Southernization

During the month that I recently spent riding the rails across America, I was in Bloomington, Indiana when I found one of the most exciting discoveries I’ve ever made in a bookstore: Southern Politics by V. O. Key, Jr., published 1949. Its cover lists its price at $2.95, which would be more than $35 today. The largest part of the book is taken up with a detailed state-by-state analysis of each part of the old Confederacy, surveying the political landscape and explaining what factions exist and how elections are won in each state. This is a book full of the sort of information that you just can’t find online anywhere, and it would be interesting if it had nothing to provide but geographic and demographic information, but it does have a broad narrative, and that is to understand the nature of political organization in a single-party state. (The eleven states listed in the book happen to be the eleven states of the Confederacy, but they were chosen because they were the states in the country where the Republican Party did not exist as a force capable of meaningfully contesting statewide elections.) I am always thinking about California, even when I am far away, and so as I sat on the train and read my thoughts drifted toward my own one-party state.

I have written in the past about the effects of California’s top-two electoral system, which was enacted at the behest of Republican politician Abel Maldonado in hopes that he could ride it to statewide office as a moderate while bypassing the right-wing Republican electorate. That did not work out for his political career, which has been dead for a long time, and the effect of the new electoral system turned out to be to castrate the California Republican Party, which no longer has a guaranteed ballot line each November. Since the party now lacks that ability to nominate a candidate for the general election, there is no reason for candidates for statewide office to adopt the label of “Republican” and hurt their chances with an electorate that by and large dislikes the Republican Party. Since the top-two system was enacted in 2010, no Republican has come particularly close to winning a statewide election, and for the most part statewide elections are not meaningfully contested by Republicans. All competitive elections are between two Democrats. At the statewide level, California is a one-party state, which for the purpose of elections means effectively that it is a zero-party state.

Perhaps because California is hard to understand and because media types tend to have lived in New York, there’s a pervasive tendency among people trying to pontificate on politics to talk about California as though it were New York. This leads to embarrassments like arguing that Asian voters swung hard toward Republicans in 2022: this can be seen to be obviously true in New York City by looking at results in Asian neighborhoods there, but it is just as obviously false in California if one looks at results in Asian municipalities there. Blindly scanning New York onto California also leads to misunderstanding the nature of the Democracy in California. Outsiders holding forth on California love to assert that the California Democratic Party is divided into an “establishment” faction and a “progressive” faction on the basis of ideology, just like New York. Here, I guess, Gavin Newsom is meant to represent Andrew Cuomo. In the context of the upcoming senatorial election, this would mean that “establishment” candidate Adam Schiff should be favored thanks to his establishment support against “progressive” candidate Barbara Lee. In reality, these opposing sides do not exist because California is not like New York. As I’ve noted before, Newsom’s control over the state is personalist and broadly non-ideological. Barbara Lee has more friends in Sacramento than Adam Schiff does. Ideology is not the primary factor in this race and it is rarely the primary consideration in selecting candidates for statewide office. In a one-party state, the ruling party will not automatically split into two factions and recreate two-party politics under its own banner.

Here we can come to V. O. Key for guidance. In his section on South Carolina, he writes:

A common illusion of southerners is that they have the equivalent of parties for state matters in the subdivisions of the Democratic party. South Carolina experience demonstrates the falsity of the belief. The confusions and ambiguities inherent in the one-party system make for splits of voters along lines quite irrelevant to issue, such as localism. […] Uni-partisanism may make it possible for a politician to shift his general orientation with far less risk to personal political survival than under two-party conditions. Lack of party labels and of party lines means that there are no institutional obstacles to collaboration with erstwhile enemies. Sooner or later the mass of voters catch on to what has happened and retire the unfaithful servitor; there may be, however, a considerably longer lag between constituency and representative than is the rule in two-party situations.

California today does not quite resemble the South Carolina of 1949, which really did have only one party in the whole state, but it is substantially similar to states of that time like Tennessee and North Carolina, with a Republican Party that was confined to one particular portion of the state while in the greater part of the state all politics was completely Democratic. Probably the most important state-level issue for urban and suburban Democratic voters in California today is the supply of housing. This is an issue with an obvious interest group on each side—renters in favor of new housing, homeowners against it—both of whom in California generally vote Democratic, which one might expect to lead to factional politics, with elections being contested between a pro-construction Democrat and an anti-construction Democrat. In practice this has not happened. Gavin Newsom has broadly been supportive of new construction and Democratic legislators have broadly followed him. If there are meaningful ideological distinctions between Democrats on the housing issue, then they are obscure and illegible to the typical voter.

To the best of my knowledge, only in San Francisco, where local elections receive more media attention than elsewhere, has there been an election for state-level office between two Democrats with clearly different views on the housing issue: in 2020, pro-housing incumbent Scott Wiener was returned to the State Senate over anti-housing activist Jackie Fielder. Single-party politics elsewhere in the state tends to focus on vague labels like “progressive” that can be adopted without real significance or on ethnic and identity appeals.

California is the most interesting example to me of one-party politics because it’s a state where the minority party is literally excluded from statewide elections and because it’s the state I know the best, but these dynamics matter in most states nowadays, since polarization on the basis of national politics has built up to the extent that few states now have meaningful political competition between opposing parties. More and more states look like the old South. Just like in the old South, dominant parties in different states will differ in terms of their level of internal political organization, but in general history does not suggest to us that there will be robust internal competition in these dominant parties. In general, we should expect state-level politics to be an undifferentiated ideological slurry, just like in California.