Within the Margin

As I looked at the map of county results in Florida tonight, I was immediately struck by the success of Newt Gingrich in northern Florida.  It reminded me of the 1968 general election map of Florida, the year of a vigorous three-way race between Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey and arch-segregationist George Wallace. That year, Wallace received 8.6% of the nationwide vote, but won several southern states. He failed to capture Florida, finishing third with 28.5% as Nixon benefited from the decidedly un-Southern demographics in the central and southern portions of the state. But to the north, Wallace was dominant: he won almost every single county north and west of Orlando, some by outlandish margins – he took 87% in tiny Holmes County along the Georgia border and broke 70% in many other rural counties. He won pluralities in Leon (Tallahassee) and Duval (Jacksonville). He’s green on the map below, while Humphrey is red and Nixon is blue – thanks to Dave’s Election Atlas for the ongoing great work, but keep in mind that Dave uses red for Dems as was the case throughout the media for many decades. Meanwhile, on the adjacent map from Google Elections, Gingrich is red while Romney is yellow (click for larger images).

1968 General Election

2012 Republican Primary

You can see that Gingrich’s areas of strength overlap quite a bit with areas that Wallace was winning almost 44 years ago. The Florida Panhandle and the Piney Woods of North Florida gave Wallace his best counties in the state back then, and they did the same for Gingrich tonight. Those are deeply Evangelical areas, mostly working-class, very white (with the occasional African American pocket mixed in) . We would expect them to be more receptive to Gingrich’s anti-establishment populism than wealthier areas featuring a larger professional class and lots of northern transplants. And indeed they were: Newt didn’t record too many blowout victories at the county level tonight, but he at least carried almost every northern county, some by a decisive margin. And take a look as well at that group of south central Florida counties that Gingrich won tonight. Those five inland counties, surrounded by yellow? Wallace won all five of them in 1968.

Has Newt inherited the Wallace mantle? Well, look: it’s unfair to say that these sections are Florida are seething with race resentment in the way they were back then. Integration is a reality, hostilities have softened. But many of these counties – that Newt won tonight and Wallace won in ’68 – are part of the small (and overwhelmingly white) subset of counties around the country that gave Barack Obama a smaller portion of the vote in 2008 then they did Kerry in 2004. These are places that swung toward the Republican presidential ticket even as the country as a whole, and Florida to a slightly smaller extent, were swinging to Obama by several percentage points. They are confined almost exclusively to Appalachia and the Deep South. We have no indicator to show that they were impacted differently by the economic conditions of 2008 – or any other factor – than were areas that followed the norm and moved toward Obama. It’s more complicated than race alone – it’s clearly wrapped up in resentment of elites; conservative anger in 2008 was aimed certainly aimed at Obama on that (somewhat bizarre, given his upbringing and some of his career choices) basis, and is being aimed at Romney now – remember that Gingrich’s sizable South Carolina win followed a stretch of attacks on his work at Bain Capital.

Now, those are all small counties. So they didn’t put Gingrich even in shouting distance of catching Romney, who was dominant in the populous areas of southern and central Florida; even in the north, Romney won razor-thin pluralities in Bay County (Panama City) and Leon County (Tallahassee, the state capital). And only winning areas like that won’t work in other states which, like Florida, feature larger population centers that gravitate toward Romney. I don’t think Newt can rely on a base of less-affluent, less-educated primary voters in many of the upcoming states; he won’t find himself in another southern primary until March 3, and the race may be quite different by then. In South Carolina he expanded beyond that base, winning almost everywhere and only losing narrowly in the state’s upscale and somewhat Florida-like areas; tonight, after being outspent 6:1 by the Romney campaign, his support was confined to the old Wallace strongholds.

And it goes without saying that while 2010 saw Republicans dominate the Congressional ballot in places like Appalachia and north Florida, capturing districts long held by moderate-to-conservative Democrats, the nation’s demographics will not allow the Republican nominee to rely on those regions while struggling in metro areas. No one expects the battle to be fought in America’s shrinking rural heartlands. It’s not news that Gingrich would be hopelessly ill-equipped to compete in a general election, but tonight helped show us why. The pseudo-historian is far more comfortable competing for the votes of America’s past than those of its present or future.