LET'S GO OUT ON A LIMB HERE...:

Dixie is gone with the wind: No economic-populism-inspired revivals are going to turn the region blue. Virginia's Jim Webb is a lonely exception. (Thomas Schaller, Aug. 19, 2008, Salon)

[8]5 percent of all new-seat gains in Senate, House, gubernatorial and state legislative races in 2006 came outside the 11 states of the former Confederacy. Exit polls showed Democrats carrying every region but the South. In the long history of the Democratic Party, national fortunes were almost always pegged to the party's Southern fortunes, with good Southern years also being good national years (recently: 1986 congressional, 1992 presidential) and bad years regionally also being bad nationally (1980 presidential, 1994 congressional). But in 2006, the link between the Democrats' Southern fortunes and national fortunes was severed.

That said, if the South were in fact primed for and desperately in need of an infusion of economic populism, why weren't electoral gains at the very least uniform across the country? Indeed, given the greater poverty of the South and the already-higher share of Democrats outside the South, shouldn't the party's new economic populism have produced in 2006 better-than-average gains in the South relative to other regions?

All of which brings us to the success story of one Southern politician Moser adduces as Exhibit A in the case for a newly emergent blue Dixie: Jim Webb. Virginia's rookie senator has become a one-man wellspring for Southern Democratic revivalists trying to extrapolate from Webb's victory regionwide conclusions about how to win back the South.

Yes, Webb won against George Allen. But consider how favorable the conditions were. He is a native-stock Scots-Irishman. He is a former Republican. He is an ex-Marine who not only fought in Vietnam but has a son who served in Iraq. And Webb's wife is Asian, which matters more than you might think, given that the key Northern Virginia suburban counties that ring Washington, D.C., are about 15 percent Asian now.

Those are just Webb's biographical assets. The state's demography and the national political environment in 2006 were also extremely favorable. Those Northern Virginia suburbs have made Virginia one of the fastest-changing states in the South, and one with the highest median income of any former Confederate state. The 2006 midterm cycle was the best for Democrats since at least 1974, and maybe going back to 1954. Rarely is a party blessed at once with a candidate biography so favorable and a demographic-electoral tailwind so strong. As if all of this were somehow not enough, Webb was the beneficiary of one of the greatest media-electoral windfalls of modern American history: the infamous "macaca" moment. (Though I can't prove the counterfactual, I firmly believe that despite all the other advantages, sans macaca, Webb still loses. Remember: This race was too close to call on election night.)

The point is that Webb-Allen contests are rare in the South, and are sometimes lost even when they do fall into Democrats' laps. It is sobering to remember that even while Webb was winning in Northern Virginia he was losing badly among native white Southerners downstate.

...and predict that there just aren't enough Confederate sympathizers, like Mr. Webb, who'll run as Democrats for them to make much headway in the South.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 21, 2008 8:23 AM