Folks may or may not remember Nixon introduced the Southern Strategy that the Republicans have used ever since to win the presidency.
President Obama’s victories in North Carolina and Virginia threatened the continued validity of that strategy. Until the GOP took control of the North Carolina State House and expanded their control in the rest of the South.
Their goal is to leverage Redistricting to isolate Black Voters into as few districts as possible to increase the odds of the GOP winning the others.
Now they are digging in and trying to leverage Race to make the Southern Strategy work for at least another generation…
It’s really reprehensible and very obvious. Especially here in North Carolina….
Here is an excerpt from a great article in The Nation by Ari Berman that explains this exceedingly well. I encourage you to click the link at the bottom and read the entire article.
(Hat tip to Daily Kos where I first saw this….)
“What’s uniform across the South is that Republicans are using race as a central basis in drawing districts for partisan advantage,” says Anita Earls, a prominent civil rights lawyer and executive director of the Durham-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice. “The bigger picture is to ultimately make the Democratic Party in the South be represented only by people of color.” The GOP’s long-term goal is to enshrine a system of racially polarized voting that will make it harder for Democrats to win races on local, state, federal and presidential levels. Four years after the election of Barack Obama, which offered the promise of a new day of postracial politics in states like North Carolina, Republicans are once again employing a Southern Strategy that would make Richard Nixon and Lee Atwater proud.
The consequences of redistricting in North Carolina—one of the most important swing states in the country—could determine who controls Congress and the presidency in 2012. Democrats hold seven of the state’s thirteen Congressional seats, but after redistricting they could control only three—the largest shift for Republicans at the Congressional level in any state this year. Though Obama won eight of the thirteen districts, under the new maps his vote would be contained in only three heavily Democratic districts—all of which would have voted 68 percent or higher for the president in 2008—while the rest of the districts would have favored John McCain by 55 percent or more. “GOP candidates could win just over half of the statewide vote for Congress and end up with 62 percent to 77 percent of the seats,” found John Hood, president of the conservative John Locke Foundation.
Lost in the 21st Century 