In an interview with the Columbus Dispatch this afternoon, Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) blamed the recent struggles of the GOP squarely on “southerners.”  When asked about the “GOP’s biggest problem,” he replied:

“We got too many Jim DeMints (R-S.C.) and Tom Coburns (R-Ok.). It’s the southerners. They get on TV and go ‘errrr, errrrr.’ People hear them and say, ‘These people, they’re southerners. The party’s being taken over by southerners. What they hell they got to do with Ohio?’”

A more accurate description probably wouldn’t have been that the GOP has too many southerners, but that it doesn’t have enough non-Southerners.  As Ron Brownstein noted in the National Journal in May:

The Republican Party today is more electorally dependent on the South than at any point in its past. Today the GOP holds a smaller share of non-Southern seats in the House and Senate than at any other point in its history except the apex of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s popularity during the early days of the New Deal.

It may be a vicious cycle where the loss of moderate northern Republicans opens the doors for the rise of the Tom DeLay’s of the party, who in turn pave the way for the defeat of more moderate northerners.  The same cycle played out in the 1980’s and ’90s when the loss of Dixiecrats enabled liberals to take power of the Democratic Party, and thus prompted the death of more southern Democrats.

Even Voinovich’s Ohio, once the bedrock of the Republican Party, has shifted to the Democratic Party in recent years despite having little gain in minority and/or suburban voters that have turned other regions (mid-Atlantic, Mountain West) blue.

Voinovich is retiring in January 2010 and probably doesn’t care about popularity points in his caucus, so he’s not going to win any friends south of the Ohio River for that comment.  But he is correct that his party increasingly speak with a southern accent:

[Chart credit: National Journal]