Posted on 11/25/2013 6:27:44 AM PST by Resettozero
South Carolina Republican Party Chairman Matt Moore shares some striking political data when visiting local party meetings: In a state where the GOP holds most statewide offices and congressional and state legislative seats, Democrats still hold the counties. Democrats also outnumber Republicans as sheriffs, coroners and auditors.
But that could change in 2014. Moore says his goal in next year's elections is to flip the local offices to Republican control, completing a transformation that started nearly 50 years ago when then-Democrat Sen. Strom Thurmond went on statewide television and announced he was switching to the GOP — in a state so heavily Democratic that it didn't even list party affiliations in its legislative manual.
The same transformation is occurring elsewhere in the South, in places where Republicans often didn't put up candidates because Democrats had such a lock on the electorate.
Focus on local races is the next logical step, Moore said, because most Republican statewide offices, the two U.S. Senate seats, six of its seven U.S. House members and 106 of the 170 seats in the Legislature appear safely in the GOP control.
That means the party can afford to spend resources further down the ballot on the program it calls "Red to the Roots."
"Local decisions have more impact than federal decisions or state decisions," Moore said. "We want to have an impact on things like property taxes and schools."
In South Carolina, counties have a lot of power. Only 35 percent of the state's population lives in cities or towns, leaving 65 percent to live in unincorporated areas run by counties. The counties also set property taxes — the revenue generator for schools — and some counties even get a say in who gets on local school boards. Cities have relatively little power.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
I wish they would devote time and resources to finding, and funding, a strong opponent for that POS Clyburn. SC has a huge population of ex-military....there’s gotta be ONE Allen West type somewheres in the state.
The problem is that even if you got such a challenger to Clyburn and outspent him 10-to-1, you’d be lucky to crack 40%. It’s a problem the GOP will have to tackle for the long term, getting through the mindset of Blacks putting all their political eggs in one basket. Having no leverage when the GOP is in the majority is politically stupid.
When the Democrats broke through the Black voting bloc in the North in the 1930s, they used hardball tactics... “Why should we help you if you won’t vote for us ?” In just 3 decades, they went from a minority of their vote to virtually the entire bloc. The GOP isn’t that ruthless and aggressive.
There’s only one Dem district in S.C.: the 6th with idiot-for-life Clyburn permanently ensconced. But it’s the biggest (swallowed my house in 2010; I had been in Joe Wilson’s district).
And yet Flimsey Tinkerbelle got reelected in 2008. Republicans should flourish in South Carolina & mostly they do; there’s no hostile local media or liberal establishment here.
We can & should do better in the Palmetto State.
They should also find a replacement for Lindsey. Who cares if the dog catcher is R or D?
I do for one because local taxes often are greater than state taxes. However given the spending habits of the SC State Legislature which is controlled by the GOP, I am not sure if I want the party to expand control of local government.
“The GOP isn’t that ruthless and aggressive.”
Exactly. That’s why I refer to many as “waiting for Lawrence Welk to come on”. They are ignorant and clueless, working off of a script from 300 years ago.
It adds up to failure.
“...The GOP isn’t that ruthless and aggressive....”
The RINO contingent is... especially when they’re trashing Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Sarah Palin, et al...
This is very true.
I hope they do. Then, fix the concealed carry laws. No reciprocity with any of the nearby southern states? Idiocy. Are Alabamians or Georgians not good enough to carry in SC?
I understand your comments. However,we have long maintained that the vast majority of southern blacks are conservative, church-going...and that the values of the Democrats, which Clyburn supports and votes for, are anathema to his “supporters.” I don’t expect to beat him this time out..but he hasn’t faced a decent candidate in decades. It may take 2-3-4 tries..but we have to start holding his feet to the fire for his votes..stop giving him an electoral pass every two years..Clyburn is old, tired, unaccustomed to any challenge, and often incoherent when speaking. An Allen West type...and surely there are a few in his district...would draw not ice, shake things up..
Correction: ...Alamobamanians and Georgianitites...
We may have had an outside chance when the state had 6 districts, but now that there are 7, it’s taking a bit of doing keeping all of those in the GOP column. Blacks make up enough of the vote in the state (even outside of Clyburn’s district) that their Dem habits put at risk 3 of those other seats (especially in a bad year). It’s remarkable that the Justice Department didn’t demand a 2nd VRA Black-majority district when SC landed the 7th seat, and then there’d be two race-baiting Stalinist moonbats.
Even if the Voting Rights Act were eliminated and the legislature given free reign to draw all the seats, it would be extremely difficult to win all 7 without putting no fewer than 4 (and hence a majority) within reach of the Democrats winning. You want to put as many Dem voters into a minimal number of seats in order to make the rest safe. In keeping Clyburn in that one heavily Dem seat, it ensures the rest of the delegation isn’t constantly imperiled.
Saying that, however, we don’t want to give him a free pass, but Clyburn is the 3rd highest ranking member of the House Democrats, and as a result, he has virtually limitless amounts of money at his disposal, and barring a self-funding candidate, the GOP would not risk spending money in a district with such demographics. It would be like dumping money into defeating the execrable John Lewis in an urban Atlanta district. Better to spend the resources on seats occupied by Democrats in Republican seats (such as Allen West’s district, which will probably be flipped back to the GOP next year).
You obviously know your demographic/districting data..and while it might cost us a seat or two in SC..we'd win a lot more elsewhere. When we have a GOP controlled Congress and WH, among the first things we need to do is repeal the VRA..
