Should the Democrats Give Up on the South? - The New Yorker

Tomasky says Yes.  Cassidy say No.  I agree with Cassidy.  What do we do?  Abandon the Black and Latin people of the south to the racists? - gwc
Should the Democrats Give Up on the South? - The New Yorker:
by John Cassidy

"What now for the battered Democrats? After Mary Landrieu’s heavy loss to Bill Cassidy, her Republican opponent, in Saturday’s runoff election in Louisiana, the Democratic caucus in the U.S. Senate will have just forty-six members, including two independents, and none at all from the Deep South.
Indeed, Democratic senators are scarce anywhere below the 37th Parallel and east of the Rockies: if you draw a line from the southern border of Colorado to the Atlantic Coast in Virginia, the only states that have any are New Mexico, Missouri, Virginia, and Florida. It’s otherwise a solid phalanx of red.
 And, of course, it is not just the Senate. Come January, according to a tally by the Wall Street Journal, the G.O.P. will control a hundred and one of the hundred and thirty-eight Southern seats in the House of Representatives. Every Southern state except Virginia and Kentucky will have a Republican governor.
Back in 1961, when John F. Kennedy entered the White House, the Democrats controlled all twenty-two Senate seats from the South and ninety-nine of the hundred and five Southern seats in the House. To oversimplify things a bit—but only a bit—the historic political realignment that began sixty years ago, with the rise of the civil-rights movement, is now complete.
 So where do the Democrats go from here? In an anguished and pointed column on the Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky, the liberal journalist, says the Party should “dump Dixie” and concentrate its electoral efforts on other parts of the country. “Practically the whole region,” Tomasky writes, “has rejected nearly everything that’s good about this country and has become just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment…. Forget about it. Forget about the whole fetid place. Write it off. Let the GOP have it and run it and turn it into Free-Market Jesus Paradise.”"

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