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Overview
Since the passage of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, only three Democrats have captured the White House -- all of them natives of southern states. The ascendancy and reelection of Bill Clinton to the presidency is a prime example of this phenomenon, and although books have been published on the "native son" psychological variable in electoral contests, no work to date has investigated this aspect of Clinton's political career.
Covering all of Clinton's twenty-one elections to state and national offices, Hanes Walton Jr. explores one of the political success stories of our century, showing how Clinton's popularity in his southern home has had a profound influence on his national electoral dominance. Walton combines the native-son theory with the issue of race to describe how the Democrats have built a vital power base in the South, in large measure because of their popularity among African-American voters.
With an epilogue on the Monica Lewinsky scandal and its effect on the Democratic Party, Reelection is a major contribution to the literature on the psychology of national elections at a time when its insight into the possibility of Democratic leadership into the next century is most critical.
Columbia University Press
Editorials
Journal of American Studies
Sophisticated and impressive.
Peri E. Arnold
Building on his 1992 study of Jimmy Carter, Hanes Walton, Jr. argues here that a "native-son" candidate is the Democrat's counter to the Republican South. Southerners- Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton- achieved the four Democratic successes in presidential politics since the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Walton argues that the native-son variable attracts voters in the region, as well as the home state, across party lines.This book develops a native-son theory and examines its utility, applied to Bill Clinton's electoral performance in Arkansas. Using county-level voting data for all of Clinton's campaigns, 1974 to 1996, Walton analyzes support for Clinton across five types of Arkansas counties.
Walton argues that Clinton's consistent appeal to black voters in his home state was in turn a key to building crucial support among African Americans outside the South in the 1992 Democratic presidential primary.
The reader may want more from Walton, but he achieves his main goal of conceptualizing the native-son variable and illustrating how it affects voters in the Clinton case. Along the way, this book makes a case for the utility to Democrats of the native-child electoral strategy.
—Political Science Quarterly