Like Katharina and Petruchio in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, the Democrats and the South have long had trouble deciding whether they would rather fight or make love. Beginning in 1948, Southern voters, traditionally Democratic, became increasingly embittered by the national party's liberal tendencies. As a consequence, while the South remained more or less true to local and congressional Democrats, it began playing the field where presidential candidates were concerned. The Democrats toyed with the idea of a divorce, hoping to capture the White House with just the North and the West. But the landslide defeats of 1984 and 1988 put an end to that, and last week the chastened party turned southward again by nominating Southerners for both President and Vice President. Said Georgian Jimmy Carter, as he prepared to address the delegates: "I think I've heard more Southern accents here this week than at the convention that nominated me in '76."
The strategy is not complicated. The 11 states of the old Confederacy control 147 of the 270 electoral votes necessary to win. Just three border states -- Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri -- would add 34 votes to the equation. Better yet, for candidates who can appeal to it, the South has often voted as a bloc. A candidate who carries the region can pick and choose among the rest of the states to put together a winning combination. The South, plus New York, California, Ohio and Michigan, for example, yields an electoral-vote total of 307. Carter's election in 1976 was a textbook illustration of how the arithmetic works. The former Georgia Governor carried the entire South (except Virginia) and defeated Gerald Ford by 57 electoral votes, even though Carter won only one non-Southern state west of the Mississippi River and had only a 2-percentage-point edge in the popular vote. Says Carter: "I don't think that mathematically the Democratic Party has much of a chance to win this year without carrying most of the South."
The team of Bill Clinton and Al Gore aimed to repeat the Carter performance by using Clinton's strong base among Southern blacks, while benefiting from a three-way split of the white vote with George Bush and Ross Perot. Clinton, says senior strategist James Carville, "is the first candidate since Carter to have significant black support in his own right. He has the network. He has the record." Some key Southern Democrats, including Carter's former press secretary Jody Powell, estimate that with Perot in the race they needed only about 20% of the white vote, plus the black vote, in order to carry the South; with Perot out, the same experts estimate that Clinton-Gore will have to get at least 30% of the white vote.
Another problem -- for Republicans as well as Democrats -- is that the old "Solid South" has begun to lose some of its solidity. As more and more Northerners have moved to the Sunbelt in search of jobs, warmer winters, cleaner air and affordable suburbs, and as telecommunications have bound the nation closer together, the region has become more diverse, its citizens more cosmopolitan.