The South Shall Rise Again: Mega Tuesday

The last time the Southern states formally banded together to assert their political will, the Civil War broke out. Nothing quite so cataclysmic is likely to ensue from Dixie's creation of a "Mega Tuesday," the first great regional primary. But the rush of Southern and Border states to join in a plan to hold primaries on the same Tuesday early in the 1988 election season--March 8, to be precise--could produce the greatest change in the way party nominees are chosen since the reform movement of the 1970s.

For the past two decades, Southern political leaders as divergent as Jimmy Carter and George Wallace have been talking about the need for their region to exercise greater clout in picking candidates for the White House. First, in 1972, Florida held an early-March primary. When Alabama and Georgia climbed / aboard in 1980, the result was what came to be known in the last presidential election as Super Tuesday. Over the past year, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Missouri and Tennessee decided to stage primaries on the second Tuesday in March. Mississippi is expected to follow suit in the next week or two. If, as anticipated, several other Southern states--including North Carolina and, most prominently, Texas--get on the bandwagon, then Super Tuesday will need a new superlative.

All in all, a dozen or so Southern states are expected to hold primaries or caucuses during the second week of March. Almost one-third of the delegates at the nominating conventions will be on the line. Duke University Political Scientist Joel Fleishman calls the regional primary "a logical extension of the South trying to find its place in the sun." Texas State Senator John Traeger, chairman of the Southern Legislative Conference and a leading proponent of the Mega Tuesday idea, puts it even more emphatically: "The South has risen again."

The impetus has come largely from the Democrats, who control all the Southern state legislatures and thus have the power to set primary dates. They have long felt that the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary in February give the Snow Belt an inordinate voice in picking the party's nominee. A Southern primary, they hope, will amplify their region's voice and enhance prospects that the Democrats will nominate a centrist, someone who can win back significant Southern real estate and thereby shatter what has become the modern G.O.P. base of presidential politics: most of the old Confederacy as well as much of the West. With the Democratic Party groping through an identity crisis in the wake of two landslide losses to Ronald Reagan, Southern Democrats see an opening to reshape the party in an image more to their liking. "It's a risk," says Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee, "but when you lose 49 states, it's time to take some risks."

Maybe so, but in politics the only sure rule is the law of unintended consequences. Among them: