Phil Bredesen, the Democratic governor of Tennessee from 2003 to 2011, has a message for a party that, after Saturday’s runoff in Louisiana, will have no senators from the Deep South: “I come out of the business world. If you have a product that’s not working, you don’t say, ‘Our customers are lazy’ or ‘Our customers don’t know what’s best for them.’ The ones that are successful say, ‘I need a better product.’”

Sen. Mary Landrieu was the latest Democratic casualty in the region, losing this weekend’s election to Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy in a rout. But in interviews with more than a dozen elected Democratic officials, strategists and academics found some optimism that the party can find at least selective success across the South in the not-distant future, particularly in states with growing minority populations like North Carolina and Georgia.


It will take more than demographics, however, to rescue the once-dominant model of the centrist Southern Democrat: The party, the officials said, needs to spend less time on divisive social issues and more on middle-class economic concerns, and then hope that Barack Obama’s departure from the White House prompts skeptical white voters to give them a second look.

“We’re just trotting out the same old nostrums: a little class warfare here and a nod to labor unions there and more money for X, Y and Z programs,” said Bredesen. “People are looking for a vision.”

Most believe that vision will be found in pocketbook issues, particularly related to the middle class, including a revival of the more populist economic message that resonated during the first half of the 20th century. Support for student loans, Medicare and Medicaid, equal pay for equal work – all can be framed in a way that strengthens and bolsters the working class, Democrats say.

In 1962, every senator and an overwhelming majority of House members from the South was a Democrat. Next year, Democrats will control 39 of 149 Southern congressional seats, fewer than at any time since Reconstruction. The GOP won each of the seven governor’s races in the South this year as well, padding majorities in state legislatures across the region.

The Democrats’ earlier dominance, some of which stemmed from the Jim Crow era, faded steadily since the mid-1960s. Now, the party has hit rock bottom, but many younger candidates and strategists believe the atmosphere is ripe for a bounce-back.

“As tough as 2014 is, you have to go watch the game film,” said Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, a Democratic rising star. “The first thing you’ve got to do is shake it off. Then stop whining. Midterms are hard for Democrats, but we have the opportunity in ’16 to win the presidency and to rebuild the party.”

Here’s a look at what some top Democratic minds from the South say the party needs to do to win again in Dixie:

Move past the Obama era.

Mike Beebe, the popular outgoing Democratic governor of Arkansas, believes “most” of his party’s struggles in the state can be traced to Barack Obama.

In 2008, Obama became the first Democrat to carry Virginia and North Carolina for the first time in decades. Democrats dominated Arkansas’ congressional delegation, and Republicans did not even field a candidate against Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) that year.

But in 2010, driven by an anti-Obama backlash, Republicans won three of the state’s four House seats and knocked off Sen. Blanche Lincoln. In 2012, Republicans seized control of the state House and Senate for the first time since right after the Civil War and captured the fourth U.S. House seat. And Pryor was trounced this November.

“The No. 1 thing to be competitive in the South is to have Barack Obama not be president anymore,” said North Carolina pollster Tom Jensen, who runs the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling. “It’s just a simple reality that Southern whites really, really despise him in a way they have not despised any other president.”

Beebe says “it’ll help” for Obama to not be around, “but it’ll take more than that” to make up the lost ground.

Exit polls showed that Pryor received fewer than one-third of white votes last month. In Georgia, Democratic Senate candidate Michelle Nunn received a quarter of white votes, and Landrieu just 18 percent in the first round of voting last month.

Capitalize on demographic shifts.

Six of the 10 states with the largest black population are in the South, and the four states with the fastest growing black population are Florida, Georgia, Texas and North Carolina. Nine of the 10 states with the biggest Hispanic population growth are in the South as well.

Reed, the mayor of Atlanta, believes Georgia’s large African-American community did not turn out in force the way it did in 2008 and 2012 because Democratic candidates foolishly tried to distance themselves from Obama. In Kentucky, for example, Alison Lundergan Grimes refused to even acknowledge that she voted for Obama.

“Black people can see how the president of the United States is being treated by the party,” Reed said. “You’re trying to have the Obama coalition when you won’t even say the name of the president?”

To the extent that we try to be Republican Lite, we’re gonna lose. - Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed.

“To the extent that we try to be Republican Lite, we’re gonna lose,” he added.

Reed praised Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine in 2012 and Gov. Terry McAuliffe in 2013 for not running away from Obama, espousing progressive principles and aggressively attacking their opponents

Exit polls showed that Pryor received fewer than one-third of white votes last month. | Getty

“The Virginia model is the model we need to follow in the South,” he said.

