By
Ed Kilgore,
political columnist for Intelligencer since 2015
Georgia gubernatorial candidate Keisha Lance Bottoms speaks in Atlanta on May 19, 2026.
Twenty years ago, after two presidential elections in which George W. Bush won every electoral vote in the former Confederate states, there was a noisy debate among Democrats over the idea that the party should give up on the South altogether. The thinking, promoted most avidly by political scientist Tom Schaller in his book Whistling Past Dixie, was that the South was a hopeless proposition for any progressive party and that pursuing the chimera of southern comfort would inevitably mean kowtowing to the region’s militarism and atavistic cultural views. Indeed, wrote Schaller, Democrats should run against the South in the rest of the country.
