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Not only is there diversity in the South; the region is also changing. Its rate of evolution may seem glacial, but fundamental shifts in the conditions underlying its politics are taking place.
By 1948, President Harry S. Truman recognized that the path to winning another term was through securing the votes of a burgeoning black electorate, and he...
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Context 1
... the majority of whites have come to call themselves Republicans, goP dominance of southern politics is evidenced in both voter preferences and election results. Figure 4 displays the rate of ticket splitting in presidential and U.S. House elec- tions for white southerners. Specifically, the data show the percentage of Demo- cratic presidential voters who voted Republican for the House and the percent- age of Republican presidential voters who cast Democratic House ballots. ...
Context 2
... again to Figure 4, in 1988, 30 percent of Republican presidential voters cast Demo- cratic House ballots, but since 1992 the number is less than 17 percent. More im- portantly, and complementing the data in Figure 4, since 1990 there has been a marked rise in white Republican identifiers-with more southern whites affiliat- ing with the goP than the Democratic Party since the 1992 elections (see the data displayed in Figure 3). ...
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Citations
... This included sitting senator J. Thomas Heflin, who was not renominated for his seat in 1930, ran as an independent, and subsequently lost the election to Democratic nominee John H. Bankhead II (Thornton III, 1968). 18 Truman in part reacted to demands from black World War II veterans who, after fighting for the cause of freedom abroad, increasingly demanded more equal treatment for themselves at home (McKee, 2012). 19 Coincidentally this also evolved into a proxy war over which faction held the most power in Alabama state politics. ...
... (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina) are significantly more likely to vote Republican for high-profile statewide offices than white voters in peripheral South states such as Virginia, Arkansas, or Tennessee. While prior to the 1990s, native southern white voters tended to be more Democratic than whites who moved to the region (Hadley, 1981), this pattern reversed after 1990, with white migration to the South being significantly more Democratic than the increasingly Republican native population (McKee, 2012). ...
In this chapter, I provide an analysis of Alabama’s electoral evolution from 1945 until 1968 on the presidential, senatorial, and gubernatorial levels. The factionalism of the Old Alabama runs into a changed and changing national Democratic Party ready to embrace racial liberalism and the Civil Rights Movement. The result is a fracturing of the old political order upholding the Democratic one-party state along predictable regional lines. Alabama’s political factions, the Loyalists and the Dixiecrats, and their respective regional bases set up the struggle over control of the Alabama Democratic Party.KeywordsFactionalismDixiecratsElectoral shiftsAlabama politicsPolitical partiesIssue evolutionRegionalism
... While the above narrative hews closely to the view that the Republican transformation of the modern South was at its core driven by considerations of race (Black and Black 1987;Carter 1996;Hood, Kidd, and Morris 2012;McKee 2012;McKee and Springer 2015;Phillips 1969;Valentino and Sears 2005), this is, of course, not the only perspective. Some scholars have argued that the focus on the centrality of race in the partisan transformation of the South is overstated. ...
It is well-established that the realignment of the past half-century sorted southern whites into the Grand Old Party (GOP) while southern blacks have remained stalwart Democrats. Surprisingly, however, there has been little systematic investigation of the relationship between party identification and opinions toward the South’s Confederate legacy. If it is indeed the case that race played the dominant role in the partisan sorting of southern whites into the Republican Party, then it should follow that contemporary GOP adherents have also taken a more favorable view toward Confederate symbols. In this study, we present data from numerous surveys that show southern whites of opposing parties have polarized on opinions toward the Confederate legacy in a historical reversal so that those aligned with the party of Abraham Lincoln are now the staunchest defenders of the “Lost Cause.”
... Further, we employ the commonly used subregional classification of Deep South (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina) and Peripheral or Rim South (Arkansas, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia). This sectional distinction within the South is based first and foremost on the fact that the Deep South states have proportionally larger black populations and this contributes to greater racial polarization in all manners of behavior (see Black and Black, 1987;Hood, Kidd, and Morris, 2012;Key, 1949;Matthews and Prothro, 1966;McKee, 2012;McKee and Springer, 2015;Valentino and Sears, 2005;White, 2014). enfranchised black electorate was like a huge pent-up reservoir of water that finally burst through the damn holding it back. ...
... Put plainly, the black takeover of the Democratic Party has caused white Mississippians to control public affairs by comprising an almost lily-white Republican majority (Hood, Kidd, and Morris, 2012). As is true throughout the South (Black, 2004;McKee, 2012) and especially in the Deep South (McKee and Springer, 2015), the political clout of black Mississippians has approached a new nadir in the post-VRA era because whites have overwhelmingly realigned to the GOP and no longer need Democratic votes to implement their preferred policies. Under these conditions, black votes matter if they can affect the outcome of Republican contests, since the GOP nominee is practically assured election against the Democratic opponent in the general election-an opponent who is increasingly likely to be African American (see Hayes and McKee, 2008) because blacks now constitute the majority of Democratic supporters in most southern states. ...
... The story of contemporary southern politics is one of Republican rule. Once considered a one-party Democratic stronghold, the South can now be properly characterized as Republican-dominant (Hayes and McKee, 2008;Lublin, 2004;McKee, 2012); talk of a competitive two-party region appears antiquated. More than 30 years after Ronald Reagan's election, Republican hegemony in the South is firmly established, and this region anchors the party in national politics (Black and Black, 2007), a trend unlikely to abate in the foreseeable future. ...
