Interesting punditry tonight from Tom "screw the south" Schaller [View All]

[Recursion]

Schaller wrote the book "Whistling Past Dixie", a guide for Dem victories that don't include the South. He had some very interesting points on NPR today. Basically his argument was that this will be seen as a realignment year for a crucial reason: this is the first time in a century that the majority party in the South has been the minority party in Congress.

Someone from TNR asked him the old, "but how can anybody get a majority while ignoring the South?" and he said, "look at the election: they did it." His argument is that Democrats can (and, indeed, now have) won a majority with

1) the "four corners" base
2) the rust belt
3) the mountain west

leaving the South/Sun Belt crescent to the mouth-breathers.

Schaller also smacked down the soon-to-be-conventional-wisdom that we won by running Conservative candidates: he pointed out that 3/4 of our House pickups were liberal Dems beating moderate Republicans and RINOs. Casey/Santorum and Webb/Allen were more spectacular, but Whitehouse/Chafee was the model that won the house.

I'm sold on the 50-state idea so I can't say I'm down with abandoning the South, but I think it's a really interesting point: we don't have to sell out our principles to win Alabama, because we can keep our principles and win Illinois and Colorado.