SOLID SOUTH

'Solid South' refers to the electoral support of the Southern United States for Democratic Party candidates for nearly a century after the Reconstruction era (1877-1964). Except for 1928, when candidate Al Smith, a Catholic, ran on the Democratic ticket, Democratic candidates won by large margins in the South in every presidential election from 1876 until 1948 (even in 1928, the divided South provided most of Smith's electoral votes). Beginning about 1950, the national Democratic Party's support of the civil rights movement significantly reduced Southern support for the Democratic Party and allowed the Republican Party to make gains in the South by way of its "Southern strategy." Today, the South is considered a stronghold of the Republican Party.
The Democratic dominance originated in many white Southerners' animosity towards the Republican Party's stance in favor of political rights for Blacks during Reconstruction. It was maintained by the Democratic Party's willingness to back Jim Crow laws and racial segregation. Conversely, black voters, today 90-percent Democratic, usually preferred the Republicans until the 1930s.

Contents

Democratic factionalization over the Civil Rights Movement

The "Southern Strategy" and the end of the Solid South

The "Southern strategy" today

References

See also

Democratic factionalization over the Civil Rights Movement

The "Solid South" began to erode when Democratic President Harry S. Truman began supporting the civil rights movement. His policies, combined with the adoption of a civil rights plank in the 1948 Democratic platform, prompted many Southerners to walk out of the Democratic National Convention and form the Dixiecrat Party. This splinter party played a significant role in the 1948 election; the Dixiecrat candidate, Strom Thurmond, carried Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. In the elections of 1952 and 1956, the popular Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower carried several border southern states, with especially strong showings in the new suburbs. In 1956, Eisenhower also carried Louisiana, becoming the first Republican to win the state since Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, but the rest of the Deep South was still the bastion for his Democratic opponent, Adlai Stevenson.
In the 1960 election, the Democratic nominee, John F. Kennedy, continued his party's tradition of selecting a Southerner as the vice presidential candidate (in this case, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas). Kennedy, however, supported civil rights. In October 1960, when Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested at a peaceful sit-in in Atlanta, Georgia, Kennedy placed a sympathetic phone call to King's wife, Coretta Scott King, and Robert Kennedy helped secure King's release. King expressed his appreciation for these calls. Although King himself made no endorsement, his father, who had previously endorsed Republican Richard Nixon, switched his support to Kennedy.
Due to these and other events, the Democrats lost ground with white voters in the South. The 1960 election was the first in which a Republican presidential candidate received electoral votes in the South while losing nationally. Nixon carried Virginia, Tennessee, and Florida. In addition, slates of unpledged electors, representing Democratic segregationists, won the election in Mississippi and Alabama.
The parties' positions on civil rights continued to evolve in the run up to the 1964 election. The Democratic candidate, Johnson, who had become president after Kennedy's assassination, spared no effort to win passage of a strong Civil Rights Act. After signing the landmark legislation, Johnson said to his aide, Bill Moyers, "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come."^[1] In contrast, Johnson's Republican opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
That November, Johnson won a landslide electoral victory, and the Republicans suffered significant losses in Congress. Goldwater, however, besides carrying his home state of Arizona, carried the deep South: the South had switched parties for the first time. Prior to 1956, the region had almost always provided the only victories for Democratic challengers to popular Republican incumbent presidents. Now, however, the South had provided a Republican challenger with electoral victories against a popular Democratic incumbent.

The "Southern Strategy" and the end of the Solid South

Main articles: Southern strategy

In the 1968 election, the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon, saw and capitalized on this trend with his "Southern strategy." The new method of campaigning was designed to appeal to white Southerners who were more conservative and more segregationist than the national Democratic Party. As a result of the strategy, the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, was almost shut out in the South; he only carried Texas. The rest of the region was divided between Nixon and the American Independent Party candidate George C. Wallace, the governor of Alabama, who had gained fame for opposing integration. Nationwide, Nixon won a decisive Electoral College victory, although he received only a plurality of the popular vote.
After Nixon's landslide re-election win in 1972, the Democrats made a comeback in the South in 1976, when their candidate, southerner Jimmy Carter of Georgia, won. The party's success in the South was short-lived, however. In Carter's unsuccessful re-election bid in 1980, he lost the South except for his native Georgia. The year 1980 was the last time a Democratic presidential nominee did better in the South than in the nation as a whole. The Republicans took all the region's electoral votes in 1984 and 1988. In 1992 and 1996, when the Democratic ticket consisted of two Southerners, (Bill Clinton and Al Gore), the Democrats and Republicans split the region. In 2000, however, Gore received no electoral votes from the southeast, even from his home state of Tennessee, though the popular vote in Florida was extraordinarily close in awarding the state's electoral votes to George W. Bush. This pattern continued in the 2004 election; the Democratic ticket of John Kerry and John Edwards received no electoral votes from the South, although Edwards was from North Carolina.

The "Southern strategy" today

Today, the South has a mix of Republican and Democratic officeholders (Senators, Representatives and state governors). In presidential elections, however, the region is a Republican stronghold, with few exceptions. Florida, home to many immigrants and retirees from elsewhere in the country, is considered to be "in play" between the major parties. Louisiana, Arkansas and Tennessee as well tend to vote more Democratic than other southern states, although Democratic presidential candidates rarely win in those states. Many major corporations are franchising or relocating to southern states such as North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas because of favorable banking laws and "right to work" attitudes. Democrats hope that the resulting change in the traditional southern demographic will help their party.
Today, the Democratic Party's stronghold has shifted to the Northeastern United States, which, well into the 1900s, had been the bastion of the Republican Party; the states of the Upper Midwest, such as Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota; and to the states of the far west, namely California, Oregon, and Washington. In 2000, the Democrats easily carried every state in the Northeast except New Hampshire. In 2004, all eleven Northeastern states, from Maryland to Maine and including the District of Columbia, voted en masse for John Kerry. Kerry won handily in California, Oregon, and Washington as well. Minnesota, too, is a Democratic stronghold. It voted for a Democrat in every presidential election since 1932, except in 1952, 1956, and 1972, and continuously since 1976, more than any other state. Illinois provided Kerry with an 11-point margin in 2004, his best score in the entire Midwest.

References

★ Kari Frederickson, ''The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932-1968'' (2001)

★ Dewey W, Grantham, ''The Life and Death of the Solid South'' (1992)

See also

★ Border States

★ Conservative Coalition

★ Deep South

★ New South

★ Old South