How Not to Navigate the Primary/General Two-Step. Or, Did Artur Davis Have Any Choice Than to Move Right???

Among yesterday's primary results, probably the most interesting was on the Democratic side in Alabama's governor's race. For a long time I've been puzzling over the candidacy of Artur Davis, currently (but not for long) the House member from the state's 7th District, centered around Birnmingham. For many national observers, Davis was seen as a shining light. The Harvard educated African American was envisioned as kind of a southern Obama--pragmatic, clear-eyed, and electable. First elected in 2002, Davis secured a coveted seat on the Ways and Means Committee and even got some talk as a potential Attorney General before Eric Holder got the nod.


This year, Davis mounted a campaign for Governor and in doing so had to figure out how to win both a primary (which necessarily entails catering to a more liberal audience) and the general in a state that has been pretty hostile to Democrats--at least state wide--in recent years. As an African American candidate, given the state's history, the job was all the more difficult. Davis' strategy seemed to be to tack to the right during the primary season in the belief that he could engender himself to the moderate voters he would need in the general. Davis was one of the few House Democrats to vote against the Health Care Reform Bill and during the campaign went to great lengths to distance himself from President Obama. Likewise, as much of the coverage of the race makes clear, Davis also decided not to court Alabama's black political brokers.


What happened?? Yesterday he got crushed by State Agriculture Commissioner Ron Sparks. Sparks won 62% of the vote and 62 of the state's 67 counties. Sparks filled the vacuum created by Davis' passivity toward the black community, winning a sizable percentage of the black vote. He was endorsed by several of the state's leading liberal organizations, including the powerful teacher's union, in a campaign that moved leftward while Davis moved right.


In the post mortems being written today, Davis' strategy is being decried. By focusing on moderates he was, the argument goes, putting the cart before the horse. Primaries and generals are very different animals. They bring out different electorates, emphasize different issues oftentimes, and thus require different strategies and coalitions. Candidates who try to win both elections with one strategy--given these differences--oftentimes fail. What is worth thinking about, however, is whether a candidate like Davis had any other choice than to move rightward as soon as he could. Given the state's history and political profile, can a left of center African American win statewide?


Alabama Primary Coverage:

Montgomery Advertiser
Birmingham News
Washington Post
Fivethirtyeight.com
Talkingpointsmemo.com


County by County results
County Results Map

Returning South--Alabama

As I mentioned in my posting on Mississippi a few days ago, I decided to go back to V.O. Key’s Southern Politics to see how much, or little, has changed since the time of his writing in the late 1940’s. While the politics of the deep south has certainly changed, what I found interesting was the lack of change we’ve seen in some of the underlying demographics of the region. Focusing on the African-American population, we saw that those parts of the state that had heavy concentrations of blacks in the 1940’s have similar concentrations today. When Mississippi voted last week, the Delta region especially gave Obama huge margins.

With that in mind I thought I’d take a broader look at the region and revisit a few of the earlier primaries. I’ll start with Alabama, which voted on February 5th. Like in Mississippi, Obama won statewide garnering 56% to Clinton’s 42%.

I’ve reproduced above two maps. First is a regional map of the south that comes from Kevin Phillip’s masterful “The Emerging Republican Majority.” In this map we see the distribution of the African American population throughout the south at the time of his writing in 1968. I’m going to be referring to this map in several posts over the next little while. Second is an earlier map of Alabama from Key’s "Southern Politics". What we see in Alabama is, like Mississippi, a geographic concentration of African Americans. Here we have a band of counties running across the state from east to west. This area was commonly referred to as the “Black Belt” in regard to quality of the soil rather than the majority of its inhabitants.

In describing the nineteenth to mid-twentieth century politics of the state, Key argued that a dynamic similar to that in Mississippi was consistent. Namely, wealthier white planters tended to square off against lower income whites from the upstate and downstate areas for control of the state government. Key writes:

“The split between the black belt and the remainder of the state…suggests that the backbone of southern conservatism may be found in those areas with high concentrations of Negro population. For decades the Alabama black belt has been a stronghold of conservative agricultural strength which has frequently allied itself with the business interests of the state. The presence of a large proportion of Negroes in the population alone may induce a degree of conservatism. To maintain its status the ruling group must oppose any political program that tends to elevate or excite the masses, black or white…

If the black counties are the backbone of southern conservatism, a partial explanation for the recurrent progressive outbursts in Alabama politics rests in the fact that over considerable areas of the state the population includes comparatively small proportions of Negroes.”

The resulting politics, Key found, was subject to ebbs and flows of power between the black belt and the remaining parts of the state. While the black belt trended conservative, the outlying counties were subject to fits of populism and economic radicalism. Because there was no developed two party system, Key found, politics was highly driven by personal factions.

So, looking at last month’s primary, what do we see? I’ve reproduced the primary results in the map at left (courtesy of uselectionatlas.org). The Obama counties are in green; Clinton’s in red. Like with Mississippi, we see a virtual reproduction of the earlier demographic picture of the state. The Black Belt is alive and well and still has heavy African American concentrations of voters, the vast majority of whom went with Obama. In the outlying areas, north and south, we see Clinton’s strength. Sixty years since Key’s writing we see how little has changed.