Throughout recent years, the Washington Post has aggressively taken the line that the U.S. is intractably divided into halves of “red states” and “blue states.” This line was pushed by the WashPost’s most prominent political reporters, in print and on television.

The paper has now been forced by the 2006 elections to refine its thesis and, retreating to narrower boundaries in a basically reactionary rear-guard action against the polity, is now aggressively pushing a new orthodoxy of the South exclusively as a monolith of “red states.”

Dan Balz says that “The electoral map that has emerged from this election shows Republicans in control of the South, Democrats the Northeast.” The GOP is said to be “the party of Dixie.” Balz and Jim Vanderhei report “a geographic partitioning of the [U.S.] House.”

Reification is not a substitute for analysis. One of the first casualties for the thesis ridden is accuracy.

Thus readers of the Post may have noticed, for example, a certain reluctance to acknowledge that Jim Webb had beaten George Allen in “red-state” Virginia; repeated articles reported the election, even with Webb ahead and all precincts counted, as “too close to call.” With returns in, the paper party line became “recount likely.” Only after Allen conceded did the Post throw in the towel too. And it still has not reported that had Allen asked for a recount, allegations of fraud and other problems with the Allen campaign could have been aired.

More broadly, insisting (sometimes a bit hysterically) on a red South omits or downplays key facts about southern state houses. As shown by web site of the National Conference of State Legislatures, “The two major parties are no longer locked in parity in state legislatures. Wresting control from the GOP in all but one of the chambers that changed hands outright, the Democrats now control the legislatures in more states than they have since 1994. Not since then have so many of the chamber switches gone one way. Democrats control legislatures in 23 states; Republicans in 15, 10 are split and Pennsylvania is undecided.”

Four of these both-chamber-Dem states are in the South. All 4 went even more Dem in the 2006 elections.

Of the 13 southern states, Florida, Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas shifted slightly more Democratic at the state level. The 4 southern states already solidly Democratic in both houses went more that way. Only 3 southern states went slightly more Republican at the state level – Alabama, Georgia and Virginia. And one of those three voted George Allen out of the U.S. Senate, as noted. (Both Georgia state chambers went GOP, for the first time since Reconstruction, in 2004.)

Of the 15 states where Democrats now have both the governorship and both chambers of the state legislature, 4 are in the South. Of the 8 states where that sweep is new, one is in the South – Arkansas – and it is also one of the 4 states where Dems picked up an open governorship that had been GOP. Six southern states have Democratic governors.

A rigid singlemindedness that seals off the South as some alien region is unfair, and not merely in the abstract. The broader concern is that subtracting anything from the polity is a dangerous game for democracy. When the late Barry Goldwater suggested cutting off the Eastern seaboard and letting it float out to sea, some people objected to the joke and some people liked it, but nobody called it political science (or analysis). We discourage participatory democracy at our peril.

The more immediate concern is that several close elections for the U.S. House of Representatives still remain to be decided, some in the South:

Florida District 13. Vern Buchanan, Sarasota County GOP, Katherine Harris’s old seat, over Christine Jennings by 373 votes, within the recount margin.

Georgia 12. Democrat John Barrow beat Repub Max Burns, but by only a few hundred votes, within the recount margin.

North Carolina 8. Race betw GOP incumbent Robin Hayes and Dem challenger Larry Kissell still has not been decided.

Texas District 23 will pit GOP Rep. Henry Bonilla in a December run-off against the worthy Ciro Rodriguez. Bonilla, the incumbent, won fewer votes than his Democratic opponents.

Probably the main target of WashPost red-South slant is Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy, vindicated by the elections. (BTW, what happened to the nearly successful Dems in NY’s Districts 25, 26 and 29? Could Mrs. Clinton have campaigned for Maffei and the others?) The Post has no love lost for Dean, having plumbered Dean’s candidacy early on, partly with a front-pager suggesting a relationship between Dean and some female campaign operative.

Unconsciously, some individuals cannot admit the South to nationhood because they have trouble admitting rigorous accuracy, a sense of the polity, and the grassroots. The vindication of Dean’s strategy was pro U.S. nationhood. That’s what bothers them.

The national GOP is greatly at fault for its criminal foreign policy, its reactionary economic policy, and its eagerness for surveillance and secrecy. But it must be remembered that some non-Republicans who have attained position, either in politics or in media, by accommodating the GOP on key issues may not adjust eagerly to growing public awareness about these issues.