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Tavis: Thomas Schaller is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Maryland and a columnist for "The Washington Examiner." His new book is called "Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South." He joins us tonight from Washington. Thomas Schaller, nice to have you on the program.

Thomas Schaller: Hey, thanks for having me, Tavis. I appreciate it.

Tavis: Let me go right to the heart of the matter. How in the world does one argue that the Democrats can win without the South?

Schaller: Well, they're actually already doing it, Tavis, if you look at what happened in the 2006 mid-term elections. As I called for in the book, the Democrats needed to consolidate their control over the Northeast where they actually hadn't really maximized their control over governors and in Congress, pick off as much as they can in the far West and then make serious gains in the Midwest.

That's exactly what happened. They won eighty-five percent of their seats in governors, congressional races and even state legislative races outside the South, so the Democrats now have majorities at every level of government, governors, House, Senate, state legislative chambers and state legislators nationally, despite the fact that they barely moved the needle in the South this cycle. So now they have a majority of everything except for the presidency and George Bush is at thirty-three percent on that score.

Tavis: Okay, so you think again they ought to focus their efforts and attention where as opposed to the South?

Schaller: Well, I think they've gotten pretty far in the Northeast. There's not much more they're going to be able to do there. In fact, in New England, the six states of New England, there are twenty-two members of the U.S. House of Representatives and twenty-one of the twenty-two are Democrats now.

I think the place for them to really make gains at this point is in the Midwest and particularly the interior eight West states sort of from Montana and Wyoming down to Arizona and New Mexico. Those are ripe grounds for Democrats to still continue to make gains.

I think they'll make some gains in state legislative races and governors in the South here and there, but I don't see them building a majority to get to two hundred seventy electoral votes in the presidential race with Southern electorates with the possible exception of Florida, which is really sort of a non-Southern state in the middle of the South.

Tavis: To your thinking, what makes the West so ripe for the taking?

Schaller: Well, the Democrats are more socially liberal than the Republican Party. Nobody is going to argue that point. And the West has this very strong libertarian tradition and I think what you find is that Democratic messages, particularly on social issues, cultural issues, wedge politics kinds of issues, Westerners are more attuned to Democratic messages than they are to Republican messages and that they feel a little bit of a discomfort with the southernized, evangelized wing of the party that has come to dominate national politics.

The thing about the Republican Party of today under the sort of George Bush, Tom DeLay, Newt Gingrich area is that they are fundamentally different from the historical Republican Party that used to be dominated by sort of Ford and Rockefeller Northeast and Midwest style Republicans.

If you look and see where Democrats won in the state legislatures and in Congress's cycle, that's where they won. They beat Ford and Rockefeller style Republicans out of the Northeast and Midwest and now they're a national majority party as a result of it.

Tavis: I'm sure there's somebody watching right now - some bodies, no less - who say, "You know, with all due respect to Mr. Schaller, he's the problem. Folk will come on television and spin this political fragmentation picking off certain parts of the country and represent the problem."

That is to say that Howard Dean, for example, whose argument is that the Democrats need a fifty-state strategy, his strategy is antithetical, quite different from your strategy of picking off certain regions that we ought to win rather than forcing candidates to play to all of America. How do you argue against that notion that this kind of strategy is precisely what's wrong with our politics today?

Schaller: Well, I argue in the book and I've argued both before and subsequent to the 2006 elections that I think Dean's strategy is right because what he's calling for, Tavis, is a minimum investment. He's saying, “Look, you shouldn't have a volunteer executive director of a state party and there should be three or four people for institutional memory and have a minimum presence in every state.”

I agree with that, but if he said, “We're going to put twelve people in Mississippi and we're going to put twelve people in Michigan,” that would be absurd. I mean, look at Mississippi as a state with the highest African American population in the country. You've got Haley Barber, a conservative Republican governor. You've got Thad Cochran and Trent Lott as their U.S. Senators and George Bush carries it by an overwhelming margin. So politics is about economics. It's about spending resources, scarce resources, where you can win.

The fact of the matter is that the South is the most culturally conservative, it's the least unionized, it's the most racially polarized. It's even the region of the country with the smallest gender gap. So the Democratic Party which builds its majority as a multi-racial, female-led, union party is going to do worse almost by definition in the South.

