Republicans Southern Strategy

WASHINGTON - WASHINGTON (AP) - Tuesday's elections leave little doubt that the Republicans' Nixon-era strategy to win over white Southerners
has been a resounding success. But have they lost the rest of the country along the way?
     
For all the talk of President-elect Obama's inroads in "New South" states like Virginia and North Carolina, the numbers in the Deep South are stark.
     
Associated Press exit polls found that some 90 percent of white voters supported Republican John McCain in Alabama and Mississippi.
In South Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia and Texas, it was about 75 percent or more.
     
Three of the Republicans' four congressional pickups came in the region, which remains dark red from Charleston, S.C., to Dallas.
     
Louisiana pollster Bernie Pinsonat says the South ought to tell the Republican Party to hold its primaries down here because it's
the only region of the country that Republicans can count on, calling it "the only base left."
     
To many Republicans, the lopsided Southern victories have come at the expense of other regions.
     
Republicans under Richard Nixon 40 years ago decided that national success required breaking up the Democratic dominance in the South. They did so by employing a "Southern strategy" of
appealing to white resentment over desegregation and later by highlighting liberal Democratic positions on social and welfare issues.
     
Today, conservative positions on gun rights, abortion and gay marriage are staples of the Republican platform, as well as a disdain for any tax increases and unyielding support for the war in
Iraq.
     
But if these hard-line conservative positions sell in the Deep South, they appear to have alienated voters elsewhere, if the past two elections are any indication.