THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, November 25, 1994 TAG: 9411230039
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A22 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 60 lines
For unique local reasons, Virginia didn't fully participate in the Republican sweep on Election Day. But North Carolina experienced the full earthquake.
As Election Day dawned, two-thirds of seats in the U.S. House delegation were held by Democrats. When the dust settled that evening, the ratio was reversed. In the 104th Congress, both U.S. senators and eight of 12 congressmen from North Carolina will be Republican. It is the first Republican majority sent to the House from North Carolina in the 20th century.
The 4th District, which encompasses the Research Triangle near Raleigh and the area's universities, has been owned since 1986 by David Price, a former Duke professor of political science. But on Nov. 8, he was defeated by the Republican police chief of Raleigh.
In the 3rd District, which includes the Outer Banks and coastal plain, Democrat-turned-Republican Walter Jones Jr. beat Martin Lancaster. And in both the 2nd District, which takes in a suburban and rural semicircle around Raleigh, and the 5th, which includes Winston-Salem and neighboring counties, longtime Democratic incumbents saw the writing on the wall and chose not to seek re-election.
In both cases, redistricting to create black-majority districts had transformed the landscape. The reassignment of reliably Democratic voters resulted in districts newly favorable to Republicans. A Jesse Helms protege captured the 2nd and a Jack Kemp Republican took the 5th.
The fallout from redistricting is a theme seen throughout the South. Where the Voting Rights Act has been interpreted to demand racial gerrymandering to create majority-black districts, it has resulted in a net gain in Republican seats. Often to create a single black district, more than one traditionally Democratic district has lost enough of its Democratic base to tip it into the Republican column.
In North Carolina, Republican successes weren't confined to congressional races either. The state's lower house has gone Republican for the first time since Reconstruction, and the state Senate came within two seats of doing the same. If Republicans had challenged numerous Democrats who ran unopposed, their gains might have been even greater. And Republicans took seats in many local elections.
This astonishing change - the political world turned upside down - was a long time coming. It is the culmination of a number of historic trends. Increasing prosperity and suburbanization in the South have turned economic sentiments increasingly conservative.
Always culturally conservative, the region has lost patience with the Democrats on social issues. When Lyndon Johnson embraced civil rights in the 1960s, he foresaw that the Democrats would lose the South for a generation.
It took a generation for his prediction to come true. Now a South once solidly Democratic is solidifying again - this time for Republicans. Until the Democrats reinvent themselves for a post-New Deal, post-Great Society world, the sun has set on their hopes for success in the Sun Belt. by CNB