DJ is correct. The only issue for Republicans in SC is whether they should continue to pack black Democrats into a single black-majority SC-06 (and leave surrounding districts vulnerable to Democrat challenge, albeit with a strong GOP lean), or whether to draw 2 black-majority CDs that would leave the other 5 CDs safely Republican and invulnerable to future Democrat gerrymandering (because once a black-majority CD has been created, the VRA prohibits changes with a “retrogressive” purpose). Trying to draw 7 GOP-majority CDs in SC would be a fool’s errand, even if the VRA did not prohibit such reapportionment practices.
The GOP holding 6 out of 7 CDs (86%), in a state in which the GOP gets between 54%-58% of the presidential vote, local Democrats often outperform Democrat presidential candidates by 5% or more, and large geographic areas are heavily Democrat, is excellent, and getting too greedy only will result in Democrats holding a larger percentage of SC’s U.S. House seats.
Thanks, I’m not quite done with my page, yet.
As I said, even if we got rid of the VRA, we’re just about maxing out on the number of seats we can realistically win in the South. SC’s 6 of 7 is the top for now. NC, we can get 1 more seat (the one occupied by McIntyre), but the rest are either Black Dem or White Moonbat (David Price’s seat). Same with GA, where we can only get 1 more (Barrow), but the rest are all Black Dem.
Here in my state of TN, the GOP has 7 out of 9. Although Memphis (9th) is a VRA district, it sends a White moonbat (Cohen, who is actually WAY further to the left than his 2 Black predecessors), and a Black Republican has run for the seat, albeit she was not well funded, and he wins in a landslide. There’s a slim chance the GOP could win Nashville (my district, the 5th), but this is a historically Dem district and has been since Grant’s 2nd term, but it has many urban White leftists.
When the TN GOP got control to draw the lines, they mulled drawing an 8th district and splitting my district 3 ways, but opted against it because it was too risky that the Dems could narrowly capture all of them in a down year. So again, even dumping the VRA, the district lines may not differ much than what they are now.
DJ, I think that, given the recent electoral performance of the Nashville metro area and the rural, formerly Yellow Dog Democrat counties surrounding it, TN’s GOP legislature will draw 8 GOP CDs and only one (black-majority, Memphis-based) Dem CD.
As for GA and NC, you are exactly right that they only have one Dem-held CD that we can win (and I think we’ll pick up both in 2014 due to lower black and college-kid turnout with Obama not on the ballot), with the other 3 NC CDs and 4 GA CDs being overwhelmingly Democrat black-majority or black-influence CDs. In fact, if NC and GA gain a CD after the 2020 Census (which NC surely will and GA could as well if it returns to its 1990-2010 level of population growth), I expect both states’ GOP legislatures to draw an additional heavily Dem CD to shore up adjoining districts that could fall to the Democrats. So long as blacks vote 90%+ Democrat, and white Southern Democrats can con 35% of whites to vote for them, any district that is 25%+ black will be vulnerable to a “Blue Fraud” Democrat.
I would be shocked if they did try to carve up TN-5, especially since they passed on doing so the last time around. It’s curious to note that despite Jim Cooper’s liberal record (and his phoniness on claiming to be fiscally Conservative when he voted for the obscenity known as Porkulus), he is really loathed by the moonbat base (especially the folks on my local urban development forum). They want more of a Steve Cohen type of extremist.
In such a situation, there’s an even shot that the House Speaker Beth Harwell could run and beat such a candidate under the current lines (whether she’d want to run is another story, as she has more power in her current capacity). We really don’t have much of a farm team in Nashville of Republicans. Just a few on the 40-member Metro Council (although it is “non partisan”). There’s still just the 1 House member (out of 10) from this county (Harwell herself, with another having won in 2010, but lost by literally a handful of votes in 2012), though they didn’t ruthlessly draw the lines here, as we ought to have at least 3 of them.
We do have 1 State Senator wholly within the county (taking the outer periphery excluding the most liberal and Black areas) out of 3, a freshman Doctor named Steve Dickerson. Dickerson won a newly-drawn seat in 2012 after having given old-line Democrat Doug Henry a scare in 2010 in a more liberal district. Henry, a moderate, is retiring next year (nearly half the remaining State Senators on the Dem side are quitting), and this being a White liberal district, the Dems are trying to out-moonbat one another to get the seat. Despite that we’ll probably pick up 2 of the retiree seats (the Burks & Finney seats), the state GOP says it wants to contest the open Henry seat as they expect the Dems might go with their craziest nutter (a lady named Mary Mancini, a Cohen clone).
I’m all for challenging every seat even if only for the principal of the thing. But realistically, we can’t win or hold that seat, 70% Obama. So that a low priority right there.
Even if you repealed the VRA so you didn’t have to have the majority Black seat, spreading them all out would endanger many seats.
I’d lean against giving them 2 to make the GOP seats super safe. Though the results for the new 7th district were distressing, an ultra liberal Black professor got almost 45% of the vote, matching what Obama got in the district. So conceivably a White rat in a bad year could win that seat. But I say we can defend it.
Now these countries offices, I’m unhappy to learn that rats still hold most of those posts. They are a lot more important than you think, Moonman62. A lot of important governing is done at the local level. It’s past time for those corrupt good ole boys to be purged from their fiefdoms. Depriving them of those posts also shrinks their farm team for higher offices. I’m glad to see that the state party is on it.
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