As an American who yields to none in her loathing of the incumbent president, I am frequently invited to enthuse over the presumptive 2008 Democratic contenders. But I’m unconvinced that either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama is electable. Perhaps it’s time to consider the dark horse.

US papers report that John Edwards has gone on the attack; one of his advisers opined that a Clinton nomination would lose blue states. A recent poll agreed: more than half of Americans would never vote for Clinton, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who remembers the first Clinton presidency. Obama presents a similar problem. I’m a fan, and from his home state, but I don’t think he can win the presidency yet. Moreover, the dark horse has an overlooked advantage: history.

The election of the first Republican president, in 1860, precipitated the US civil war. His name was Abraham Lincoln, and his new party represented the urban north, federalism, and abolition. The party of the rural south, the Democrats, supported agrarianism, states’ rights, and slavery. After Lincoln’s election, southern Democrats seceded from the union, formed the Confederate States of America, and declared war on Republicans.

The entire south — the 11 confederate states plus five border states — voted as a block for the Democratic presidential candidate in every election for the next 60 years. In 1948 everything changed. Harry S Truman, a southern Democrat, endorsed a strong civil rights platform. The deep south nearly seceded again, as four “Dixiecrat” states followed white supremacist Strom Thurmond.

The Democrats had always represented the workers, and the Republicans big business. The rural southern working man had two claims to power: gender and race. He may have been white trash, but he was superior to women and “negroes”. As the Democratic platform liberalised, the conservative south began turning Republican, and electoral maps show the subsequent contest for the south in the 14 presidential elections since 1948.

The neglected fact is this: with one exception since the 1944 election of Franklin D Roosevelt, no Democratic president has come from a northern state. Not for 60 years. Since Roosevelt, all the Democratic presidents but one were southern: Truman, Johnson, Carter and Clinton. Conversely, the list of failed Democratic presidential candidates from the north since Truman is a catalogue of humiliating routs: Stevenson, Humphrey, McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis, and Kerry — the most successful.

In theory a Democrat could win the election without carrying the south. But no Democrat since the civil war who lost more than half the southern states has become president. If the Democrats want to win, they need to consider nominating someone from the south. It won’t guarantee them the election, but if they nominate another northerner I fear they can kiss the White House goodbye for another four years — and the rest of the world can weep into its history books. — The Guardian