In his op-ed today on race and Southern politics, Paul Krugman writes:
Consider voting in last year’s Congressional elections. Republicans, as President Bush conceded, received a “thumping,” with almost every major demographic group turning against them. The one big exception was Southern whites, 62 percent of whom voted Republican in House races.
And yes, Southern white exceptionalism is about race, much more than it is about moral values, religion, support for the military or other explanations sometimes offered.
Pretty much true, although I think race and moral values/religion/support for the military are not entirely different things, but are interconnected in a variety of ways. In the South, particularly the deep South, everything is racialized, whether overtly or implicitly. Support for the military, for example, is tied into patriotism, and the way one defines patriotism depends on one's view of what America "is." And for white Southerners, it's often been, well, white Southerners.
Religion in the South is incredibly racialized, with blacks and whites mostly attending separate churches with separate traditions. The (white) Southern church was partially responsible for Jim Crow and the (black) Southern church was partially responsible for overturning it. So although they may share the same Bible and some of the same moral prohibitions on homosexuality and abortion, they share little else.
In a blog follow up, Krugman offers a necessary prebuttal:
Since I’ve just published an op-ed about the enduring influence of race on Southern voting, I’m sure to be accused of being a typical Northeastern snob talking about poor white trash who don’t know what’s good for them. So I thought I’d mention an important point about Southern white voting that didn’t fit in 800 words: namely, the poor whites are not the issue.
So who is? Rich whites. Or, at least, non-poor whites -- a much larger part of the Southern electorate than in decades past. The rise of white Southern middle-class suburbanism is a vastly underappreciated element at play here, probably because it's a bit less mythical and, well, interesting than rurality. As Krugman notes:
Contrary to what you may have read, the old-fashioned notion that rich people vote Republican, while poorer people vote Democratic, is as true as ever – in fact, more true than it was a generation ago. But in rich states like New Jersey or Connecticut, the relationship is weak; even the very well off tend to be only slightly more Republican than working-class voters. In the poorer South, however, the relationship is very strong indeed.
This is why it’s true both that rich voters tend to be Republican, and that rich states tend to be Democratic.
Which, Josh Patashnik reflects, makes sense:
This isn't an odd fact at all, though. What seems to be going on is that low-income voters everywhere tend to vote Democratic because economic concerns are more salient for them, as they depend heavily on the welfare state. Middle- and upper-income voters, by contrast, are far more likely to vote based on other considerations, particularly social issues...As a result, in Southern states, once you move up the income ladder and people start voicing their socially conservative preferences at the ballot box, you see a sharp drop-off in the percentage of the population voting Democratic. In more socially liberal states outside the South, as you move up the income ladder, large numbers of people still vote for Democrats because they find the party's position on social issues attractive.
There will always be a certain base of Democratic voters in the region; previously, it was white supremacists, and now it's mostly the opposite. Pretty peculiar story, but one that's always been bound up in racial and class tensions. And clearly, I'll take any media reference I can to ramble on about my pet interest.
