The bubba vote.

• Author: Garrett, Major
• Position: Political Booknotes

THE RISE OF SOUTHERN REPUBLICANS by Earl Black and Merle Black Belknap Press, $29.95

YOU MIGHT AS WELL BUY THIS book now, because it's already required reading at the Bush White House and the Democratic National Committee. Or at least it should be.

Everything you need to know about Election 2002 is in Earl and Merle Black's new book, The Rise of Southern Republicans. Forget issues. Forget national polling data on generic party comparisons. Forget the final grotesque lunging for softmoney donations.

Election 2002 is about control of the House and Senate and, by extension, the future of the Bush agenda and prospects for Bush's reelection in 2004. And the path to majority power runs through the Old Confederacy. Five Senate seats are up for grabs there; if Democrats have any chance of winning back the House, they must take back from Republicans the seats lost in the 1994 Gingrich Revolution and win seats added through redistricting.

And as the Black brothers explain in exhausting detail (with more logrithmic graphs than my high school trigonometry text), Democrats have a fighting chance in Senate seats and very dim prospects when it comes to defeating Republicans or winning open seats born of redistricting.

When it comes to winning House races, Democrats must win in majority white districts where the cultural, economic and political trends favor Republicans. The Gingrich Revolution set these trends in motion. In 1994 Republicans won a majority of House seats in the South for the first time since 1874. The narrow, three-seat margin ballooned to 17 seats in 1996 even as the party lost seats overall. The 17-seat Southern advantage has, from the eyes of national Democrats, persisted stubbornly ever since.

The irony is not lost on the Black brothers, both professors of political science and government at southern universities:

"In 2001 the Republican party's fragile control of the House of Representatives thus rested entirely on the realignment of the region historically most hostile to the Republican Party."

In Senate races, Democrats can and have relied heavily upon strong black voter turnout to compensate for massive white defections to the GOP--defections that have demolished what used to be an impenetrable Democratic stranglehold on the region.

As the Black brothers explain, the basic Democratic formula for survival in Senate races is economic conservatism matched with strong civil rights credentials. Put more bluntly: Bush tax cut = Yes...