You know, you're not trying to build a unanimity party here, Tavis. You're not trying to get to seventy-one percent. You're trying to get to fifty-five percent or even sixty percent before you start dreaming of winning all the states.

So in our 49-49 country where it's pretty balanced right, you got to go where you can win first and that means the Northeast, the Midwest, the interior West. You add that to the coastal states and you have a Democratic majority that can govern and we already have one.

Tavis: You know what? With all due respect to the text, what's missing - and I'm being somewhat tongue-in-cheek here - is that the book does not consider who the candidate will be. You can't win something with nothing. So the candidate makes a big difference, particularly this time around, were the candidate to be a Latino like Bill Richardson or a woman like Hillary Clinton or a Black like Barack Obama. How does that throw this book into all kind of havoc?

Schaller: Well, I actually have a piece this week in the new newspaper in D.C. called "The Politico" where I argue that the two people who should be reading my book right now are Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the two leading contenders for the Democratic nomination.

Because if anybody tells me that they think Hillary Clinton is going to win a seat or any of the states in the South other than Florida, I think they're crazy. Frankly, I think the same is true for Barack Obama. I mean, if Hillary Clinton really thought she could win in the South, she would have run for senator by moving back to Little Rock instead of moving to Chappaqua, New York.

I mean, the fact of the matter is that Democrats have shown that a non-Southern strategy can work. Bill Clinton won some Southern states, but you know what, Tavis? He got two hundred seventy non-Southern electoral votes in 1992 and 1996. Al Gore, a native Southerner, didn't win Tennessee, but he came seventy-two hundred votes from getting a majority if he had won New Hampshire in 2000, while winning the popular vote nationally.

And John Kerry lost the popular vote by two and half points and still almost got to two seventy, but for one state of Ohio. So people who say this can't be done, the Democrats are two for four in the last four presidential elections and came within one state in the two times they lost. That's like two wins and two overtime losses. It can be done.

Tavis: But to Obama, Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988 won some states in the South, did extremely well in picking up votes and had coattails, no less.

Schaller: He did. He won in the primary, but that's among Democratic voters where African Americans are a huge share of the primary electorate. But in the general electorate, the unfortunate fact of the matter is, Tavis, that the white support for Republicans in George Bush today - I just looked at numbers, the most recent state numbers from around the country in November, according to Survey U.S.A.

Do you realize that George Bush's approval rating in Mississippi is sixty-one percent? It's fifty-seven percent in Louisiana, fifty-six percent in the Carolinas. The national numbers have him at thirty-two or thirty-three and that includes the white South.

If you take white Southerners out of his national support, he's at twenty-seven or twenty-eight with the rest of the country, but he's at fifty-seven or fifty-eight with white Southerners, more than twice that rate. The fact of the matter is that African Americans are eighteen percent of the South and they cast eighteen percent of the votes in 2004 in the presidential race.

But white voters vote seven out of eight for the Republicans which is why the blackest state in the union, as I pointed out, has Haley Barber, Thad Cochran, Trent Lott and two big victories for George W. Bush. It's the most racially polarized region in the country and that's an unfortunate fact, but it's a fact that Democrats need to deal with.

Tavis: Point well taken. As you well know, Nevada and South Carolina, two states that have some color in them, have been pushed up at the front of these primaries and caucuses right up there with Iowa and New Hampshire. How does Nevada and South Carolina being pushed further up front impact this strategy?

Schaller: I think it's great and I think it's a game changer. I think Iowa and New Hampshire, though they take their role as first in the process very seriously and I've been to both Iowa and New Hampshire in 2004, the people really do take it very seriously and they try really hard to meet all the candidates and work through the issues.

I think it's an outdated system and there needs to be a more diverse set of Democratic and, for that matter, Republican primary voters and caucus goers having some say. So I strongly support and applaud the notion that South Carolina and Nevada move up.

You know, some people say it should be on a rotating basis and try different states as long as they're heterogeneous and have a mix. So I'm all for that and I actually think it's going to make the Democratic Party stronger in the long run because they're going to have to respond to their full coalition.

