Whit Ayers, a Republican political consultant who has specialized in Southern politics for 25 years, has a useful chart he carries around with him when he gives speeches. It’s perfect for two kinds of questioners: Democrats who want to know how terrible things are and Republicans who want to know how wonderful things are.

What it shows is simple enough. In 1960, Democrats held 24 of the 26 Senate seats from Southern states. When the new Senate reconvenes in 2005, Republicans will hold 22 of those 26 seats. Charted on an x-y axis, a line tracing the number of Democratic senators and a line tracing the number of Republican senators crisscross and form a perfect “X,” as one party sinks over 40 years and the other rises.

It’s a tidy summary, in graphic terms, of the central truth of American politics: The “Solid Democratic South,” the bulwark for more than a century of the party’s winning coalition, is now the Solid Republican South.

If you’re a Democrat, this news, which has been a long time coming, is bad enough. But it gets worse.

“The South isn’t a world apart,” says Mr. Ayres. “What’s happening in the South is an extension, an exaggeration, of what’s happening in politics nationally.”

So if Democrats want to understand why the national party is in bad shape, they might want to start by looking south.

It’s hard to underestimate the full measure of the Democrats’ Southern defeat in 2004. Not only did President Bush sweep the region’s electoral votes, but GOP strength was felt up and down the ballot.

Republicans won six open Senate seats in the South. These included states such as Oklahoma, where GOP candidates were far weaker than those offered by the Democrats, and other states, such as South Carolina, where the Democratic candidates ran far to the ideological right of the national party.

Earlier this month, the data-mongers at the Los Angeles Times published a county-by-county survey of the presidential election results in the 11 states of the old Confederacy, plus Kentucky and Oklahoma. Their conclusion: Among white voters in the South, the national Democratic Party has ceased to exist as a plausible political option.

Mr. Bush won a staggering 85% of Southern counties – 1,124 to Senator Kerry’s 216. Just eight years ago, Democrat Bill Clinton won 650 counties in the South.

The GOP strength was seen in Mr. Bush’s showing among self-described moderates, who in past elections have tipped Democratic. No longer. In all but three Southern states, Mr. Kerry got fewer than 44% of the moderate vote. In the South nowadays, the center is Republican territory.

A conventional-wisdom narrative has taken hold among political analysts to explain the rise of the solid Republican South. The great turning point, according to this view, was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by a Democratic president, which permanently drove a majority of white Southerners into the arms of the GOP.

But history isn’t so orderly. Ed Kilgore, political director of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, points out that two post-1964 Democratic presidential candidates – Jimmy Carter and Mr. Clinton – have done just fine with Southern voters. In 1996, for example, Mr. Clinton tied Republican Bob Dole in the Southern popular vote.

The key, says Mr. Kilgore, lies in the political center. Nationwide, self-identified conservatives outnumber liberals 3 to 2; in the South, the ratio is 2 to 1.

“Democrats have to win moderates by 20 points to be competitive,” he says.

Mr. Clinton did this by signaling his moderation with, among other things, an endorsement of the Gulf war in 1991 – an endorsement that stands in contrast to Mr. Kerry’s deep ambivalence about the Iraq war in 2004.

More important, says Mr. Kilgore, when Mr. Clinton pledged to “end welfare as we know it,” he demonstrated his independence from the reflexive liberalism of the national party. Mr. Kilgore sees the possibility for a similar repositioning on the issue of “government reform” – a frontal attack on the lobbying, gerrymandering, and slipping congressional ethical standards that gum up the federal government and disconnect it from the average voter.

“An agenda like that would show we’re not the party of Washington, but the party that’s willing to reform Washington, from the outside if necessary,” Mr. Kilgore says.

Mr. Kilgore’s reform strategy deserves a closer look. For the moment, however, it is purely hypothetical. Every message needs a messenger, and here the party is disastrously undersupplied.

It’s no coincidence that Messrs. Carter and Clinton, the only two Democrats to win the presidency since 1964, were both Southern governors. With the national party’s collapse in the South, however, the Democratic “farm system” offers few opportunities for future Clintons: young state legislators or statewide office-holders with a gift for appealing to centrist voters.

Still, such a figure is bound to emerge, sooner or later, and when he (or she) does, he will find a receptive audience among at least some Democrats who’ve grown tired of losing the South.

“There are no permanent realities in American politics,” says Mr. Kilgore, hopefully, “and there is no permanent Republican Southern majority.”

For now, as Democrats glumly contemplate Whit Ayres’s unhappy chart, this is all the consolation they can afford.

Mr. Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.