Solid South

File:USA Map 1864 including Civil War Divisions.png Union states, including those admitted during the war. Light blue represents southern border states, though West Virginia, Missouri and Kentucky had dual Confederate and Unionist governments. Red represents Confederate states. Unshaded areas were not states before or during the Civil War.{{efn| This map during the Civil War does not reflect the exact state boundaries today. For example, Nevada was not as large.{{usstat|14|43}} For further reading, Territorial evolution of the United States.}} ]]

At the start of the American Civil War, there were 34 states in the United States, 15 of which were slave states. Slavery was also legal in the District of Columbia until 1862. Eleven of these slave states seceded from the United States to form the Confederacy: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina.{{Cite web|last=Tikkanen|first=Amy|date=June 17, 2020|title=American Civil War|url=https://www.britannica.com/event/American-Civil-War|access-date=June 28, 2020|website=Encyclopedia Britannica}}

The southern slave states that stayed in the Union were Maryland, Missouri,{{efn|Missouri is considered a Midwestern state by the Census Bureau.{{cite web|title=History: Regions and Divisions|url=https://www.census.gov/history/www/programs/geography/regions_and_divisions.html|website=United States Census Bureau|access-date=November 26, 2014}}}} Delaware, and Kentucky, and they were referred to as the border states. Kentucky and Missouri both had dual competing Confederate governments, the Confederate government of Kentucky and the Confederate government of Missouri. The Confederacy controlled more than half of Kentucky and the southern portion of Missouri early in the war but largely lost control in both states after 1862.{{cite book|author=Wilfred Buck Yearns|title=The Confederate Congress|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=rV-XNj4eJ3wC&pg=PA43|year=2010|publisher=University of Georgia Press|pages=42–43|isbn=978-0820334769}} West Virginia, created in 1863 from Unionist and Confederate counties of Virginia, was represented in both Union and Confederate legislatures, and was the only border state to have civilian voting in the 1863 Confederate States House of Representatives elections.Foner, Eric, Reconstruction, America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, Harper Collins, 2011, pg. 39Dubin, Michael J., United States Gubernatorial Elections, 1861–1911: The Official Results by State and County, McFarland, 2014, pgs. 585, 600

By the time the Emancipation Proclamation was made in 1863, Tennessee was already under Union control. Accordingly, the Proclamation applied only to the 10 remaining Confederate states. Some of the border states abolished slavery before the end of the Civil War—Maryland in 1864,{{cite web |url=http://www.msa.md.gov/msa/speccol/sc2600/sc2685/html/conv1864.html |title=Archives of Maryland Historical List: Constitutional Convention, 1864 |date=November 1, 1864 | access-date=2012-11-18}} Missouri in 1865,{{cite web |url=http://www.civilwaronthewesternborder.org/event/missouri-abolishes-slavery |title=Missouri abolishes slavery |date=January 11, 1865 |access-date=2012-11-18 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120425132518/http://www.civilwaronthewesternborder.org/event/missouri-abolishes-slavery |archive-date=April 25, 2012 }} one of the Confederate states, Tennessee in 1865,{{cite news |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1865/01/15/news/tennessee-state-convention-slavery-declared-forever-abolished-parson-brownlow.html |title=Tennessee State Convention: Slavery Declared Forever Abolished |publisher=NY Times |date=January 14, 1865 | access-date=2012-11-18}} West Virginia in 1865,{{cite web |url=http://www.wvculture.org/history/thisdayinwvhistory/february.html |title=On this day: 1865-FEB-03 | access-date=2012-11-18}} and the District of Columbia in 1862. However, slavery persisted in Delaware,{{cite web |url=http://www.slavenorth.com/delaware.htm |title=Slavery in Delaware | access-date=2012-11-18}} Kentucky,{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=FdTIIEZ1k2QC&pg=PA174 |title=A new history of Kentucky |author=Lowell Hayes Harrison and James C. Klotter |year=1997 |page=180|publisher=University Press of Kentucky |isbn=978-0813126210 }} In 1866, Kentucky refused to ratify the 13th Amendment. It did ratify it in 1976. and 10 of the 11 former Confederate states, until the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery throughout the United States on December 18, 1865.{{Cite web |title=National Museum of African American History & Culture |url=https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/13th-amendment-constitution-united-states#:~:text=On%20December%2018%2C%201865%2C%20Secretary,13th%20Amendment%20had%20been%20ratified. |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20231015211624/https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/13th-amendment-constitution-united-states#:~:text=On%20December%2018%2C%201865%2C%20Secretary,13th%20Amendment%20had%20been%20ratified. |archive-date=2023-10-15 |access-date=2023-09-19}}