... Our study also examines the role of race in southern politics, which is especially relevant in light of the rise of the Latino population as well as recent work showing that race still plays a prominent role in electoral politics and representation (Grose, 2011;Hood et al., 2012). If race plays a systematic role in fostering party switching, it would suggest that it is still inextricably linked to partisan politics in a region where it has been the dominant factor shaping public affairs both past and present (Glaser, 1996(Glaser, , 2005Grose, 2011;Key, 1949;Kousser, 1974;McKee, 2012). ...
We undertake an examination of southern state legislators who changed their party affiliation between 1992 and 2012. Not surprisingly, the vast majority went from being Democrats to Republicans, and this change has fuelled the dynamics at the national level by pulling the Republican Party further to the right and Democrats to the left. Hence, these are the incumbent party switchers we evaluate. With the use of constituency, electoral and contextual data on both switchers and non-switchers, we assess which factors influence the likelihood that a Democratic office-holder will switch to the GOP (Grand Old Party). We find that the typical demographic correlates of southern Republicanism, such as race and education, do indeed have a significant effect on the probability of the GOP label being adopted. In addition, the disruptive effect of redistricting induces switches, as does a change in the party of the elected governor. However, electoral pressure does not have an independent effect on party switching. Our results suggest that party switching is a response to several district-level factors as well as the broader political context within the state. We conclude with a discussion of why increasing partisan polarization and the maturation of the southern GOP is likely to forestall future party switching.
This chapter traces the emergence of Alabama as a one-party state of the Republican persuasion, analyzing the shifting foundations of old regional divisions. I show that after the completion of partisan realignment, Alabama ended up in many ways more polarized than it had been during its initial period as a Democratic one-party state. While even now traces of the old economic divisions can be found, they have been firmly pushed into the background by partisan splits along racial lines.KeywordsOne-party politicsAlabama politicsElectoral shiftsPolitical parties
This chapter traces the period of electoral upheaval that would finally lead to Alabama’s political realignment through county-level electoral shifts, showing how the old regional factions remained relevant, even as economic divisions were competing with the rise of race as a party-defining issue. Using presidential, senatorial, and gubernatorial elections, I show that realignment proceeded unevenly across political offices as well as regional divisions.KeywordsCivil rightsRealignmentAlabama politicsElectoral shiftsPolitical changeEnfranchisement
Scholarly accounts attribute the American South's historic partisan transformation that began in the 1960s to a combination of political and economic factors, but no prior work emphasizes the connection between individuals' fundamental beliefs and partisan change. Using pooled American National Election Studies (ANES) data from 1988 to 2016, we show that egalitarianism and moral traditionalism are more likely to influence southerners' party affiliation relative to non-southerners. Southerners did not connect their core values to the same extent as other citizens in the early years of our analysis-owing to the vestiges of a one-party system operating in Dixie. But over time, the relationship between core values and partisanship among southerners strengthened remarkably. Moreover, 1992-96 panel data show that egalitarianism in particular influences southern partisanship (but not vice versa). Our results reveal that core values are integral to understanding the southern Republican realignment and southerners' persistent political distinctiveness.
This study is the most comprehensive analysis of the election of black state legislators in the American South. We start with the election of Leroy Johnson to the Georgia Senate in 1962, the first African American to win a state legislative seat in the modern South. We also document the election of all subsequent African Americans who were the first to enter their southern state legislative chambers. Next, we assess the factors influencing the election of southern black state legislators from the 1970s through 2015. Because of notable long‐term changes to the southern electorate and alterations in the racial composition of legislative districts, there has been substantial variation in the likelihood of electing black lawmakers. Our final analysis highlights the undeniable reality and broader significance that the increasing share of southern African American state legislators has occurred at the same time that Republican representation has grown at a greater rate.
One of the most important career decisions for a legislator is the decision to switch parties, and it raises a theoretical puzzle: it carries significant risk, yet sometimes legislators do change partisan affiliation. We elucidate this puzzle with the first-ever systematic comparison of the entire careers of state legislative switchers and non-switchers in the American South, where the high prevalence of party switching coincided with rapid realignment toward the Republican Party. Our analysis is the first to evaluate all post-switch career decisions (retiring, running for reelection, running for higher office) simultaneously, and it is the broadest in its scope with two full decades of career data. We demonstrate that converts to the Grand Old Party (GOP) pay a reelection cost. However, they are less likely to retire than Democratic non-switchers and more likely to seek higher office. This latter finding is especially strong during the earlier part of our study—when the Republican bench in the South was not as deep and competition for the party label was not as intense. Our findings suggest that political ambition motivates legislators to trade short-term electoral costs for a more promising long-term electoral career with the ascendant party.
Since the 1970s, American politics has taken an impressive turn away from political dealignment and moved toward a more responsible party system. As a result, elections have become more nationalized, a process by which presidential and national politics exert greater influence over down-ballot contests. We evaluate nationalization in electoral contests for two high-profile offices—U.S. Senate and governor—that encompass the same constituencies but constitute markedly different job descriptions and mandated responsibilities. Our analysis utilizes both macro- and micro-level data (election returns and surveys, respectively) to assess patterns of nationalization in these elections. Although it is perhaps not surprising that the linkage between presidential and senatorial contests has tightened, it appears national political forces now also exert greater influence over gubernatorial contests. Nonetheless, we do find regional variation in the nationalization of senatorial and gubernatorial politics, which is more evident in the latter office.
