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Southern Democrats' Decline Is Eroding the Political Center
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Contributor | ScottĀ³ |
Last Edited | ScottĀ³ Nov 15, 2004 11:18am |
Category | News |
News Date | Nov 15, 2004 12:00am |
Description | New York Times article.
An excerpt..."The once mighty Southern Democrats are an increasingly endangered species on Capitol Hill.
In the new Congress, only 4 of the 22 senators from the 11 states of the old Confederacy will be Democrats, the lowest number since Reconstruction; as recently as 1990, 15 of those Southern senators were Democrats. In the House, the Democrats suffered smaller but still significant losses in Texas, where a Republican redistricting plan took down a group of veteran lawmakers, including the paradigmatic Southern conservative: Representative Charles W. Stenholm, a 13-term deficit hawk and longtime leader of the Blue Dog Democrats, a group of centrists in the House.
This moment has been a long time coming. Ever since the national Democratic Party fully embraced the cause of civil rights 40 years ago, shattering its hold on the so-called solid South, Republicans have been making steady inroads among culturally conservative white voters in the region. But the acceleration of this trend is important for the next Congress: some of these Southern Democrats, along with Northeastern Republicans, were among the last remaining lawmakers in the political center of an increasingly polarized House and Senate." |
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