Michael Tomasky started the conversation by saying that Democrats “shouldn’t bother trying” to appeal to the South any more. Er, except for Virginia, Florida, North Carolina, and maybe soon Georgia too.

Even this qualified thesis began to be picked apart by other commentators. Ed Kilgore pointed out that the Democratic party isn’t actually engaged in much pandering to the voters of Alabama or Arkansas, and that anyway there’s a difference between refusing to make concessions to the South and insulting it. Matthew Yglesias argued that Democrats could advance their policy objectives by nominating candidates in conservative states who are well to the right of the national party but to the left of local Republicans. And Sean Trende noted that today’s southern Democrats have voted very differently from yesterday’s:

The Almanac of American Politics collects 12 key votes for each Congress. If we go back to the edition covering 2001-02, we can see what Southern Democrats’ voting patterns used to look like. A Northern liberal like Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts aligned with a conservative like Jon Kyl of Arizona on just one of these 12 votes. Mary Landrieu, however, voted with Kyl on five, while John Breaux of Louisiana voted with him on eight. Perhaps more importantly, the votes that these Democrats cast with Kyl tended to be on the most crucial issues: the Bush tax cuts, ANWR drilling, military-force authorizations, and barring cooperation with the international court, for example. The differences tended to come on issues where the Democratic position was broadly popular or of low salience: The Patient’s Bill of Rights, funding hate crime prosecutions, and allowing homeland security personnel to unionize.
Fast-forward to 2009-2010. Mary Landrieu voted with Jon Kyl on only two of the key votes, while Pryor voted with him on four. Hagan voted with Kyl on three. Moreover, these votes weren’t on “big-ticket” items: measures such as a repeal of D.C. gun laws and stopping EPA climate regulations weren’t salient enough to overcome votes for the stimulus, confirming Justices Kagan and Sotomayor, passing the health care bill and financial regulation reform.
What had kept Southern Democrats in the game for so long was that, on popular, major items, they tended to vote like Republicans. This changed over the past decade, especially 2009-10, when national Democrats needed their votes to move anything tied to the Democratic president’s agenda.

If liberals had not insisted that Democrats be monolithically liberal, there would be more Democrats in Congress now. But they would also have had to forgo some policy victories, notably Obamacare. Most liberals are probably happy they made the tradeoff they did.