Dick Harpootlian, the former chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, said minorities would have a lot more sway if courts stopped allowing Republican state legislators to overly concentrate them in safe majority-minority districts. He noted that one-third of the Palmetto State population is black, but only one of its seven House districts is represented by a Democrat.

“The gerrymandered artificial districts are created for white people, not black people,” he said.

The Supreme Court is currently considering a case out of Alabama, in which Democrats and African Americans argue that Republicans impermissibly concentrated black voters in gerrymandered districts to create more GOP seats.

Talk more about economic issues — and less about social issues.

“During this last election — if you made above minimum wage, and you already had health care — there wasn’t a hell of a lot in [the Democratic message] for you,” said Jim Hodges, the governor of South Carolina from 1999 to 2003. “If the Republicans have a 1 percent problem, we have a 10 percent problem. We seem obsessed with the problems that 10 percent of the population has. Then voters don’t believe Democrats care about people like them.”

Even as Democrats were getting swamped, Arkansas overwhelmingly passed a minimum wage hike. Polling shows heavy support in the region for expanding Medicaid, reforming student loans and giving women equal pay for equal work.

Former Mississippi Gov. Ronnie Musgrove said all those things are good, but Democrats need a broader, more comprehensive plan. “To me, the sweet-tea-and-grits crowd still likes our economic issues,” said Musgrove, who served from 2000 to 2004 and narrowly lost a 2008 Senate race. “Democrats need an economic message based on opportunity: education, job training, infrastructure rebuilding, and even health care – where voters know that Democrats can make a difference in these issues.”

Bredesen, the former Tennessee governor, put it more bluntly. “We’re known for gay rights, immigration, climate change and an unpopular health plan,” he said. “I think we’re on the right side on all those issues, but it’s not what people are looking for right now from government.

“I’ll be honest: it passes my understanding how particularly the past few years we’ve ignored the economic pain that’s been created in this country,” he added.

Bredesen said Democrats who are thinking about running for office need to adopt what he calls “the Walmart test.”

“When you think about what your platform is going to be, go to the nearest Walmart and stop someone in the aisle and tell them what you’re going to run on,” he said. “If that engages them and they’re interested, then you have a plan.”

Stay out of the way while Republicans mess it up.

When Democrats controlled the South, moderates and liberals battled in heated primaries. Now Republicans find themselves with increasingly testy primaries — between the right and the far right.

Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran received fewer votes than state Sen. Chris McDaniel in a June primary but narrowly won a runoff a few weeks later after African-Americans and other moderates rallied behind him. If McDaniel had won the nomination, his history of incendiary comments would have given an opening to former Democratic Rep. Travis Childers — and national Republicans might have needed to spend millions of dollars to hold the otherwise-safe seat.

Meanwhile in Alabama, state House Speaker Mike Hubbard was indicted on 23 felony corruption counts two weeks before the midterms; he denies wrongdoing.

“They’re not delivering,” said Mississippi’s Musgrove, who noted that his state is often ranked near the bottom of national quality of life rankings. “It’s constant overreach. It is corruption. There are positions that are so far to the right that people of the South just say we can’t go that far. “

Beebe, who is voluntarily leaving office next month as one of the country’s most popular governors, said that he successfully capitalized on division between “mainstream,” business-minded Republicans and “extreme right wing” tea partiers in the state legislature to expand Medicaid.

“The pragmatism of the business Republicans together with the Democrats created a coalition,” he said. “That’s going to be a dynamic going forward.”

Democrats need to build deeper benches in Southern state legislatures.

The Kentucky state House is the only legislative chamber in the South still controlled by Democrats. Gov. Steve Beshear marvels at how many voters pulled the lever for GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell, who won by 15 points, and Democratic state representatives last month.

“In Kentucky, we’ve demonstrated to our people that we can get things done with a divided government,” said Beshear, who handily won reelection in 2011 and was just appointed to a Democratic National Committee task force to explore what lessons the party can learn from this year.

Insiders say the key is to win state races, which tend to be less polarized than federal ones, and have candidates prove themselves there.

There is a hunger and appetite for fresh faces, including business people who’ve never held office, after several Democratic dynasties showed their limitations this year.

Georgia Rep. John Barrow was the only remaining white Democrat from the Deep South in the lower chamber, but he lost by 10 points last month. And because Republicans control the other legislatures — which draw congressional-district boundaries in most states — Democrats will be hard pressed to make inroads at the federal level if they can’t take over before the next redistricting cycle, beginning in 2021.

Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), who is white but represents a majority-minority district around Memphis, thinks his party has a long road back in the South.

“Lyndon Johnson allegedly said we lost it for a generation when he signed the Civil Rights Act [in 1964],” Cohen recalled. “I think it’s gone for the rest of my lifetime and probably yours.”

Lauren French contributed to this report.