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A New South? Obama won Florida and Virginia and is leading in North Carolina
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An election volunteer distributes "I Voted" stickers to voters after they cast their ballots in Dawn, Va.
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Published: November 6, 2008
WAKE FOREST
Barack Obama hardly marched across the South like Sherman. But he certainly made some inroads.
The Illinois Democrat failed to win a majority of white votes in any Southern state, and exit polls indicate that a deeper racial divide may persist here than in other regions.
But he won Florida. You could argue that Florida -- with its snowbirds and ice-hockey franchises -- is not really "Southern," but that doesn't change the fact that a Northern, liberal Democrat hasn't taken the state since FDR.
And it's hard to overstate the symbolic importance of Obama's comfortable victory in Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy. No Democrat had won the Old Dominion since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.
"Old Virginny is dead," declared Gov. Tim Kaine, who helped guide Obama to victory there.
Even North Carolina, which has been reliably Republican in presidential politics since 1980, is still too close to call. And though Georgia chose Republican John McCain, Obama was more competitive in that deep South state than any Democrat since Bill Clinton -- who won it in 1992 and narrowly lost it in 1996.
"Look, Al Gore couldn't win any Southern state," says Jeremy Mayer, a political scientist at George Mason University and author of the book Running on Race: Racial Politics in Presidential Campaigns, 1960-2000. "A Northern black man did better in Southern states than Al Gore, a child of the South."
Ordinary Southerners can't be faulted for feeling that something huge has happened in their region.
"It is a new day," real-estate broker Sibrina Roberts, who is black, declared as she emerged from a Wake Forest polling place Tuesday into a cold, persistent rain after casting her vote for Obama.
When LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he famously confessed to an aide: "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come."
Unless 12 years constitutes a "long time," Johnson's prediction was overly pessimistic. Jimmy Carter won every Southern state but Virginia on his way to the White House in 1976, and Clinton had Southern support in his back-to-back election victories.
But they were both Southern whites who could appeal to moderates.
Obama was never foolish enough to think he could sweep the "solid" Republican South. Like Clinton before him, he knew his best hope was to split the region.
In 1992, Clinton focused on his home state of Arkansas and running mate Gore's Tennessee, along with Florida, Georgia and Louisiana. Clinton took most of those states in both elections, though it turns out he would have won without a single Southern electoral vote.
Obama essentially used the same strategy, only he targeted different states -- Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, all of which had two things going for them: Large black populations and large numbers of "white migrants" from more Democrat-leaning states.
Of course, not all of these blue-state transplants voted for Obama. Engineer Keith Hawkes moved from Delaware to Lynchburg, Va., thinking the economy there might be stronger. A year later, he's still looking for a job.
Hawkes, who will turn 65 next month, said he voted for McCain because he thought the Republican would be better for the economy and would do more to protect his Social Security. But the white man admitted that race was also a factor. "I personally just wasn't ready for a black man to lead the country," he said.
Exit polling shows that though whites in the rest of the nation leaned toward McCain by only a hair, two-thirds of Southern whites backed McCain. In fact, the deeper South the state, the more overwhelming McCain's victory among whites -- even young whites.
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