NYT: Obama Camp Thinks Democrats Can Rise in South
By ROBIN TONER
Published: June 30, 2008
....Officials in Mr. Obama’s campaign say they are bullish on the South, and they have signaled their aggressiveness with early campaign appearances in North Carolina and Virginia, major voter registration drives in the region, and television advertising in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia. Steve Hildebrand, the deputy campaign manager for Mr. Obama, said he saw “tremendous potential” in several Southern states. “If you go in and look at the number of unregistered voters in demographic groups that are important to Barack’s candidacy — younger voters, African-American voters — the potential is just incredible,” Mr. Hildebrand said.
And yet since the South began to shift away from the Democrats in the 1960s, it has become one of the biggest and reddest of the Republican strongholds. In the last two presidential elections, the Democrats failed to carry any of the Southern states. Although recent Democratic nominees have typically gotten about 9 out of 10 of the votes of Southern blacks, they still need a substantial chunk of the white vote to prevail. Political scientists put that figure at close to 40 percent, though it depends on the state, and the Democrats have rarely gotten it....
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Mr. Obama’s Southern strategy relies on significantly increasing black registration and turnout, as he did in the primary season. Mr. Hildebrand said that by some estimates there are 600,000 unregistered black voters in Georgia alone. The higher the black share of the vote, the lower the requirement for garnering white votes. But the Obama camp argues that it can increase its share of the white vote as well by focusing on younger, more progressive whites.
Democratic candidates have typically written off many Southern states early in the process. But when Democrats give up the South, they need to win 70 percent of the rest of the electoral votes, said Merle Black, an expert on Southern politics at Emory University. And they often subject candidates running for lower offices in the region to fierce political headwinds: it is hard for a statewide candidate to prevail when his party’s presidential nominee loses by double digits....
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(T)his time, the resources argument would be less compelling because Mr. Obama is expected to have a sizable financial edge over his rival, given his decision to forgo public campaign money and the spending limits that accompany it.
And, some Democrats who work in the South argue, writing off a region is simply the wrong thing to do. “How do you tell 102 million people who live in the South that they don’t matter?” said Steve Jarding, a Democratic consultant who has worked on several Southern campaigns....
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/us/politics/30south.html?pagewanted=all
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