NEW ORLEANS — Things traditionally get started a little late down here, an inclination that runs from mealtimes to political races. But with nearly a year to go before the 2014 election, it is already open season on Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana.
"Why didn't she do her job, protect us from Obamacare from the start?" asks a new ad from Americans for Prosperity, a political nonprofit group founded by the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch. And a post from a conservative blog that refers to her as "MussoLandrieu," with a picture of her face superimposed on the body of Benito Mussolini, has been making the rounds on Twitter.
Republicans are so giddy about the prospect of winning her seat that their main problem is too many of them are trying to do so. "It's a different world than Louisiana was six years ago," said Bernie Pinsonat, a pollster in Baton Rouge. "We do not have Democrats who win anything in this state today."
As Democrats look across the rest of the South, the outlook does not get much better. Ms. Landrieu, along with Senators Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Kay Hagan of North Carolina, is pretty much all that is left of Southern Democrats in the Senate.
All three are up for re-election next year. And the outcome of their races could determine whether the Southern Democrat, once a formidable species in the Senate, is headed for extinction.
"Democrats are fighting against history in most of the South," said Thomas F. Schaller, a professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who wrote a book on Democrats and the South called "Whistling Past Dixie."
"You can still elect a Democrat to a statewide office in the South," he added, "if you have the right candidate, with the right biography, in the right cycle. And then hopefully you get some help from the Republicans' nominating a bad candidate. But that's a lot of ifs."
Next year, Democrats will face not only a general hostility to the national party among Southern white voters, but also a keen dislike of President Obama's Affordable Care Act. Representative Bill Cassidy, one of the Republicans opposing Ms. Landrieu, has an attack ad that calls her "Barack Obama's rubber stamp." She and her two Southern colleagues in the Senate voted for the health plan and have reiterated their support, though they have also rushed to criticize the administration's handling of the rollout and pushed for modifications. Republicans are trying to exploit the opening, insisting that each of the incumbents muttered the decisive "aye" that allowed the law to pass, which was approved 60 to 39.
"Pryor is the 60th vote, Hagan is the 60th vote, Landrieu is the 60th vote," said Merle Black, a professor of political science at Emory University in Atlanta. "Everybody is the 60th vote."
The Democrats' peril is especially striking given the region's history: Their party long dominated the old Confederacy, a legacy of the Civil War, Reconstruction and, later, resistance to civil rights, and produced powerful Senate figures like Richard Russell of Georgia and James Eastland of Mississippi.
The region has swung from total Democratic to almost total Republican control over the last half-century, starting with voter defections from the Democrats in the 1960s, emerging Republican congressional delegations in the 1990s and a wave of state legislative takeovers in recent years.
Voting has increasingly become racially polarized. John Barrow of Georgia is the only white Democrat in the House of Representatives from one of the Deep South's five states.
If Republicans defeat Democratic incumbents in Arkansas, Louisiana and North Carolina and hold on to the seat of Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, who is retiring, they will control every Senate seat in the old Confederacy except in Florida and Virginia, which have drifted culturally and politically from the rest of the South.
Campbell Robertson reported from New Orleans, and Jeremy W. Peters from Washington.
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