Two conservative titans, Bob Novak and George Will, faced off today in the op-ed pages of The Washington Post on the southern question: do or do not the Democrats really need the south? And the winner was......George Will. He pointed out, correctly, that the Republicans won many presidential victories in the years after 1880 while winning few southern electoral votes and frequently none at all. Therefore, the idea you need the south to win presidential elections is ahistorical and ignores the changing regional bases of the parties. (Ignore, however, Will's bizarre contention that the realignment of the south toward Republicans in recent decades had nothing (!) to do with race.)

Novak, on the other hand, relied on that old chestnut "no Democrat has been elected president without winning at least five states of the Confederacy", including Bill Clinton. But as David Lublin and Tom Schaller point out in their excellent article on The American Prospect website, it's also true that Clinton would have been elected anyway without any of those southern states.

The logic of this--a Democrat that can win five southern states will almost certainly not need to win them because of electoral strength outside the south--has been well expressed by a frequent commenter on this site and DR thought he'd just reproduce Frankly0's comment here (originally offered in response to DR's post on "The Nonsouthern Strategy"):

One basic difficulty posed by the south can be expressed as follows. On the one hand, if the Democratic candidate wins even a single southern state, he will, almost certainly, ALREADY have won the election on the basis of other, non-southern states he will have won even more handily. On the other hand, if the Democratic candidate fails to come close to winning in ANY southern state, he almost certainly will NOT have won enough non-southern states to win the election. In this sense, it is a serious mistake simply to ignore the sensibilities of all Southern voters, because for a good number of them, those sensibilities are not terribly different from large segments of voters in other regions. It is this consideration that exposes the real danger of "kissing off" the South -- namely the deviation into a message far too much to the left to win the general election.

If a candidate's message is simple, direct, and appeals to broad segments of the American electorate including most voters in Ohio, then there will be a "rising tide" effect that will increase the candidate's votes in ALL states, even if that increase is not enough to win in a good number of them.

Exactly. Don't forget the south, but the way to the south lies outside it, in states like Ohio. Or to put it in Zen terms: you can't hit the (southern) target if you're aiming at it.

Point of clarification: The definition of south DR uses is the 11 states of the Old Conderacy: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. Some add Kentucky (like Novak above, who would have five states, not four, in his little factoid if he didn't include Kentucky). Others add Oklahoma. And there are even those who, in a Mason-Dixonish mood, add West Virginia, Maryland and DC. But the Old Confederacy 11, in DR's view, is basically what the argument is about and it is there he shall stick.