Democratic dominance of the South originated in the struggle of white Southerners during and after Reconstruction (1865–1877) to reestablish white supremacy and disenfranchise black people. The federal government of the United States under the Republican Party had defeated the Confederacy, abolished slavery, and enfranchised black people. In several states, Black voters were a majority or close to it. Republicans supported by black people controlled state governments in these states. Thus the Democratic Party became the vehicle for the white supremacist Redeemers. The Ku Klux Klan, as well as other insurgent paramilitary groups such as the White League and Red Shirts from 1874, acted as "the military arm of the Democratic party" to disrupt Republican organizing, and to engage in voter intimidation and voter suppresion of black voters.George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (1984), p. 132

{{See also|Colfax massacre|Mississippi Plan}}

File:Joseph Philo Bradley - Brady-Handy.jpg {{circa}} 1870s]]

The end of Reconstruction and the creation of the Solid South was caused by the Southern Democratic Redeemers, and enabled by some Republicans.{{Cite web|url=https://www.amazon.com/Redemption-Last-Battle-Civil-War-ebook/dp/B004YEKGDY/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.uFebRbNYGIVT5n4OdPm6I44IdpM22ulv_DJhavrnCtIXjUKpaeQHW5uJUHRW2x_l0GzcMOMq6inYiTBFYu0bMhB1lVBNhZBu4QrZq6s32xLywaH_N4pYRAJUGlNINfpcaFiK5MnloaSI_G39xGQfQSZWcO9Im6dzmW50utPgqSY8UnnxbXyEplVy7O9LzSuZQgFglTbG7jtbXfr68nC8R_u1JyqpvuuWls16rjGkyWY.AcauFH4v9Pjn-aPPfyCar54XakMZi6npnHaHwZnmGGY&qid=1742428934&sr=8-1|title=Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War|date=August 21, 2007|publisher=Farrar, Straus and Giroux|first1=Nicholas|last1=Lemann|quote=Nicholas Lemann opens his extraordinary new book with a riveting account of the horrific events of Easter 1873 in Colfax, Louisiana, where a white militia of Confederate veterans-turned-vigilantes attacked the black community there and massacred hundreds of people in a gruesome killing spree. This was the start of an insurgency that changed the course of American history: for the next few years white Southern Democrats waged a campaign of political terrorism aiming to overturn the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and challenge President Grant's support for the emergent structures of black political power. The remorseless strategy of well-financed "White Line" organizations was to create chaos and keep blacks from voting out of fear for their lives and livelihoods. Redemption is the first book to describe in uncompromising detail this organized racial violence, which reached its apogee in Mississippi in 1875. ... Redemption makes clear that this is what led to the death of Reconstruction—and of the rights encoded in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. We are still living with the consequences.}} Joseph P. Bradley was a Supreme Court associate justice from 1870 to 1892, and was a Republican appointed by Republican president Ulysses S. Grant. Bradley was a key enabler of the creation of the Solid South, both as a judge and in his tie-breaking role in the 15-member Electoral Commission that decided the disputed 1876 presidential election.

The 1872 Louisiana gubernatorial election was won by Republican William Pitt Kellogg. The Colfax massacre occurred on April 13, 1873, in Colfax, Louisiana. An estimated 62–153 Black men were murdered while surrendering to a mob of former Confederate soldiers and members of the Ku Klux Klan. Three White men also died during the confrontation.{{cite book |last=Lane |first=Charles |author-link=Charles Lane (journalist) |title=The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction |location=New York |publisher=Henry Holt & Company |year=2008 |url=https://archive.org/details/dayfreedomdiedco00lane |url-access=registration |isbn=978-1429936781 }} In 1874, the Battle of Liberty Place occurred in which the White League attempted to overthrow Kellogg's Republican government in New Orleans, Louisiana,Staff (September 15, 1874) "The White Leaguers Make a Demonstration in New Orleans". Cincinnati Daily Gazette (Cincinnati, Ohio), p.1 which was suppressed by federal troops sent by Republican president Ulysses S. Grant.Varon, Elizabeth R. (2023) Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South New York: Simon & Schuster. pp.203–208 {{ISBN|978-19821-4827-0}}

It was due to Bradley's intervention that prisoners charged in the Colfax Massacre of 1873 were freed, after he happened to attend their trial and ruled that the federal law they were charged under was unconstitutional. This resulted in the federal government's bringing the case on appeal to the Supreme Court as United States v. Cruikshank (1875). The court's ruling was that because the massacre was not a state action, the federal government would not intervene on paramilitary and group attacks on individuals. It essentially opened the door to heightened paramilitary activity in the South that forced Republicans from office, suppressed black voting, and opened the way for white Democratic takeover of state legislatures.

