Southern Senators

I've written here and elsewhere about the implications of many U.S. Senate seats representing southeastern states having switched from Democrat to Republican since the 1960s. I decided to put some numbers to it.

The first question is how to define "The South". I'm defining it as the 11 states that were part of the Confederacy. That is a rather narrow definition. One could add the "border states" of Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland and Delaware. And some might also add Oklahoma, which had not yet achieved statehood at the time of the Civil War.

No Republican represented any of those 11 states in the U.S. Senate between January 24, 1913 and June 15, 1961.

During the Reconstruction period following the end of the Civil War, 21 of the 22 seats from those states were briefly held by Republicans. But, from the end of the 1870s through 1913, there were very few Republican senators from the region.

The only southern seat not to go Republican during Reconstruction was the Georgia seat now held by Saxby Chambliss. The last previous non-Democrat in that seat was John Macpherson Berrien, who sat as a Whig until 1852.

In 1961, John Tower was elected as a Republican to the Senate from Texas, in a special election necessitated by Lyndon Johnson's leaving the Senate to become vice president.

Then, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina switched from Democrat to Republican on September 16, 1964.

The ranks of southern Republican senators vaulted to three, when Howard Baker was elected in Tennessee, in 1966.

That number ranged between five and seven, between 1971 and 1981.

The Reagan coattails brought it up to 10, with the 1980 election. Then, when the Democrats regained control of the Senate in 1986, it fell to six.

The Republican landslide of 1994 took southern Republican representation to 13, for the first time in the 20th century a majority of the southern seats.

The post-Reconstruction high of 18 was attained in the 2005-6 Congress. Then, when Jim Webb beat George Allen, in Virginia in 2006, the Republicans were back down to 17.

It's an important point that none of this means that those states completely changed their political hue. They did change in the sense that they accepted the end of Jim Crow segregation laws. But the switch to the Republican Party was made because those individual politicians changed from Democrat to Republican, in part out of pure ambition, and in part to align themselves with what was increasingly being seen as the conservative party.

This year, a Democrat looks likely to win the other Virginia seat. Democratic gains are also possible in Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina and South Carolina. If Democrats win all of those states, their numbers among southern senators will be higher than they've been since the first two years of Bill Clinton's presidency.

All this is meant to reinforce the point I've been making, that I'm skeptical of the notion that a 60-member Democratic caucus in the Senate will make the Senate filibuster-proof. If as many as 10 of those Democratic senators represent southeastern states, I don't know that they can all be counted on to vote for cloture to ensure passage of all aspects of an Obama-Reid-Pelosi legislative program.