Life Without the Confederacy

I've been reading a book about the motives of soldiers in the Civil War, and thinking more broadly about why the North fought that war. Obviously I'm glad they did, and I'm glad they won, both because slavery is one of the most wicked human institutions ever devised and the Confederacy was the last great bastion of official slavery in the "developed" world and because my grandfather was from Texas, and it might've been harder for him to come to the Northeast and become one of my ancestors if there were a national boundary running in between. But apparently late in the war many in the South were thinking that, if they could salvage their liberty and independence by jettisoning slavery, it was a sacrifice worth making. Suppose the war had resulted in an independent Confederacy in which slavery had been abolished. What would politics look like in 2012, at home here in the Union?

Well, if we just subtract the states of the former Confederacy, by which I mean Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Tennessee, we would find that the current Congress would feature 47 Democratic Senators and 29 Republican ones. That's a 61.8% Democratic chamber, instead of the current 53%. Nancy Pelosi would be Speaker of the House. And this would be a winning electoral map for President Obama this November:

In fact it would be the winning map of least resistance; in other words, that's the unique winning map for Obama where you give him the states he won by the biggest margins in 2008, in descending order, until he's got a majority, and then stop. Realistically one might add New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and New Mexico to that map without being overly aggressive, which would give him a two-thirds electoral majority.

Now, of course, that's not what would actually happen. Instead, both parties would find themselves shifted a good deal to the left, because the median voter they both had to appeal to would be further left. In fact, we would have had two parties neither of which needed the support of racist Southern whites for the last 150 years. It's a bit depressing to think about how much better American public policy might be right now had that happened.

(Although to be fair, public policy in the territory of the former Confederate states would probably be a good deal worse.)