Dr. Joyner looks at what Obama should, and should not, do about Southern voters.
As someone with a lot of friends and family from that region, and who’s watched voting patterns in the U.S. for years, I concur with everything he says. Especially about Obama’s best strategy being to avoid running as “the black candidate” and to put McCain on the defensive by aggressively courting non-black (and black, of course) Evangelicals, who are the most important voting bloc in the South.
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The big problem for obama in the south is the fact that no matter IF there is a large D turnout locally in the south, some large percentage of those D do NOT vote D at the national level, and a good percentage of them only vote on local races.
There is a bit of a conundrum in the south where large percentages are registered D, vote D at the local level, but have for a long, long time, voted R at the national level, especially for president. Heck the only reason Florida is close for Democrats is south florida. The voting bloc down there is much more northeastern than southern. North of about Ocala, it might as well be Mississippi or Georgia, though, especially in the panhandle (with the exception, perhaps, of Tally and Jax)
The large majority of southern democrats are quite conservative historically, and defining Obama as a liberal to them will be his death knell.
P.S. add to this the whole delegate screwup, and you’ve got a lot of pissed off FL Democrats who are likely to either vote third party, or invalidate their ballot on the presidential race. Watch the overvote/undervote numbers in FL (and probably MI) this year. A large portion of those will be intentional.
Yep. Southern Democrats, particularly white ones, get pretty sick of being treated like dirt at the national level by the Democratic elite. One of the reasons Clinton won was because he knew better than to do that to them, and was seen as one of them (which he was).
Just adding a Southron to his ticket won’t be enough for Obama, although one who’s sympatico with the actual southern blue collar vote would. That may or may not be Hillary, depending on how it’s handled.
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