The Northern Strategy

And the Dem establishment seems to hate the one non-white candidate still standing, as an outsider.

Consider for a moment these two lists of recent Democratic presidential candidates: LBJ, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Obama.

Now: Humphrey, McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry, Hillary Clinton.

What is the difference between the two lists?

The most obvious difference is that all in the first list won the presidency. The second list all lost.

But there is a second difference that is almost as consistent. Everyone in the first list except Obama came from a Southern state, a member of the old Confederacy.

And everyone in the second list came from a northern state. Gore is a bit of an outlier, from Tennessee. But Tennessee is still only a border state—and Gore did win the popular vote. And he was running against a more solidly southern candidate, in George W. Bush.

Obama, the other outlier, was from Illinois—but being black meant that he held special appeal to a large segment of the Southern vote, the black vote. He notably had that southern cadence in his speech.

Since about the Second World War, the math has seemed obvious: if the Democrats ran a Southerner, they won. If they ran a Northerner, they lost.

This was the Democrats’ own “Southern strategy.” They had to do this to, as James Carville once put it, “pick the lock” of the otherwise reliably Republican South.

And the Democrats seem now to have utterly forgotten this. Look at their current crop of candidates. Sanders and Warren, New England Yankees. Bloomberg, New York. Klobuchar, Minnesota—could not get much more northern than that. Buttigieg is from Indiana, but far northern Indiana, close to Chicago. And he seems aggressively preppy. Biden is from Delaware, technically a border state.

This might be explained, in part, by a weak front bench. Who, after all, do the Democrats have to run who comes from the South? They are reduced to circling the wagons in their traditional regional strongholds. But that is not the full story—for nobody seems to have noticed or expressed concern over the lack of any prominent Southern candidate.

Sure, there is concern about the ability to appeal to black voters. But that is not the real issue. Nor is it so much about ideology. The South, black or white, is culturally distinct from the North, more emotionally attuned, and finds it hard to warm up to stiff preppy types like Buttigieg, or schoolmarmish figures like Warren. Blacks who have migrated North simply tend to preserve these characteristics.

The Democrats seem to be living in a bubble, huddled with their own, and either not interested in anyone outside their familiar circle, afraid of them, or contemptuous of them.

This shows too in their policy platforms: all the candidates seem to the left of the general public.

This is suicide for a political party.

Compare the Republicans. In their last presidential race, they scared up prominent candidates from Louisiana, Texas, Florida, and Arkansas, and then also from New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, California. And the New York candidate won.

Trump was able to go after the Democratic “firewall,” in the rust belt, and take three critical states. He picked their northern lock.

Now, with excellent political instincts, he is working on the black vote. Which has great cultural affinities with the white Southern vote, to which the Democrats have lost all sensitivity. It may not take much more for them to shift Republican in large numbers, just as did the white working class in the North.

At this point, whomever the Democrats nominate, and barring some economic disaster, I call it for Trump.