The Magic and the Message

(5 of 8)

Reagan won Oregon and Washington in 1980, but Jimmy Carter and Independent John Anderson together received nearly as many votes. The Democrats have a good chance in Oregon and plan a serious campaign in Washington.

The South. Texas is a hybrid of the Republican West and conservative South, but the G.O.P. has not had anything like a lock on the Lone Star State: Democrats won Texas in four of the past six presidential elections. Still, the polls and almost all the local hunches give the state and its 29 electoral votes to Reagan. For one thing, although the Hispanic vote is significant (17.7%) and overwhehningly Democratic, macho Mexican-American men may resist the prospect of a female Vice President. For another, Reagan's happy-go-lucky cowboy style and his free-market economics seem to suit Texans.

Of the other Southern states, which among them have 109 electoral votes, the President has a decent chance to win all ten. The Democrats, however, write off only Florida and Virginia. Mondale Campaign Chairman James Johnson says that "Tennessee is close" and that Georgia, Alabama and "maybe even Mississippi" are winnable. Right now, however, the region is Reagan's to lose. The most recent Darden poll showed Reagan with an enormous 26% regional lead. White Southerners tend to share his extreme hawkishness and his distaste for civil rights schemes like affirmative action. "I think Reagan can just sleep late," says John Havick, a Georgia Tech political scientist. "He's got these people."

The Democrats' tenuous Southern hopes rest on the black vote. A University of Alabama poll found that Reagan is leading in the state just 46% to 40%. If the party is able to generate huge black turnouts in Alabama (where 23% of the electorate is black), South Carolina (28% black), Georgia (22%), Mississippi (26%) and Louisiana (25%), and capture at least a third of the white vote in each state, the

President could be denied Dixie. The recent trend in voter registration worries the G.O.P.: according to the American Political Report, a Republican-run newsletter, black registration in the region increased by about 700,000 since 1980, while white registration declined by more than 200,000.

For the next two months, the critical thrust of both parties' Southern campaigns may be their respective registration efforts. No doubt the G.O.P. enterprise has in many places been able to benefit from racial fears and thus transform white nonvoters and Democrats into registered Republicans. In North Carolina (19% black electorate), says Elections Director Alex Brock, "Jesse Jackson began registration in the churches. But the Moral Majority picked up on it and may have surpassed him." In six months, G.O.P. registrations in rural Scotland County, N.C., increased from about 1,000 to almost 2,300. Lamarr Mooneyham, a Moral Majority official, says he has indeed been "fishing for conservatives in church waters." The white vote, however, is no solid bloc of fundamentalists, and some backlash seems possible. The Darden poll asked about a hypothetical endorsement by Moral Majority Founder Jerry Falwell, who is campaigning for Reagan. By a ratio of 3 to 1, Southerners said they would be less likely to support a candidate endorsed by Falwell.