In hostile territory

Can the Democrats make gains in the heavily Republican South? A look at two Senate races, in Tennessee and Virginia

SOME audiences are easier than others. The students at Maryville College are as liberal as you will find in eastern Tennessee, so Harold Ford, a Democrat running for the Senate, has no trouble wowing them. He's young, clever and says the government should pay for college tuition. After a sunny speech, the audience's questions are mostly either friendly or lovestruck. “Mr Ford, will you marry me?” asks one girl, just out of the candidate's earshot.

The rest of Tennessee is a bit more conservative than Maryville College. As Mr Ford once said, “The national image of the Democratic Party does not sell well in the South.” So he is running as far from his party as he credibly can. At the Kiwanis Club nearby, where several members are boycotting his speech simply because he is a Democrat, Mr Ford boasts that he has never voted for an unbalanced budget, that he would never hire an illegal immigrant and that he gets “jumped on” a little by his own party because he goes to church a lot and loves Jesus.

This audience is not predisposed to like him, but they do. He says George Bush should have greater powers to thwart terrorists. He proposes to shut the borders to new immigrants for 45 days, to find out who's here and what they're up to. He wants to eliminate the tax code's bias against marriage—between a man and a woman, that is. The only strike against him, with this audience, is that he would not criminalise abortion.

To win the Senate in November, the Democrats need to gain six seats. Tennessee is, by some measures, the sixth-most-vulnerable Republican-held one. It is open because Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, is retiring. If anyone can turn the Volunteer State blue, it is Mr Ford. His Republican foe, Bob Corker, is rich but unexciting. The national trend is towards the Democrats. But still the race is a toss-up.

Mr Ford has both youth and experience on his side. Though only 36, he has been in politics for 32 years, since he first starred in a campaign commercial for his father, Harold Ford senior, calling for “lower cookie prices”. He inherited his father's seat in the House of Representatives as soon as he was old enough to stand for election, and has been tipped as a future star ever since. In 2000, he was a keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention. The next year, People magazine named him one of the 50 most beautiful people in the world. But to win in Tennessee, he will have to convince a lot of voters he is not a liberal.

Despite his Republican-lite bonhomie, this is hard. A liberal pressure group has rated him the most liberal Tennessee congressman. That is a label akin to “wussiest linebacker for the Tennessee Titans”, but Republicans are making sure everyone hears about it. One ad, after accusing him of being soft on terrorists and illegal immigrants, flashes the word “liberal” on the screen like a neon warning sign.

Mr Ford has other handicaps, too. He is black, and he comes from a family of machine politicians with ethical hiccups. His uncle, a state senator, was indicted on corruption charges the day after his nephew announced his candidacy. Mr Ford deals smoothly with both issues. To those who will not vote for him because he is black, he says “God bless your heart.” To pre-empt questions about dodgy relatives, he says: “My dad's family gets all the attention...but my mother's got a family too.” He then recounts how his maternal grandmother taught him right from wrong with a wooden switch.

The Democrats will forgive Mr Ford any amount of pious pandering if he wins. And, despite the populist excesses of his campaign, he would be a thoughtful addition to the Senate. But however charming Tennesseans may find Mr Ford, they know that voting for him could flip control of the Senate and hand power to people such as Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton. And that, most feel, would not be good.

A non-southern strategy

Democrats do badly now in the South. The conventional wisdom is that the party should redouble its efforts to appeal to “Bubba”, the white working-class southerner who loves God and guns and bristles at the condescension of effete north-eastern liberals. For Mr Ford, this is obviously a sensible strategy. But for the party as a whole, Thomas Schaller, author of “Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats can win without the South”, thinks it is bunk.

Why, Mr Schaller asks, do Democrats want to spend so much time and money courting a group that is reflexively hostile to them? Rather than chasing southern whites, Democrats should be pursuing swing voters in Ohio or Pennsylvania, who might actually listen to them. And in the long term they should exploit friendly demographic trends, such as the migration of liberal Californians into sparsely populated neighbouring states.

Americans' mobility makes politics unpredictable. Virginia, for example, is always assumed to be solidly conservative, but an influx of liberal high-tech and government workers is making it less so. Throw in a series of gaffes by the incumbent Republican senator, George Allen, and the race suddenly looks competitive.

Mr Allen is an affable, tobacco-chewing ex-governor. Virginia has a one-term limit for governors, so for six years he has been biding his time in the Senate, plotting a presidential bid. Re-election this year was supposed to be a formality. But suddenly Mr Allen has found himself fending off charges of racism. First, he referred to a young Indian-American as macaca. He says he made the word up, but it turns out to be a racial slur in North Africa.

Mr Allen's mother is from Tunisia. There was also a rumour that she was Jewish. At a debate with his Democratic opponent, Jim Webb, a tone-deaf TV reporter asked Mr Allen: “Could you please tell us whether your forbears include Jews?” The audience booed. Mr Allen said his mother was raised as a Christian. But it turns out that she wasn't, and Mr Allen lied about it. His mother says she hid her Jewishness when she emigrated to America after the Holocaust, and never told her son until last month. Even then, she says she asked him to keep quiet about it. So maybe he lied to protect his mother, but voters would doubtless prefer him not to lie at all.
Finally, two college mates claim that, when young, Mr Allen used racial epithets so offensive that prissy American newspapers cannot print them. The Washington Post quoted one of them alleging that Mr Allen once pointed to turtles in a pond and said only “the [epithets] eat them”. Mr Allen denies calling anyone an epithet.

Mr Allen will probably win anyway, though his presidential hopes are in ruins. Mr Webb, his opponent, is impressive, a decorated Vietnam veteran who served as navy secretary under Ronald Reagan. But he is a stiff, unsmiling campaigner, whom Mr Allen will massively outspend.
For the Democrats to capture the Senate, they will almost certainly have to win either or both of Tennessee and Virginia. Whether they do will have global consequences. But whether they can depends largely on local issues such as traffic congestion, and whether voters think Mr Allen is a bigot.