Book: How Obama and Democrats Broke Up the ‘Republican South’

Newswise — Developed with support from the Blair Center for Southern Politics at the University of Arkansas and the University of Arkansas Press, A Paler Shade of Red: The 2008 Presidential Election in the South, edited by Branwell DuBose Kapeluck, Laurence W. Moreland and Robert P. Steed (paperback, $29.95), is a timely, in-depth, state-by-state look at the 2008 election as it played out in the South.

The individual authors of the book provide detailed, state-by-state analyses of how the presidential election, from the nomination struggle through the casting of votes in November, unfolded in states from Texas to Arkansas to Virginia. The book also includes examinations of important elections other than for president; and, in addition to the single-state perspectives, three chapters look at the region as a whole.

In his Introduction to the book, Todd Shields, director of the Blair Center, writes that this book will help us “understand more clearly how Senator Obama and the Democratic Party successfully broke up the ‘Republican South.’ Despite the ‘fifty state’ campaign rhetoric from the Obama campaign, we find an extremely strategic and unique campaign strategy focusing resources on a few southern states while virtually ignoring others.”

Furthermore, “Obama’s emphasis on mobilizing new voters, particularly among minorities and young people, promises to have fundamentally, and perhaps permanently, changed the face of the southern electorate.”

Branwell DuBose Kapeluck is an associate professor of political science at the Citadel. Laurence W. Moreland and Robert P. Steed are professors of political science at the Citadel and editors of the Presidential Election in the South series that began in 1984 through the Citadel Project on the South.