Take a look at these two maps from the 2008 GOP presidential primaries. In the two Southern states contested in this Super Tuesday – once a Dixie-based day of primaries – Michigan-born and Massachusetts-elected Mitt Romney was right in the middle of the race with John McCain and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.
2008 wasn’t a clear moderate vs. conservative or establishment vs. populist – or even South vs. rest of the country – contest. Huckabee found appeal with social conservatives, economic populists and rural voters, especially native Southerners. McCain was strong in most demographics, but scored particularly strongly in places with a strong military influence. Mitt Romney found appeal with business-oriented suburban voters, but that appeal was not limited to the Midwest and Northeast.
Standing out in the county result maps in both Tennessee and Georgia are the clusters of counties in green that pushed Mitt Romney into a first place finish. (Huckabee wins are orange, McCain counties in blue.) In Tennessee, they were the New South counties growing around Nashville, full of Republicans with higher education levels and healthier incomes than the rest of the state. And significantly, these counties boast a much higher percentage of voters born outside of the South.
The same phenomenon is evidenced in Georgia’s map, with Romney winning pluralities in the boom counties around Atlanta. (Scroll over the coastal counties around cosmopolitan but naval-influenced Savannah, and find Romney barely losing to McCain, too.) A first wave of Northern-born Sunbelt pioneers in Atlanta’s ‘burbs defied Peach State convention and sent a Rust Belt-born Republican college professor named Newt Gingrich to Congress in the 1970s. Two decades later, a new generation of Republican in Newt’s old base was turned off by Huckabee’s populist evangelizing and not swayed by McCain’s paeans to military service. The guy who hyped his business executive resume was the one they went with.
Especially in Georgia, with so many of the state’s congressional districts gerrymandered to include a least a sliver of the Atlanta media market, Romney could amass a healthy share of delegates even if he’s swamped in the Pines of South Georgia and up in the Appalachian mountains of the state’s northwest.
Once the heart of solid Republican presidential majorities, these New South counties in both states have trended back to Democrats in recent elections. Winning here does give Romney a point to boast with when playing the “electability” card.
