Look Who Has a Southern Strategy

You need only glance at the recent political history of the states of the Deep South to get a sense of the magnitude of the political earthquake that shook the region in last week’s elections.

South Carolina, which elected a Democrat, Annie Andrews, to fill the seat held by Lindsey Graham, last sent a Democrat to the Senate in 1998, when Fritz Hollings won his sixth and final term. For that matter, Andrews now holds a position once occupied by Strom Thurmond, “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman and John C. Calhoun.

The last time Democrats held all three of Georgia’s top statewide offices — governor, lieutenant governor and secretary of state — George W. Bush was still in his first term. And Mississippi, which is on the verge of sending Scott Colom to Washington, has not elected a Democrat statewide since 2015. Its last Democratic senator, the long-serving John C. Stennis, left office in 1989 a more or less unreconstructed segregationist. Despite its large Black population, Mississippi has not sent a Black lawmaker to the Senate since Blanche K. Bruce was elected by the state legislature to a single term in 1875.

The South has not been this competitive in national politics since the 1970s and ’80s, when the Voting Rights Act opened up meaningful partisan competition in the region for the first time since the 1870s and 1880s.

And it is the demise of the Voting Rights Act, and the resulting threat to Black representation and political equality in the region, that has fueled such a seething backlash to the Republican Party that it has transformed national politics.

In April, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Louisiana v. Callais. In his majority opinion for the court, Justice Samuel Alito eviscerated what was left of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the conclusion to more than a decade of jurisprudence dismantling the landmark civil rights law.

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