RALEIGH – Years ago, I added the newsletter Southern Political Report to my stew of regular reading, even though it was nearly full to the brim even then with an assortment of newspapers, magazines, columnists, and websites. I thought it a good investment of time, given that during election seasons my writing responsibilities often include coverage of competitive state and federal elections in the South.
I was right. SPR proved to be particularly indispensable to me as I sought to keep up with the 2004 and 2006 congressional elections, key governors races in states such as Kentucky and Louisiana, and the early organizational efforts by Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns in the early-voting states of South Carolina and Florida.
The most recent edition of the newsletter proved interesting to me for a different reason: it brought together in one handy reference a series of data on the changing demographics of the South. Trends such as the end of net emigration by Southern blacks and the acceleration of immigration by Hispanics are obviously affecting politics and public policy across the region, most definitely including North Carolina, so I was glad to see some of the population flows quantified and discussed.
Here are some key lessons to be gleaned from the data:
• The South remains slightly less “white” as a whole than the national average, but not because of recent Hispanic immigration. In both the South and the nation, Hispanics made up 15 percent of the population. The South is roughly 18 percent black and 63 percent white, vs. 12 percent and 66 percent for the nation. (SPR didn’t provide the breakdowns for the smaller groups, such as Asians and American Indians.)
• Among the 13 states that Wyman counts as the South – the former Confederacy plus Kentucky and Oklahoma – North Carolina is at the median when it comes to non-whites as a share of the population, with a count of 68 percent white, 21 percent black, and 7 percent Hispanic. The largest minority populations are in Texas (11 percent black, 36 percent Hispanic), Mississippi (37 percent black, 2 percent Hispanic), Georgia (29 percent black, 8 percent Hispanic), and Florida (15 percent black, 20 percent Hispanic). Kentucky is the only state on the list where the non-white population (9 percent) is lower than the national average.
Racism infected much of Southern politics at its inception, and the disease has yet to be eradicated despite great toil, sacrifice, and progress. SPR points out that while racial dynamics still play a critical role in interpreting political outcomes – African-American voters overwhelmingly vote Democratic, Southern whites are much more pro-Republican than the national average, etc. – it is important to factor other considerations and local circumstances into the equation. The catch-all category of “Hispanic” or “Latino,” for example, includes many new Southerners who affect the economy, culture, and government but don’t vote. It includes strongly Democratic constituencies as well as GOP-leaning Cubans in Florida.
As to the long-term implications for partisan competition, I hope they are positive. I think that the polity as a whole is better served to the extent that elections are competitive, and I think that it’s often harmful to ethnic groups to be taken for granted by one party and ignored by the other. But as I have said and written about many times in the past, I don’t think Republicans will be competitive for the votes of African-Americans – many of whom have conservative views on a range of specific issues – until they find the courage to woo those voters consistently, and in turn find courageous voters willing to listen.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.