Republican presidential candidates obviously don't win general elections by winning Dixie alone. They win in swing states like Ohio. And they win in swing states like Ohio by turning out Southern-type voters who live in Ohio—evangelicals and Reagan Democrats. ... Romney's "Southern problem" therefore isn't that he's in danger of losing Southern states; it's that he's not reaching those demographic chunks of non-Southern states that most resemble the South.

Will these voters turn to Obama? The great majority of them surely won't.

But, like the four million absent evangelicals who Karl Rove believes proved decisive in the 2000 popular vote, they might just stay home.