Is Voinovich's 'Southerner' Code for 'Religious Conservative'?

In an interview with the Columbus Dispatch, Republican Ohio Sen. George Voinovich blames the GOP's woes on Southerners:

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 the hell they got to do with Ohio?"

It strikes me that Voinovich may be using "Southerners" as shorthand for religious conservatives or white evangelicals. Can Coburn's Oklahoma really be called a Southern state? It wasn't a part of the Confederacy, usually a prerequisite for a state to be considered Southern.

Coburn is, however, a religious conservative and a white evangelical. Those are the kind of folks that some Republican are blaming for the party's electoral doldrums, claiming the party's social conservative image has made the GOP an endangered species in the Northeast and the West.

It's worth noting that some of the party's leading religious conservatives—including, most notably, Sarah Palin—aren't Southerners at all. I wonder what Voinovich, a moderate, thinks of them.

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