Wednesday, November 05, 2014

Southern Democrats need a New Strategy

Chris Cillizza puts it the best when he called Southern Democrats a loser in the 2014 election:
Southern Democrats: Both Alison Lundergan Grimes in Kentucky and Sen. Mark Pryor in Arkansas did everything they could to run away from President Obama and insist they were their own independent voices. Ditto Michelle Nunn in Georgia.  Didn't work.  Grimes lost minutes after polls closed in Kentucky. Same for Pryor in Arkansas. Nunn wasn't able to push David Perdue (R) to a runoff. And even Sen. Mark Warner, long considered to be impregnable, found himself in a tight race with former Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie.  The results affirmed just how difficult it is for Democrats to win federal races in the South -- particularly in an election cycle like this one where a Democratic President is decidedly unpopular in the region. (And NBC/Marist poll released on Sunday showed Obama with a 32 percent approval rating in Kentucky.)
It may be easy to when statewide for state elections but in Kentucky, nobody has been elected statewide to the United States Senate since Wendell Ford.  In 2011, the Steve Beshear/Jerry Abramson slate won with 55.72% of the vote.

The Kentucky Democratic Party has a lot of work to do over the next few years.

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