A rash of party-switching by former Democratic state legislatures in the South has drawn attention to the parlous condition of the Donkey Party in that region following a terrible midterm election.   Jonathan Martin of Politico captured the zeitgeist with a much-discussed piece entitled, “Democratic South Finally Falls,” a testament not only to Republican gains in the region but to the advent of such endlessly predicted but long-delayed developments as the GOP conquest of the Alabama state legislature.

How bad was election night 2010 for southern Democrats?  Well, there were a total of 14 Senate and gubernatorial races in the eleven states of the Old Confederacy, and Republicans won all of them except for the Arkansas governor’s race.  Exactly one-third of the 66 House pickups for the GOP occurred in the same eleven states (along with one-third of the three Democratic pickups).  Republicans gained control of four state legislative chambers (the House and Senate in both Alabama and North Carolina), then picked up control of the Louisiana House due to a party switch.  Today Democrats control the Arkansas and Mississippi House and Senate; the Senate in Louisiana and Virginia; and nothing else.  And the Mississippi, Louisiana, and Virginia bastions will be at risk in 2011.

Were there regional bright spots for Democrats?  Sure, in individual races.  But it’s hard to call, say, North Carolina a bright spot because endangered House Democrats Larry Kissel and Mike McIntyre survived, since the state legislature was lost for the first time since Reconstruction.  Similarly, two of three targeted House Democrats in Georgia won, but Republicans swept all the statewide races for the first time ever, and are approaching a veto-proof supermajority in both state legislative chambers.

Democrats had unusually strong gubernatorial candidates facing Republicans with problems in four southern states:  South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, and Texas.  All these Democrats lost.

Now it’s important to understand that the demographic turnout patterns that made the midterms so hospitable to Republicans nationally were especially strong in parts of the South, where the pro-Republican trend among older white voters in 2008 was especially pronounced, and the predictable falloff in African-American voting after a historic cycle was especially damaging to Democrats.  That means Democrats will likely rebound (relatively speaking) in 2012 in the South as elsewhere.  Indeed, post-midterm PPP polls of Virginia and North Carolina, the two southern states carried by Obama in 2008, show the president in pretty good shape in both for 2012.

What really happened in 2010 of enduring significance is that the post-Civil Rights Act era of ticket-splitting in the South, which enabled Democrats to do much better in state and local election than at the presidential level, is finally drawing to a close, with one important qualifier: as Republicans become the natural governing party of the South, they will also be vulnerable to unhappiness with the status quo, which could produce Democratic victories, particularly in states with an irreducibly strong Democratic base.  Generally, though, congressional districts with a long history of going GOP in presidential races and Democratic in House races, like South Carolina’s 5^th district or Mississippi’s 4^th, aren’t likely coming back to the Democratic column now that their long-time incumbents have lost.  In addition, as the party-switching in state legislatures demonstrates, Democrats will no longer benefit from being perceived as the party of convenience for ambitious politicos with flexible ideological views.

The upside for southern Democrats is that the long-term demographic trends favoring them in the region—growing minority populations, continued in-migration of less conservative voters, and the increased importance of “knowledge jobs”—haven’t gone away.  And without question, southern Democrats are continuing to converge with their national counterparts in ideology as conservative white rural voters complete their migration out of the Democratic coalition.   Overall, southerners will still be more moderate than Democrats from areas with a strong labor movement or a tradition of cultural progressivism, but much of the argument that southern Blue Dogs are muddling the message or obstructing the legislation of the national party has become moot.