By Ronald Brownstein

National Journal: The Republican domination of the South “looked great when we were holding on to our Northeastern and Midwestern seats and continuing to sweep the South,” said Whit Ayres, a GOP pollster who specializes in Southern races. “The challenge arises when the rest of the country says, ‘I don’t believe the same things,’ or ‘I don’t admire the same candidates,’ as the South does.”

In the view of former Rep. Charles Bass, R-N.H., who was defeated in 2006, “The current crisis of the Republican Party is whether it wants to be a regional party or whether it can try to expand ideologically and appeal to other regions.”

Bill Carrick, like many other Democratic strategists, believes that these ideologically assertive Southern Republicans are hurting the GOP’s appeal elsewhere, particularly because cable television has made each party’s leaders more visible than a generation ago. “It makes them look… extreme and that they are engaged in partisan political fights that are irrelevant to achieving success,” Carrick says. “It is definitely a losing spiral that… is reinforced every day by the 24/7 news cycle.”

But the growth of other nonwhite populations, such as Hispanics and even Asians, is strengthening Democrats across the region, especially in the outer South, and even in portions of the Deep South such as Georgia. These “new minority” voters functioned like a thumb on the scale last year for Obama in Virginia (where they reached 10 percent of the vote) and North Carolina (where they comprised 6 percent). They were also instrumental in tipping Florida to the Democratic presidential nominee. “When you add the Democratic vote among African-Americans with that of the new minorities, that means the share of the white vote a Democrat needs to win goes down,” notes Merle Black. –[ READ FULL ARTICLE ]

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