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Southern Democrats are becoming a political endangered species. And with the defeat of Mary L. Landrieu last weekend in a Louisiana runoff election, Democratic senators from the Deep South have gone extinct.

The outcome “was yet another sobering reminder of their party’s declining prospects in the South, a region they dominated for much of the 20th century,” Richard Fausset writes at The New York Times.

In the House of Representatives, there are no white Democrats from the Deep South, and Republicans now control most state legislatures and governorships in the region.

The political scientist Thomas F. Schaller is not surprised. In 2006, he wrote the book on giving up on the South. That book, “Whistling Past Dixie,” urged Democrats to develop a non-Southern national electoral strategy.

Now the situation for Democrats in the South, he writes at The Baltimore Sun, is more bleak, even as their national prospects remain solid.

The number of Southern Democrats as a whole is shrinking, he says, and “the loss is led by the disappearance of whites from the party.”

Still, he says, “At this point, with Democrats having hit rock bottom in the South and nowhere to go but up, I’m almost persuaded it’s time to re-invest there. Almost.”

But for Michael Tomasky, at The Daily Beast, it’s time for Democrats to say good riddance to the region.

Well, like Mr. Schaller says, almost. He makes exceptions for certain states in presidential politics: Florida and Virginia, plus North Carolina and, eventually, perhaps Georgia and even Texas. (Which of course leads to the question: What is the South?)

But otherwise, he says, don’t lift a finger: “At the congressional level, and from there on down, the Democrats should just forget about the place.”

They should spend no money and expand no effort, Mr. Tomasky writes. “This means every Senate seat will be Republican, and 80 percent of the House seats will be, too.” He points out that “Democrats will retain their hold on the majority-black districts, and they’ll occasionally be competitive in a small number of other districts in cities and college towns,” and between that, the blue states in the North and on the coasts, and the pockets of opportunity that exist in other states (especially in the West), “the Democrats can cobble together congressional majorities in both houses, under the right circumstances.”

He bases this view on what he sees as the intransigence of Southern culture, and what Democrats would give up by appealing to it. He writes: “Practically the whole region has rejected nearly everything that’s good about this country and has become just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment. A fact made even sadder because on the whole they’re such nice people! (I truly mean that.)”

So trying to win Southern votes is not worth the ideological cost for Democrats, he says: “The Democratic Party cannot (and I’d say should not) try to calibrate its positions to placate Southern mores.”

But Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg View does not see such heavy costs: “Trying to shift the entire Democratic Party so its center of opinion is equal to that in South Carolina or Mississippi would be a bad idea. But accepting a diversity of candidates, with national Democrats willing to support centrists or mild conservatives in conservative states, is good politics that costs the rest of the party little.”

Still, Mr. Tomasky prefers a hard line: “If they get no votes from the region, they will in turn owe it nothing, and in time the South, which is the biggest welfare moocher in the world in terms of the largesse it gets from the more advanced and innovative states, will be on its own, which is what Southerners always say they want anyway.”

Timothy P. Carney, at Washington Examiner, also points to culture — though from a decidedly different viewpoint — as a breakup point for Democrats and the South.

“Democrats waged a culture war against the South, trying to force Southerners to stop ‘clinging’ to their guns and to God,” he writes.

Mr. Carney argues that the left can blame a rampantly racist Southern culture all it wants, but doing so overlooks the election of, for example, Senator Tim Scott, an African-American Republican from South Carolina, or Nikki Haley, the Indian-American re-elected governor of South Carolina.

In his eyes, President Obama and his party waged a “culture-war crusade with glee — and failed, but not before making it clear that they disapproved of the way Southerners live.”

“And the Democrats have made it clear that they are willing to use government to impose their morality on others,” Mr. Carney adds. “Through the courts, the Left has banned prayers at high school football games and forced states to remove the Ten Commandments from public grounds.”

It’s simple, he says: “Democrats and the Left have tried to outlaw Southerners’ way of life.”

Harry Enten at FiveThirtyEight takes issue with the argument that the South is a goner for Democrats. Certainly not in Virginia, Florida and North Carolina, he notes in agreement with Mr. Tomasky — though he does acknowledge that it’s a little harder to be an optimist about the Deep South.

Yet he thinks that Blue Dog Democrats, under more favorable circumstances such as in 2012, may return. And indeed, the next “wave” election — which are happening more frequently — in the Democrats’ favor could also tilt the field.

At Politico, James Hohmann, in seeking out advice from Southern politicians for Democrats willing to engage the region, points to pocketbooks 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.”

He also enumerates: finding hope in demographics, including the increasing size of the African-American populations in Florida, Georgia, Texas and North Carolina; talking less about social issues and more about economic issues, stressing a populist tone; and building deeper benches in Southern state legislatures.

“The key is to win state races, which tend to be less polarized than federal ones, and have candidates prove themselves there,” Mr. Hohmann writes. “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.”

Still, Jonathan Chait at New York magazine takes a long view of the South and political parties. For him, “The real anomaly is that the Democrats managed to hold out in the Deep South so very, very long.”

He sees two American political traditions: “One tradition bore intense suspicion of centralized government, venerated farmers and rural life, believed the Constitution forbade Congress from all but a handful of specifically enumerated fields of activity, felt comfortable with aggression and violence in both domestic life and foreign affairs, and defended existing social institutions against racial minorities and their allies. This political coalition has always had its strongest base in the Deep South. It is right-wing.”

“The other tradition advocated a stronger federal government (and deemed this expanded role Constitutional), considered public investment and education the best method of securing prosperity, was more averse to territorial conflict with neighbors, and was more solicitous of racial minorities. This coalition has always had its strongest base in New England. It is left-wing.”

He highlights a map of the country’s divisions in 1860 — one red block in the North, a blue one in the South, the party labels reversed from our time. Well into the middle of the 20th century, he says, the liberal party had its base in the Deep South.

“If the mid-20th century forms your frame of reference, the Obama years represent a regrettable turn away from normality,” he adds. “But an even longer view of history leads to the conclusion that the trends of the Obama years have simply brought the two parties back into their natural resting position. The amazing thing about southern Democrats is not the scale of their fall, but the heights they were able to sustain in the face of all logic.”

It also, he concludes, “signals the appropriate, full resumption of the major argument of American history.”