Reply #3: Frankly, it's not the state but the party that changed

[jobycom]

The Democrats used to be a conservative party in the south, and more labor than issues driven. During the 60s the Democrats began to change, becoming more liberal, backing civil rights, the ERA, abortion rights, etc.

Ralph Yarborough was an old school populist. He supported civil rights and LBJ's Great Society (actually, LBJ stole the phrase from Yarborough), but he came across as an honest, people's politician. He was known as "the people's Senator."

With the Republican move away from Eisenhower's moderate right influence to the more radical right of Goldwater, Nixon, and eventually Reagan, the Democrats should have been left standing in the middle, but the Democrats in the South were associated with forced desegregation, military invasion (with the National Gaurd) and, paradoxically, an increasing anti-war stance. All of these issues were personal to the South, so the South turned against the Democrats-- not because they were "liberals," (there was nothing particularly liberal about sending armed troops into a state to force compliance to federal law, no matter how much it had to be done), but because the South felt it was under attack. Sure, it was wrong and deserved to be attacked, but that's still how it felt.

So the South sided with the Republicans, who were becoming more conservative, and thus they became more conservative. With the conservative Democrats fading from the party, the Democrats moved to the left, and that's when they started losing. Nationally, Carter and Clinton won by being southern and pretending to be moderates.

I'm not blaming liberalism. If the Democrats moved to the middle, they still wouldn't attract the South back. We have to win it back the old fashioned way, by convincing labor that we are better for them, by convincing the majority of Americans that our views are right. All this demographics politics is dividing this nation too much-- each party panders to whatever group they thing they can add to their column, and no one is looking at the whole picture, showing the voters what they have in common, rather than what they want that's different. That was Reagan's legacy: divide and conquer, villify the other party, make it personal, make a person's allegiance to party first, country second, and to humanity last if at all.

We need an anti-Reagan, not a Democrat Reagan. Maybe Gore will run again, he's one of the few that sees the big picture.