For GOP, A Southern Exposure

Republican strength in the South has both compensated for and masked the extent of the party's decline elsewhere.

Carrick, like many other Democratic strategists, believes that these ideologically assertive Southern Republicans are hurting the GOP's appeal elsewhere, particularly because cable television has made each party's leaders more visible than a generation ago. "It makes them look... extreme and that they are engaged in partisan political fights that are irrelevant to achieving success," Carrick says. "It is definitely a losing spiral that... is reinforced every day by the 24/7 news cycle."

Like Barbour, South Carolina Gov. Sanford rejects the idea that the South is disproportionately influential within their party. In any case, he says, the arguments that he and other Southerners have raised against Obama offer the party its most promising path back to power. Republican recovery "is probably less about new bells and whistles and more about the core of what made the party great in the first place, which is the angle of limited government," Sanford said. "I believe our political destiny is more closely tied to our roots than in trying to add new features."

A broad range of Republicans supports a return to small-government arguments. Nevertheless, some GOP strategists are gingerly suggesting that staunchly conservative Southerners are putting too much of their own stamp on the party, especially on social issues. GOP consultant Mike DuHaime, political director of McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, said that "everybody in the party is concerned" about the GOP's decline along the coasts and in the Upper Midwest. "It's important that we always keep our base [in the South] as part of our party, but we need to have the ability to disagree on certain issues. That's the only way we are going to expand," he said. Republican pollster Ayres concurs. "The South is an incredibly important part of the Republican coalition, but it's not sufficient to win," he said. "You may very well have standards that are somewhat different for a Republican in the Philadelphia suburbs than you do for a Republican in Alabama."

Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, appears to have taken that thinking to heart, pursuing moderates for 2010 Senate contests in several Democratic-leaning states, including Connecticut, Delaware, and Illinois, where Democratic troubles or departures have brightened GOP prospects. Democrats are also giving Republicans openings in several high-profile gubernatorial races in blue states outside the South, including Illinois, New Jersey, and New York. Those opportunities create some optimism among Republicans that they may have hit bottom in the non-Southern states. Yet, given the extent of the party's decline there, it may be some time before Republicans recover enough strength outside the South to truly threaten the generation-long southward migration in the party's center of gravity.

Meanwhile, demographic trends could create new challenges for Republicans within their Southern stronghold. The Republican position in the Deep South is fortified by a racial paradox: In the states with the highest proportion of black voters (such as Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi), Democrats usually attract the smallest percentage of white voters, partly because African-Americans are seen as dominant in the Democratic Party.

But the growth of other nonwhite populations, such as Hispanics and even Asians, is strengthening Democrats across the region, especially in the outer South, and even in portions of the Deep South such as Georgia. These "new minority" voters functioned like a thumb on the scale last year for Obama in Virginia (where they reached 10 percent of the vote) and North Carolina (where they comprised 6 percent). They were also instrumental in tipping Florida to the Democratic presidential nominee. "When you add the Democratic vote among African-Americans with that of the new minorities, that means the share of the white vote a Democrat needs to win goes down," notes Merle Black.

Eventually, Hispanic population growth might even threaten the Republican hold on Texas, where whites last year constituted just 63 percent of the vote, the same as in California. Demography alone probably won't flip Texas: To capture it, Democrats will almost certainly need to improve their performance among whites there, too. (Obama won just one-fourth of them, compared with twice that in California.) But at the least, Black notes, the growing nonwhite vote is allowing Texas Democrats to become competitive again in the state that has functioned as the jewel in the crown for Southern Republicans.

Questions about the GOP's regional balance may come to a head when the party picks its next presidential nominee. The 2012 race could pit several strong contenders from the South -- including Sanford, Jindal, and Barbour -- against competitors from other regions, such as Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

Carrick predicts that a Southern Republican nominee in 2012 would "solidify all of the current trends" toward Democrats among young people and socially moderate white-collar suburbanites outside the South. Another Republican Southern nominee, Carrick maintains, "would say that it is a regional party but [also] that the prevailing ideology in the party is too far out to be competitive."

Barbour, not surprisingly, dismisses this analysis. He believes that the next GOP nominee's region is less important than the candidate's skills and whether the country has lost faith in Obama. "Could a guy from Alabama, Louisiana, or Texas get elected president as easily as one from Illinois under those circumstances?" Barbour asked. "I think the answer is yes."

As on so many other fronts, the debate over the party's 2012 nominee shows how the GOP's Southern drift is forcing Republicans to confront variations of the political dilemmas that long confounded the Democrats. From Truman in 1948 until Obama in 2008, the only Democrats who could hold enough of the South to build a majority national coalition and win the White House were Southerners: Johnson, Carter, and Clinton. Republicans now face the mirror-image challenge of recapturing enough territory beyond the South to assemble a winning national coalition. For decades, Democrats ardently debated whether they could elect a president who was not from the South. Before long, Republicans may debate with equal passion whether they can elect another president who is.

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