[A]nyone who believes Democrats can consistently win the White House without puncturing the 
Republican dominance across the South is just whistling Dixie. 
 -- Los Angeles Times columnist Ronald Brownstein

For Democrats, the South has become the Sahara of the Electoral College.
Give it up.

-- Slate columnist Timothy Noah

The Democrats are in disarray. National politicians are unsure what to say about everything from gay marriage to late-term abortion, and what to do about everything from tax rates to Iraq. The party is losing a manufactured culture war and watching its labor union base lose a very real manufacturing war. Rank-and-file Democrats from coast to coast are increasingly frustrated with the party's lack of a coherent message, and they are not alone: Fewer than half of all Americans agree that Democrats "know what they stand for." In presidential elections especially, the party somehow seems to self-destruct, picking bad candidates who run poor campaigns based on myopic advice from overpaid consultants.

Desperate and fearful of being relegated to minority status for decades, some Democrats reflexively think back to the halcyon days of party dominance and conclude that the only solution is for the party to somehow restore its lost glory in the South -- the most solidly Democratic region since the end of the Civil War, the backbone of the New Deal, and home to the party's three most recent presidents. To become a national majority party again, they insist, the Democrats must compete in Dixie. Strategists Steve Jarding and Dave "Mudcat" Saunders, both southern Democrats, articulate this view most forcefully in their 2006 book, Foxes in the Henhouse. "Democrats cannot afford to keep writing off the South," they write. "If you don't start getting a message there, if you don't start listening to people there, if you don't start spending time, energy and money there, you can say good-bye to any notion of realigning political power and instead say hello to the numbing reality that you are relegating yourself to the status of a permanent minority party."

The truth is that the geographic coalition the Democrats forged during the New Deal has come undone. The dramatic economic, social, and political changes of the past half century can be neither rewound nor ignored. The old "three-party" model of regional American partisanship -- with northern and southern Democrats outvoting western Republicans -- is now defunct, replaced by a new three-party model that pairs southern and western Republicans against urban-based Democrats of the Northeast, Midwest, and Pacific Coast states. Simply put, the South is no longer the "swing" region in American politics: It has swung to the Republicans.

That said, Democrats should forget about recapturing the South in the near term and begin building a national majority that ends, not begins, with restoring their lost southern glory. Most of the South is already beyond the Democrats' reach, and much of the rest continues to move steadily into the Republican column. White southerners used to be among the most economically liberal voters in America but are now among the most conservative. The South is America's most militaristic and least unionized region, and the powerful combination of race and religion create a socially conservative, electorally hostile environment for most statewide Democratic candidates and almost all Democratic presidential nominees.

Meanwhile, there are growing opportunities for Democrats to improve their electoral fortunes in other parts of the country, where demographic changes and political attitudes are more favorable to Democratic messages and messengers. Citizens in the Midwest have been decimated by globalization and are looking for economic salvation. In the Southwest where white and, most especially, Hispanic populations are booming, a strong platform on immigration reform and enforcement could divide the Republicans and put the region up for grabs. In parts of the Mountain West, Democrats can pair the lessons learned from Ross Perot's fiscal reform campaigns with an emphasis on land and water conservation to establish traction among disaffected libertarians and the millions of coastal transplants who either moved westward or bounced back eastward from California in search of open spaces and more affordable suburban lifestyles. If the Democrats can simultaneously expand and solidify their existing margins of control in the Northeast and Pacific Coast states -- specifically by targeting moderate Republicans for defeat, just as moderate Democrats in the South have been systematically terminated by the GOP -- the Democrats can build a national majority with no help from the South in presidential elections and little help from southern votes elsewhere down the ballot.

That's a pretty big checklist, no doubt. But these tasks are far more doable than trying to rewind history to re-create a pre-civil rights era Democratic South in post-civil rights America.

The South has long been America's regional political outlier. When the Republicans dominated national politics for seven decades between the Civil War and the New Deal, they did so with almost no support from the South. Thanks to the significant African-American population base in the South, the Democrats will never be so handicapped from the outset because there will always be a minimum degree of Democratic support and number of Democratic elected officials in the region. Building a non-southern majority, therefore, should be much easier for Democrats today than it was for the Republicans a century ago. Anyone who claims otherwise is willfully ignoring partisan history, not to mention contemporary demography.

As Democrats expand their non-southern support, the South will continue to assimilate into the national political culture from which it had mostly divorced itself until recent decades. Then and only then can Democrats begin to rebrand themselves in Dixie. In the interim, the Democrats' near-term goal should be to isolate the Republicans as a regional party that owns most of the South, but little else.