While I applaud South Dakota’s boldness in attempting to ban abortion and create a statute with which to challenge Roe v. Wade, I’m somewhat mystified that the state taking the lead on this is South Dakota? Wouldn’t one expect the state to do so to be a place like Utah or somewhere in the Deep South? Is this nondescript midwestern state that conservative? I’ve never been there and don’t know much about the place, in particular I don’t know much about its political culture. Until recently, it was the state represented by Tom Daschle, notorious hack-Democrat majority leader. John Thune narrowly defeated Daschle, which suggests a state whose politics are fairly centrist. ~Chris Roach

In some respects, it would be fair to describe South Dakota as centrist, but my impression is that its habit of returning Democratic representatives to Congress is a mixture of the state’s historic tendency to favour Democrats together with its relative poverty, which now reinforces that traditional loyalty with the desire to get the best subsidy from Washington. Broadly speaking, South Dakotans are heirs to an old association with the Democrats (and Populists) who represented, well, practically everyone west of Ohio and south of New York for a very long time. They have obviously not been people given in any way to the cultural radicalism that the Dems have been pushing aggressively for 30 years, nor would you have expected solidly continental people in a very rural state to view the world as the “coastals” would.

But most serious conservative-minded people in the country only grudgingly came to embrace the GOP because of the New Deal and Great Society, and even then few would have easily thought of the GOP as a conservative party. Very often the very same voters who will send Democrats to the statehouse and Congress without fail are generally fairly socially conservative folks–or they are folks who want to support candidates who espouse social conservatism–and frequently tend to support the presidential candidate who best represents them in that way. Thus Mr. Bush carried South Dakota without any difficulty both times, because he was perceived–however bizarrely–as being more like most Americans than the ludicrous Gore and Kerry (that this may be true does not change the fact that it is still a very perverse identification).

It is usually the case that in poorer and more agrarian states the appeal of the GOP at the local and congressional levels is limited. Both because of obvious, long-standing historical resentments in the South that were mitigated only in the last generation and because of an inherited suspicion in the West of a party always rooted in the Eastern establishment, the success of the GOP outside of the core areas of the Northeast, California and far North has been a very strange and new thing, but this is a measure of the relative novelty of the identification of conservative people with the GOP or the identification of the GOP as the conservative party, which, I’m sorry to say, came about almost entirely by default thanks to the greater radicalism of their opponents.

Outside of the South and the northern suburbs where white ethnics ended up in the wake of the civil rights revolution, traditional loyalties to the Democratic party on the local, state and congressional levels have been fraying at a much slower rate, but the basic disconnect between socially conservative Democrats across the Plains states and in the Midwest and their party’s positions on many social “issues” will continue to erode that support until the so-called “red states” really do only return “red” candidates at all levels of government. This is also happening to a smaller degree in stereotypical “blue” states where the Democrats remain firmly entrenched at the local level (but not, it may be noted, necessarily at the congressional). In New Mexico, my home state, the breakdown of the Democratic machine is much farther away, though our congressional delegation gives a misleading impression of New Mexicans’ affinity for the GOP. Democrats have greater reserves of strength there for several reasons (the minority-majority situation chief among them), but even there the influx of more people from out of state and the social conservatism of New Mexico’s Catholics is making the Democrats appear less appealing.