The American South: From Democratic to Republican stronghold

Beginning in the mid-1970s, conservatives in the Republican Party began to make significant gains in winning the support of sections of the southern electorate. How do we explain the Right’s success in this period?

Introduction

The American South was long seen as stronghold of the Democratic Party. Since the time of Reconstruction, when the Republican led federal government intervened in former Confederate states, the overwhelming majority of white Southerners could never vote for the Grand Old Party (GOP). Films like ‘Birth of a Nation’ from 1915 show us how strong the refusal of Northern intervention was.¹ The era of Reconstruction formed the party system of the US for more than a half century. In addition to that movies like this helped to tighten people’s mind about the subject. The split in a Republican North and a Democratic South was done and stayed for decades.

After World War II things in the South changed dramatically. The region was industrialized and modernized. The Civil Rights Movement achieved the end of the system of legal segregation. Also the American party system didn’t stay the same. The Republican Party, once hated by the majority of South’s electorate, gained more and more success in the southern states and has now her stronghold in the region. Why did this change of electoral behaviour occur?

To answer this question, we have to analyze what circumstances have changed. Why did the change happen in the 70s and not earlier? Here former attempts should also be analyzed, especially the success of George Wallace.

What new issues led to a demand for a more conservative party? Here the essay will focus on questions on race, but also new issues that occurred.

Also it will be discussed, whether the Democratic Party lost or the Republicans won the South. Did the party especially during the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson scare voters away because of moving too far left? Or was it more a change of the GOP to get more votes? Also how and why did the conservative wing of the Republicans prevail?

First changes in Southern politics

As mentioned in introduction the South was for decades a stronghold of the Democratic Party. In the time after World War II it took till 1962 when the first Southern Republican candidate could gain a seat in the US Senate (Texas).² The situation in other elections was not better.

Exceptions to this were several Presidential Elections. So Barry Goldwater was able to win five southern states in the election 1964, Dwight D. Eisenhower also won some states in the South (Florida, Louisiana, and Texas). But votes in Presidential Elections are often in favour of one of the candidates and parties and ideologies have less influence. Still the office of the president is the most powerful. Therefore it forms the strategies of the parties. More important than the small gains of Republican candidates were those of so called third candidates. In the election 1948 Strom Thurmond won four southern states, and in 1968 George Wallace carried five. The figure of George Wallace was important in the future setting of southern politics.

The ideological change of the parties

Beside Dwight D. Eisenhower there was no Republican President between 1933 and 1969 the year Richard Nixon came into office. In Congress there was a majority of the Democratic Party from 1954 till 1980 in the Senate and till 1994 in the House. Without a doubt the Republicans were the smaller of the two parties in that period. A strategy to win elections was to build a so called Conservative Coalition with southerners. This worked already in the 1930s when conservative northern Republicans worked together with conservative southern Democrats to defeat the agenda of liberals.³ After the war the conservative wing of the Republican Party saw in the southern states a way to win elections. The population of southern states was probably more conservative than the average and also possible voters of the Republican Party. In the presidential election 1964 Barry Goldwater of the conservative wing of the party could win five southern states, but failed badly in the rest of the county. One reason for his failure was the tremendous sympathy for the Kennedy administration after his assassination in 1963, which helped Lyndon B. Johnson to win the election.⁴ Although this loss the Republicans were able to score in the South with a conservative agenda. In his campaign, Goldwater railed against the New Deal welfare state, high level of federal spending and probably most important against the federal involvement in education. Those are phrases to gain votes in the southern electorate.

Especially federal intervention in state’s authority was extremely unpopular in the majority of southern electorate. The Supreme Court Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954 put an end to racial segregation in schools and was a landmark in the upcoming Civil Rights struggle. For most southern whites the judgement was seen as a federal intervention in things, where the local population would know what is best for their region. Every federal intervention reminded them of the era of Reconstruction. And with the Brown decision Washington interfered in South’s system of a white men’s country. Many white Southerners still believed in good race relations and that the system of racial segregation was the best for whites and blacks. Furthermore they thought that only outsiders, non-locals from Washington, interrupted that system of racial harmony and so saw both “black and white, as victims of outside schemes.”⁵

Goldwater’s campaign set the groundwork for further conservative Republican policy in the South. The Civil Rights Movement changed the whole region and also the political landscape.

George Wallace, governor of Alabama, could gain an impressive success in the Presidential election 1968. Five years earlier Governor Wallace became famous for standing at the doorway of the University of Alabama opposing the entrance of black students. The figure is similar to the character of Willie Stark in the movie “All the King’s Men”⁶, who was also a very powerful character and acted in somehow in a populist way. Wallace was a populist in racial questions, whereas in the movie the race issue does not play a role.

Wallace’s success shows how important the race issue was in people minds. But also it showed once again that fighting against federal rule leads to success in the Southern electorate.⁷

In the late 1960s the GOP changed its policy on civil rights. They wanted to find the right mixture between saying civil rights for all Americans are right and necessary and to say that the progress has got too far and that it is not right for the state to interfere that much in the lives of individuals.⁸ The strategy of the Republican Party in the coming years was to gain southern votes while not losing traditional northern ones. George Wallace showed how to win those votes by setting an agenda against a strong state and federal intervention and by saying the Civil Rights Movement has gone too far.

The Republicans could gain southern votes because the Democrats lost them. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was introduced by Democrat presidents (Kennedy and Johnson) and made by Congress in which the Democrats had the majority. The delegates from the South voted with 86 - 8 against the act.⁹ The liberal policy of the Democratic Party shows that the Southern (white) electorate could no longer identify with the head party and that there was a split between the northern and the southern section of the Democrats. Former presidential elections showed that the party did not win the southern states automatically. The successes of Thurmond and Wallace proved that a candidate from a third party could gain votes and that means that the Republicans had a chance to win the southern states with the right policy.

That right policy was a more conservative one. There has long been a so called conservative coalition in Congress between northern Republicans and southern Democrats. This voting alliance was shared on shared ideology. At its peak in 1961 this coalition appeared in 30% of all votes in the two chambers of Congress.¹⁰ It is reasonable that that shared ideology could be transformed in a shared party. The period of the Civil Rights Struggle set the foundation for that step.

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¹ Birth of a Nation, 1915.

² J. Bass., The Transformation of Southern Politics, (New York 1976), p.36.

³ M.D. Brewer, and J. M., Stonecash, Dynamics of American Political Parties, (Cambridge 2009). p.108.

⁴ Brewer/Stonecash, Dynamics of American Political Parties, p. 111.

⁵ J. Sokol, There goes my everything, (New York 2006) p. 69.

⁶ All the King’s Men, 1947.

⁷ Brewer/Stonecash, Dynamics of American Political Parties, p.114.

⁸ Brewer/Stonecash, Dynamics of American Political Parties, p.115.

⁹ Brewer/Stonecash, Dynamics of American Political Parties, p.101.

¹⁰ M.A., Nye, ‘Coalition Support in the House of Representatives, 1963-1988’, in Legislative Studies Quarterly, Vol. 18, No.2, (May 1993), pp. 255-270, p.256.