From the time Georgia Godwin was a girl thrilled by buggy rides on dirt roads between piney woods and cotton farmland, her family and everyone else she knew voted Democratic.
Yellow Dog Democrats they called themselves in the rural heart of Georgia. Committed to the party ticket, they vowed they would vote for a yellow dog before they would favor a Republican.
“Would we vote Republican? Oh, Lord, no. That would be a dishonor to the family,” recalls the lady with the neatly combed halo of white hair and a matching white orchid to celebrate her 99th birthday on Monday. “You would have been a disgrace to the community.”
The political transformation of the South began more than three decades ago, but as Georgia Republicans vote in Tuesday’s primary there is evidence this year that the change is taking much deeper root.
Battling for Georgia’s 42 convention delegates, three of the four leading candidates debated Sunday night at an Atlanta television station. The most pointed topic was Sen. Bob Dole’s absence. Dole declined the invitation saying that they should “find a new punching bag.”
Former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander, commentator Pat Buchanan and publisher Steve Forbes were almost subdued in the one hour debate, in which topics ranged from Israel to prayer in schools.
A fifth candidate, Alan Keyes, was detained by police after protesting his exclusion from the debate, just as he was excluded from a debate in South Carolina last week.
During the first 75 years or so of Godwin’s life there were no Republicans to vote into local office, but political change has accelerated and now the 3,000 residents in the one-stoplight town of Social Circle are on the edge of the expanding Republican doughnut that rings the city of Atlanta.
In Walton County, where Republicans were once counted on two hands (some say one hand), the majority of the county commission, two of the three probate judges, the court clerk, the local state senator and state legislator were all elected Republican or recently switched party allegiance. Just before he died last month, the sheriff of many decades startled everyone by declaring his intention to become a Republican.
Just as Gen. Sherman’s army marched along the trail that passes through the middle of Social Circle, the trend to switching Republican across the South has left standing only the chimneys of once powerful Democratic organizations. “They have lost the ability to keep whites in the party,” says Earl Black, a political analyst at Rice University in Houston. “Now it’s a coalition of mostly blacks and a minority of whites.”
The state government 45 miles west in Atlanta is still run by Democrats, but veteran Gov. Zell Miller won re-election with just 51 percent of the vote two years ago. Democrats are dwindling in the statehouse. Between 1980 and 1992, Republican primary registration more than doubled to 454,000 from 200,000.
Nearly half of the state’s voters live in Atlanta and surrounding counties and most of the population growth is in heavily Republican areas such as neighboring Gwinnett County where there are no Democratic officeholders at all.
While the county Democratic Party in Social Circle has been handing out lapel pins with the image of yellow dogs, it stirs only a memory of the past.
“It’s all changed. We’ve become such a melting pot,” said Dorothy Parker, who runs the Claude T. Wiley general store that her father, who voted straight Democratic, started in 1920. The store, which stills sells nickel candy, Moon Pies and bib overalls, was used as a set when the television show “In the Heat of the Night” was being filmed in nearby Covington.
Which of the Republican contenders will benefit the most from that change is uncertain.
A confident Dole has support from the party establishment and is favored in private polls, as he was before his first-place finish in Saturday’s South Carolina primary.
Among the other three contenders, Alexander claims to represent the New South prosperity of Atlanta and is hoping to finish at least third to stay in the race.
Forbes’ appeal for a flat tax appeals to Stanton Duvall, a retired cotton merchant, who is committed to the Republican message promoted by Rep. Newt Gingrich, who was once the state’s only Republican in Congress.
Tenth District voters, such as Duvall and retired stockbroker James Partee, the 72-year-old nephew of Georgia Godwin, contributed to that message two years ago by sending their first Republican representative, Charles Norwood, to Washington.
Partee says he is not wild about any of the candidates and will be holding his nose when he goes to the polling booth Tuesday. Up the street, Lewis Van Dyke said a straw poll of the local Republican Party in January favored Sen. Phil Gramm, before he withdrew from the race.
Lewis Van Dyke, owner of the Blue Willow Inn, which serves a buffet of southern fried cooking each day, believes religious conservatives are split between Dole and Buchanan. And he thinks the party cannot afford a divisive candidate such as Buchanan.
Buchanan, who won a 37 percent protest vote in the 1992 primary race against George Bush, has a strong local following. He has attracted the largest, most enthusiastic crowds, though his supporters tend to be more interested in his social message against abortion and for prayer in schools.
“On the economic front, Republicans have a mixed agenda,” suggests Frank Sherill, a Democrat who has been mayor of Social Circle for 17 years. “They do not like taxes, but they want good education, good transportation and a local government that cares about recreation and parks.
“And, if you’re going to be honest, a good percentage goes to the polls on racial issues,” the 54-year-old environmental engineer said. “The Democrats are seen as catering to minorities. If you go back and scratch the Atwater concept (referring to the late GOP strategist Lee Atwater), it’s based on racial issues.” Atwater was one of the architects of the transformation of the South to a bastion of Republicanism. Of Georgia’s congressional delegation, Sen. Sam Nunn is the only white Democrat, and he is retiring. His seat is expected to go Republican this year.
The other senator, Paul Coverdell, won a 1992 runoff election against incumbent Wyche Fowler. There are three black Democrats in the House and eight white Republicans, led by Gingrich.
Georgia Godwin’s father was in the state legislature and her husband served as mayor of Social Circle during the Depression. He helped farmers by passing out sacks of flour from government programs initiated by Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt.
But that was 60 years ago, and the view of the federal government’s role has altered.
The welfare system has grown far beyond what anyone intended, says John Kuhn, 63. He and other Georgia Republican converts believe it is time to bring it under control. “This is the true South,” he said Sunday, “Now you’re in conversion territory.”