Tavis: So help me understand what the Republicans do now. They've got three front-running candidates or certainly three who've gained the most media attention. In no particular order, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney. None of these guys is beloved by the conservative wing of the party. What do they do this time around?

Schaller: I mean, it's a fascinating situation. You're right about that. I mean, the true conservatives want a Sam Brown back or they wanted a George Allen. We saw what happened to him. They like George Bush. The southernized wing of the party has really ascended and they're used to having that control and that veto power on cultural issues, particularly abortion, but other issues like embryonic stem cells and so forth.

I think the Republican Party is going to have this moment where they're going to have a real soul check. They're going to have to have a question about whether it's important for them to govern and win the White House or is it more important to have this sort of social, cultural purity in their nominees?

The fact of the matter, as you correctly point out, Tavis, I mean, John McKean is not particularly beloved among the base. Rudy Giuliani has been through three marriages and is pro choice. Mitt Romney, I mean, his position seems to have changed fundamentally since he ran for the senate race in Massachusetts in 1994.

So social conservatives are going to have to make a choice whether they're just going to bite down hard and swallow a John McKean or a Mitt Romney or whether they're going to go another direction and fracture the party.

Tavis: And that's what I think one can argue. Maybe I don't think this, but certainly I can argue this in talking to you. One could argue that that's what puts the South in play and that's why the Democrats shouldn't write it off because, if the conservative Republicans who, as you mentioned earlier, in Mississippi and other places don't have anybody that they're excited about voting for in 2008, maybe the South for Democrats is in play, given who's running.

Schaller: I mean, I think this is a fair point, but I still doubt that even if Romney and McKean and Giuliani are viewed as, you know, culturally unacceptable or a little bit looked at warily by Republicans, I doubt that they're going to move to Hillary Clinton. I doubt that they're going to move to Barack Obama who has one of the most liberal voting records in both the Senate and when he was a state senator.

I mean, perhaps they'll be so disgruntled that they'll stay home. Perhaps they'll be so disgruntled that they'll vote for a third party candidate or something. But I find it hard that, even if they're not particularly pleased with Giuliani or Romney or McKean that they're going to jump over to the other side. Some will, but I suppose that's possible.

In the long term, you know, a state like Virginia which is being populated in northern Virginia not far from here with a lot of non-native Southerners, perhaps that state begins to move in the blue column as we've seen in the governors' races and the election of Jim Webb. But I still think the Democrats are still several stages away from that.

Tavis: Here's the exit question, then. It seems to me that this issue of Iraq isn't going anywhere anytime soon. With regard to your strategy here in "Whistling Past Dixie," how does Iraq play for the Republicans and how does it play for the Democrats?

Schaller: Well, I think the Democrats, again it ratifies a strategy because, even though overall support for the war has been steadily going down, if you look at the parts of the country where Bush's support for the Iraq war, even if it's not above fifty percent, is still highest and it's in the South. It's always been the highest in the South and in some of the mountain West states like Utah, Idaho and so forth.

I mean, these are real outliers and they're outliers on social and cultural issues and on choice and on embryonic stem cells and they're outliers on the war. The central argument in my book is like, look, why would the more liberal and progressive of the two parties start with the most conservative voters, in the most conservative states, in the most conservative region which is in the South?

Nobody ever tells George Bush that he's got to put Rocawear on and a red New York Yankees cap and go to Manhattan and start talking to the J-Lo vote (laughter). Yet Democrats, for some reason, got to go and talk to NASCAR voters and doll themselves up as if they're a bunch of country Southerners. It doesn't make any sense and there's a real goose, but not gander, double standard here in the national media. My point is, the Democrats should go where the low-hanging fruit is closest to pick.

Tavis: I've never done this in all the years of hosting a program on PBS, but I found it funny and just interesting that you and I are talking on satellite tonight, but maybe on Saturday we'll get a chance to meet. I got a book-signing at one o'clock on Saturday in Baltimore at the Inner Harbor, the same store you'll be at a couple of hours later. Maybe we'll actually meet in person on Saturday, but I'm glad to have you on the program.

Schaller: I hope so too. Thanks, Tavis.

Tavis: Tommy Schaller's new book, "Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South," on sale at a bookstore near you as we speak. Up next, the real-life story behind the new NBC series, "The Black Donnellys." Stay with us.