I’ve never read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, but I’m sure there’s something in there about picking your battles…wisely. If you go into a battle, knowing ahead of time you have no chance to win, they why waste the time, effort and resources?
That was the basis of a recent article I read about Democrats and The South. The offshoot was this: Democrats, stop wasting your time trying to win any more Federal seats in Dixie. Sure ,a stray House seat may go to a Democrat, depending on how the district lines are drawn, but by and large, votes for the Senate and the President for the foreseeable future will most likely be all-GOP from Texas until you reach the Atlantic. The basis for that hypothesis? Voters in The South are heavily committed to the 3-Gs as far as issues are concerned: God, guns and gays. The article said that no matter what the Democrats say or do, they’ll always be on the opposite side on those 3 social issues, so why even pretend and go through the dance?
It kinda makes sense.
Mary Landrieu was the Democratic Senator from Louisiana for 3 terms before she was beaten in this election cycle. As the final days of the campaign were nearing, polls were showing she was going to lose big (she did) so the Democratic National Committee decided to pull all advertising from the state to save money, instead of pouring it into a losing proposition. Was that smart? Yeah, it was. They could have spent countless millions and she still would have lost, and the Democrats would have lost the money for no good reason.
So, should that strategy be expanded to a larger scale? If you look at, say, South Carolina for example, it’s one of the reddest of red states. There’s no way a Democrat wins the Senate or gets the 7 electoral votes for president…so why bother? The other states in the South are pretty much the same thing, so again, why bother? Should Democrats put up a candidate just for show, knowing they have no chance? Should a party have to spend millions on a race they know can’t be won just so it appears as though the 2-party system is alive and well? A lot of this goes into my regular argument against the electoral college, because if you’re a Democrat in a red state like ours, there’s no use in casting a vote in the presidential race…it’s just wasted.
Of course, the counter to this argument is that things go in cycles, and it wasn’t but a generation or 2 ago, that the South was as Democratic as could. If you give it up now, you’ll never have a chance to flip it back to blue. That’s a valid argument. Someday, things could change, depending on the social climate and the cultural arguments that monopolize politics. Someday, maybe. But that someday isn’t today. And as divided as Americans are at this moment, someday is probably a long way away.
