The South: Coy, with Clout

The coyest and most courted region in the 1968 election season is the South.

The Old Confederacy and the Border States nominated the Republican ticket, and will shape its campaign. The winds from Dixie make Hubert Humphrey the Democratic pacesetter and will similarly trim his sails into November. Thus, to the naked eye, the South appears to have risen again. A closer look does not quite bear out the more sweeping assumptions about Southern power, but Dixie has indisputably earned the attention it gets.

More than any other area, the South has been undergoing rapid political and social change for nearly 20 years. While the Negro population has increased 20% in the eleven secessionist states since 1948, black voter registration has risen more than 500%, to an estimated 3,250,000 for this year's election. Industrialization and legislative reapportionment have given new strength to the cities and suburbs. The Republican Party is again a potent force; but it wears dramatically contrasting faces in different states, and has lost most of the Negro support that once formed its core. The Democrats meanwhile are being pulled apart by the opposing forces of reaction and moderation.

Ancestral Party. The South in one sense has lost influence. Democratic Congressmen, who under the seniority rule built one-party security and physical longevity into enduring power on Capitol Hill, have become vulnerable to challenge and defeat. Nor can the survivors rely on each other to vote "right."

Three years ago, 43 Southern Congressmen helped pass the Voting Rights Act. In presidential politics, the once Solid South no longer has the weight to offset the Democratic Party's liberal elements. When Texan Lyndon Johnson became President, the conservative South found overnight that it still had no ally in the White House on racial and economic issues. Georgia Governor Lester Maddox, the latest presidential entry, complained last week that the "socialists and Communists" now control his ancestral party.

Yet, by re-establishing the two-party system — actually a three-party system this year, with George Wallace's candidacy — the South has regained political leverage in other respects. Both major parties must compete there as in other regions; they can no longer regard the South as a bloc but must view it as a collection of diverse states with diverse interests. In this sense, the South has come of age politically. There are real rewards for the party that deals delicately with this constituency. The eleven states of the Old Confederacy contain 128 electoral votes and five Border States add 42, for a total of 170.

Needed to elect: 270.

Non-Enemy. If the South's influence this year has been strong, it has also been negative and retrogressive. The Wallace candidacy is a magnet for the disgruntled, and while the Alabamian poses serious problems for the major parties, his odd allure is a force to be circumvented rather than absorbed into the mainstream.