Previously in Politics & Prose: Leftward Bound (August 23, 2000) Can you teach a New Democrat old tricks? Christopher Caldwell on Gore's gamble with Lieberman. The Legacy Haunting Gore (August 9, 2000) Trade, not scandal, Jack Beatty argues, is the legacy of the Clinton years that could cost Gore the election. The Issues That Aren't (July 26, 2000) Where does George W. Bush stand on Microsoft? Where does Al Gore stand on Kosovo? On Big Tobacco? You don't know? You're not alone, writes Christopher Caldwell. The Democratic Difference (July 13, 2000) Ralph Nader says the Republican and Democratic parties are indistinguishable. Jack Beatty looks at the record on labor, "the issue our era will be measured by," and sees quite another reality. Your Morality, My Values (June 28, 2000) Values and morality may sound like the same thing, Christopher Caldwell writes, but Democrats have been able to capitalize on one, while Republicans remain stuck on the other. Who Owns Capitalism? (June 15, 2000) Has democracy at last caught up with capitalism? Jack Beatty on the balance of power between the corporation and society. Joe Sixpack's Revenge (May 17, 2000) If the authors of two new books are right, it's time for Republicans to give class warfare a chance. Christopher Caldwell explains. More Politics & Prose in Atlantic Unbound. Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. From the archives: "The Southern Captivity of the GOP," by Christopher Caldwell (June 1998) In a geographic and cultural box, with political demography tilting against it, the Republican Party is an "obsolescent one," argues the author, a senior writer for the conservative Weekly Standard.

In recent decades the South has been a Republican stronghold. Times are changing by Christopher Caldwell September 13, 2000 Last spring, Al Gore's advisers debated whether the Vice President should even bother to campaign in Florida, then leaning heavily toward Bush. The consensus was no, since picking Florida's Senator Bob Graham as vice-presidential candidate seemed a bare minimum for even tightening the race. Gore picked Joe Lieberman instead. But by the first days of September, the Gore-Lieberman ticket had pulled even in Florida. That's not the only thing happening in Florida. The Senate seat from which Connie Mack recently announced his retirement had been considered one of the safest Republican seats in the country since Mack narrowly won it in 1988. (In 1994, Hillary Rodham Clinton's brother Hugh was recruited to run against him, and failed to get 30 percent of the vote.) And yet Mack's would-be Republican successor, the ten-term congressman Bill McCollum, appears set to lose to the state insurance commissioner, the Democrat Bill Nelson. Fickle behavior in the Republicans' southern base is not limited to Florida. Trial lawyer John Edwards, a Democrat, coasted to a Senate victory in North Carolina in 1998, despite being outspent by the Republican incumbent Lauch Faircloth. And once Georgia's ex-Democratic governor Zell Miller was tapped to replace senior Republican Paul Coverdell after Coverdell's death last spring, Republicans gave the Senate seat up for lost. How to explain the new shakiness in the "Solid South"? An intriguing possibility is that the kinds of people who are moving to the South are changing. Analysts looking at the South used to focus on recent transplants from the North and Northeast. Democrats focused on them, too. They looked at the changing demographics of North Carolina -- then filling up with professionals from New York and New Jersey -- and came to the conclusion that arch-conservatives like Jesse Helms could no longer win in the state. The culture was changing. Those Democrats were wrong, because transplants to the South seemed to be moving there for the culture. From the 1980s through the mid-1990s, northerners moving south tended to adopt the values of the South. In 1992 pollsters found that newcomers to Georgia responded roughly the same as longtime Georgians on whether to remove the Confederate Stars-and-Bars from the state flag. In Helms's victories over Harvey Gantt in 1990 and 1996, native-born North Carolinians were no more likely to be Helms voters than newcomers were. But the South may now be drawing a different kind of Yankee. It is too early in the present boom economy for any hard evidence to have emerged, but those who arrive in the South today may be coming more for economic than for cultural reasons. They may thus be more likely than their predecessors to keep their northern ways. The boom economy is moving politics slowly leftward in the South. In an electorate where blacks still vote with unvarying near-unanimity for Democrats and whites almost always give majorities (varying from narrow to huge) to Republicans, any factor that moves the political debate away from big white-majority issues (such as affirmative action and welfare) will favor Democrats. A thriving economy is the greatest such factor known in American politics. The new economy has led all Americans to treat education as the key to upward social mobility. But the South's particularly large role in the new economy is driving up the popularity of educational spending -- for years a relatively low priority in southern budgets -- at surprising rates. Johnny Hodges in South Carolina and Don Siegelman of Alabama, both Democrats, won shockingly easy victories in two of the most conservative states in the Union last election, waging practically identical single-issue campaigns for governor. Their promise was to create a state lottery fund wholly dedicated to education. In North Carolina this year, the state's Democratic attorney general, Mike Easley, is running a similar education-based campaign for governor -- and holds a double-digit lead over his Republican foe Richard Vinroot. For Republicans, the biggest problem with the South's economic success may in fact be the South's economic success. Sprawl is more of a problem in the South than anywhere else. The region has grown so quickly that it defies planning. It has become overbuilt, and notorious traffic jams can now be found dozens of miles from downtowns -- in Northern Virginia, in South Florida, in North Carolina's Research Triangle, around Atlanta and Houston. The Republican pollster Whit Ayres, a specialist in southern political races, notes: "If you ask voters to name the biggest problem in their community, they'll list traffic and traffic congestion, growth, overdevelopment, and overcrowding. Add those together and you reach close to 80 percent of respondents." Ayres thinks voters trust Republicans more than Democrats to handle the issue. But it's Democrats who are talking about it. Georgia governor Roy Barnes recently launched a Georgia Regional Transportation Authority, with a fiscal year 2001 budget of $1.5 billion, that is set to take charge over thirteen counties in order to alleviate Atlanta's clotted transport situation. Just as interesting is the way Gore is handling sprawl. Republicans have tried to caricature it as a left-wing issue, redolent of 1960s environmentalism and opposition to the internal-combustion engine. So Gore is not trumpeting his "quality of life agenda" nationwide. But he is trumpeting it loudly in supposedly right-wing metropolitan Atlanta. It would be wrong to exaggerate the gravity of Republicans' problems in the South, since they continue to gain ground in state legislatures from Florida to Virginia. Still, there are signs that, just as Republicans begin to strengthen their foundations in the South, parts of their roof are falling off. What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. Christopher Caldwell is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. He writes a weekly Washington column for New York Press and is a regular contributor to Atlantic Unbound. All material copyright © 2000 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. 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