The Solid South

It used to be that the South voted, routinely, 80% or 90% or 95% Democratic. That was back in the days that ended with Harry Truman, when the Democrats were still the party of not being the party of Lincoln. In recent elections where the Democrat hasn't been a Southerner himself, prior to Obama's election, the South voted solidly for the Republican candidate, what with the Republicans now being the party of not being the party of civil rights. But of course, the vote margins were never the absurdly lopsided blowouts of the '20s and '30s. "Solid South" meant the Republican got 60% of the vote in most Southern states, or mid-to-upper 50s, and won them all.

But maybe it's not so simple. I just did a little calculation of the percentage of the white vote in a few Deep Southern states that Obama lost in '08 that he would need to win in '12, keeping the racial proportions of the electorate and the non-white vote the same, in order to win those states. Here are the numbers:

Texas: 37%
South Carolina: 33%
Louisiana: 29%
Georgia: 28%
Alabama: 28%
Mississippi: 23%

He didn't come very close to winning any of these states. Closest was South Carolina at 9 points, followed by Texas at 12-ish points. Note that those are the states with the strictest white-vote requirement for Obama. In Texas he's only getting a very, very slight handicap from the non-white vote, at least compared to the real Black Belt states. But in places like Alabama and Mississippi, white people are still only giving about 11% of their vote to the pro-civil rights party. It's still the Solid South, about as solid as it ever was. It's just that now, they let the black people vote.