WAKE FOREST, N.C.
Barack Obama hardly marched across the South like General William T. Sherman, who accepted the surrender of the Conferedate armies in the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida in 1865. But he certainly made some inroads.
The Illinois Democrat failed to win a majority of White votes in any Southern state, and exit polls indicate that a deeper racial divide may persist here than in other regions.
But he won Florida. You could argue that Florida with its snowbirds and ice hockey franchises is not really “Southern,” but that doesn’t change the fact that a Northern, liberal Democrat hasn’t taken the state since FDR.
And it’s hard to overstate the symbolic importance of Obama’s comfortable victory in Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy. No Democrat had won that state since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.
“Old Virginny is dead,” declared Gov. Tim Kaine, who helped guide Obama to victory there.
Even North Carolina, which has been reliably Republican in presidential politics since 1980, is still too close to call. And while Georgia chose Republican John McCain, Obama was more competitive in that deep South state than any Democrat since Bill Clinton who won it in 1992 and narrowly lost it in 1996.
