Alexander P. Lamis - Southern Politics in the 1990s

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SOUTHERN
POLITICS
IN THE
1990s

Edited by
ALEXANDER P. LAMIS

SOUTHERN
POLITICS
IN THE
1990S

LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Baton Rouge

Copyright 1999 by Louisiana State University Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing
08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 5 4 3 2 1

Designer: Amanda McDonald Scallan
Typeface: Bembo
Typesetter: Coghill Composition
Printer and binder: Edward Brothers, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Southern politics in the 1990s / edited by Alexander P. Lamis.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8071-2374-9 (alk. paper)
1. Republican Party (U.S. : 1854 ) 2. Southern StatesPolitics and government1951 I. Lamis, Alexander P.
JK2356.S72 1999
324.2750409049dc21

9850424
CIP

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources

CONTENTS

THE TWO-PARTY SOUTH: FROM THE 1960S TO THE 1990S
Alexander P. Lamis

SOUTH CAROLINA: A DECADE OF RAPID REPUBLICAN ASCENT
Glen T. Broach and Lee Bandy

NORTH CAROLINA: BETWEEN HELMS AND HUNT NO MAJORITY EMERGES
Rob Christensen and Jack D. Fleer

GEORGIA: DEMOCRATIC BASTION NO LONGER
Michael Binford, Tom Baxter, and David E. Sturrock

VIRGINIA: REPUBLICANS SURGE IN THE COMPETITIVE DOMINION
Margaret Edds and Thomas R. Morris

ARKANSAS: CHARACTERS, CRISES, AND CHANGE
Jay Barth, Diane D. Blair, and Ernie Dumas

TENNESSEE: A PARTISAN BIG BANG AMID QUIET ACCOMMODATION
Philip Ashford and Richard Locker

ALABAMA: THE GOP RISES IN THE HEART OF DIXIE
Patrick R. Cotter and Tom Gordon

MISSISSIPPI: FROM PARIAH TO PACESETTER?
Stephen D. Shaffer, David E. Sturrock, David A. Breaux, and Bill Minor

LOUISIANA: STILL SUI GENERIS LIKE HUEY
Edward F. Renwick, T. Wayne Parent, and Jack Wardlaw

TEXAS: REPUBLICANS GALLOP AHEAD
Richard Murray and Sam Attlesey

FLORIDA: A VOLATILE NATIONAL MICROCOSM
Joan Carver and Tom Fiedler

SOUTHERN POLITICS IN THE 1990S
Alexander P. Lamis

TABLES

FIGURES

PREFACE

In the fall of 1995, I began contacting political scientists and political journalists throughout the South with the idea of joining together to comprehensively analyze the amazing Republican advance that had occurred in the region so far in the 1990s. Over the next three years, as the events of the decade continued to unfold, we investigated, scrutinized, and analyzed all aspects of Dixies on-going partisan development in order to craft this book.

We had much to cover. Since the mid-1960s, southern politics had undergone a major transformation. The solidly Democratic one-party South had collapsed, giving way to a complicated and uneven two-party system. When the decade of the 1980s came to an end, the challenging Republicans were still in minority status in all major categories of elections in the region. Just a few years laterby the mid-1990sall that had changed, as is related in detail in Chapter 1.

Recognizing that the first two decades of the emerging two-party South had received extensive treatment, we set our sights directly on the most recent developments. Our goal was to thoroughly explain how and why the GOP reached majority status in southern politics in the 1990s. In the process we aimed to shed light on all aspects of the regions partisan politics in the mature years of the two-party South.

Although there are regional commonalities, which is a continuing legacy of the one-party era, the differences among the eleven states of the former Confederacy are so great that separate state chapters are a necessity. Over fifty years ago, when V. O. Key, Jr., began the research for his classic Southern Politics in State and Nation, he reached the same conclusion concerning this approach to the study of regional politics. As his associate in that famous project, Alexander Heard, chancellor emeritus of Vanderbilt University, related the decision years later in a 1984 interview:

V. O. had originally conceived of the entire book being made up of what I will call functional chapters, treating the South as a unit. He tried to do that and concluded fairly early and very decisively that the variations within each state that made each state different from the other states made it impossible to treat the electoral process in the South... as a process across the entire region without explicit recognition of the individuality of each state. And that conclusion by Key led to the later decision that we would have to have a chapter on each state in the book in addition to having chapters that cross-cut all eleven of the states we were dealing with and that sought to see the uniformities in the processes of Southern politics.

To write each of the state chapters, I was fortunate to be able to recruit a leading journalist and political scientist who both had extensive experience with their states politics; for a few chapters a third or fourth writer was added. Please turn to the notes on contributors at the back of the book for the impressive credentials these writers brought to their assignments.

Since the contributors came from different backgroundsnewspaper reporting and academiathe hope was that they would bring the best instincts and methods of their respective worlds to bear on the topic, and they did. Each team conducted a series of interviews with major political players, scoured the available political science literature, mined extensive files of newspaper articles, analyzed a variety of survey data, and amassed an array of statistics relevant to electoral politics.

The goal for the state chapters, as expressed in my first guidance letter to the contributors, on December 22, 1995, was to capture the current partisan dynamics at work in each state. Or, as I put it in my second guidance letter on March 1, 1996, the plan is for your state chapter to be the place a reader can turn to find out exactly what happened in your states partisan politics from 1990 through the 1996 elections and why. Throughout the process, we were mindful of Keys injunction on the conduct of this type of research: In work relating to the electoral behavior of geographical units... one needs to bring into the analysis every scrap of evidence to be had.

With the signing of a contract with Louisiana State University Press in late spring 1996, the planning phase gave way to the research and writing stage, which continued throughout 1996 and into the early part of 1997. We then began an extensive revision and rewriting process at my direction that ended in late summer 1997 when the bulk of the manuscript went to the Presss anonymous reviewer. Encouraged by the reviewers positive comments, we began an intense three-month revision to improve the manuscript in the many helpful ways the reviewer had suggested. I am very appreciative of the highly professional guidance and advice this reviewer gave us.

When the reviewers consideration of our revisions was completed, I was able to write the contributors on May 4, 1998: Breakthrough at last! We just cleared the big hurdlethe readers second report is in, and its completely positive. During the summer of 1998, we made our last changes to prepare the manuscript for publication. At this time we were able to add a few updates to take account of the events leading up to the 1998 elections, but since we went into the production stage in August 1998, none of the writers was able to comment on the fall general election campaign or the November 1998 results.

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