The Mississippi Plan of 1874–1875 was developed by white Southern Democrats to reverse Republican strength in Mississippi, particularly to remove Republican governor Adelbert Ames. White paramilitary organizations such as the Red Shirts arose to serve as "the military arm of the Democratic Party." The first step was to persuade scalawags (white Republicans) to vote with the Democratic party, with outright attacks and political pressure convincing many scalawags to switch parties or flee the state. The second step of the Mississippi Plan was intimidation of African American voters, with the Red Shirts often using violence, including whippings and murders, and intimidation at the polls. The Red Shirts were joined in the violence by white paramilitary groups known as "rifle clubs," who frequently provoked riots at Republican rallies, shooting down dozens of blacks in the ensuing conflicts.George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984, p. 132 {{ISBN|978-0820330112}} Ultimately, Adelbert Ames was unable to organize a state militia and signed a peace treaty with Democratic leaders. In return for disarming the few militia units he had assembled, they promised to guarantee a full, free, fair election, a promise they did not keep. In November 1875, Democrats terrorized a large part of the Republican vote into staying home, driving voters from the polls with shotguns and cannons, and gaining firm control of both houses of the Mississippi legislature. The state legislature, convening in 1876, drew up articles of impeachment against Ames. Rather than face an impeachment trial, Ames's lawyers made a deal: once the legislature had dropped all charges, he would resign his office, which occurred on March 29, 1876.

{{main|Compromise of 1877|1876 United States presidential election}}

{{See also|1876 South Carolina gubernatorial election|Disputed government of South Carolina of 1876–77}}

File:Report of the meetings for organization and of the general meeting, together with the president's address, and a list of members (1906) (14592290138).jpg {{circa}} 1898]]

File:Wade Hampton III - Brady-Handy.jpg {{circa}} 1879–1880]]

File:Samuel Tilden. Portrait of the American politician, who served as the 25th Governor of New York, Samuel Jones Tilden (1814-1886), by José María Mora, c. 1870.jpg {{circa}} 1870]]

File:President Rutherford Hayes 1870 - 1880.jpg (1877–1881) {{circa|1870–1880}}]]

Republican Daniel Henry Chamberlain was born in Massachusetts and had served as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army with the 5th Massachusetts Colored Volunteer Cavalry, a regiment of Black troops. Chamberlain was elected Governor of South Carolina in 1874 and sought re-election in 1876.{{Cite web|url=http://www.sciway.net/hist/governors/chamberlain.html|website=SCIway|access-date=March 19, 2025|title=SC Governors – Daniel Henry Chamberlain, 1874–1877}} Both Republicans, Bradley and Chamberlain, played crucial roles on opposing sides of the creation of the Solid South. Bradley gave Republican Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency in the 1876 presidential election, which in turn caused Chamberlain to lose the South Carolina governorship as part of the Compromise of 1877.

In the aftermath of the Panic of 1873, poor economic conditions caused voters to turn against the Republican Party. In the 1874 congressional elections, the Democratic Party assumed control of the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time since the Civil War. Public opinion in the North began to steer away from Reconstruction. With the depression, ambitious railroad building programs crashed across the South, leaving most Southern states deep in debt and burdened with heavy taxes. Most Southern state fell to Democratic control in the South, as the Republican Party lost electoral power in the South.{{Cite journal |last=Barreyre |first=Nicolas |year=2011 |title=The Politics of Economic Crises: The Panic of 1873, the End of Reconstruction, and the realignment of American Politics |journal=Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era |volume=10 |issue=4 |pages=403–423 |doi=10.1017/S1537781411000260|s2cid=154493223}}

Democrat Samuel J. Tilden was elected governor of New York in 1874, and had supported the Union during the American Civil War. Republican Rutherford B. Hayes had served in the Union army as an officer, served in Congress from 1865 to 1867, and served as governor of Ohio from 1868 to 1872 and 1876 to 1877 before his swearing-in as president. The 1876 presidential election was extremely controversial, as Hayes lost the popular vote to Tilden 47.9%–50.9%, but ultimately won the Electoral College 185-184. Hayes won three former Confederate states, all by extremely narrow margins: South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. Yet all three states were concurrently won by Democratic gubernatorial nominees by narrow margins as well.{{Cite web|url=https://www.amazon.com/Fraud-Century-Rutherford-Samuel-Election-ebook/dp/B000SH1N6U/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hgzKluJ9tkb4FJDqNOGbFQv6rK_Kl4vmxOoB5Y5dsRI.ptUFB6fhmxe6uBKVVHJdUhKeBMsNdZXlGOg9ivF_1IY&qid=1742429655&sr=8-1|publisher=Simon & Schuster|date=November 1, 2007|first1=Roy|last1=Morris Jr.|title=Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876|quote=In this major work of popular history and scholarship, acclaimed historian and biographer Roy Morris, Jr, tells the extraordinary story of how, in America’s centennial year, the presidency was stolen, the Civil War was almost reignited, and Black Americans were consigned to nearly ninety years of legalized segregation in the South. The bitter 1876 contest between Ohio Republican governor Rutherford B. Hayes and New York Democratic governor Samuel J. Tilden is the most sensational, ethically sordid, and legally questionable presidential election in American history. The first since Lincoln’s in 1860 in which the Democrats had a real chance of recapturing the White House, the election was in some ways the last battle of the Civil War, as the two parties fought to preserve or overturn what had been decided by armies just eleven years earlier. Riding a wave of popular revulsion at the numerous scandals of the Grant administration and a sluggish economy, Tilden received some 260,000 more votes than his opponent. But contested returns in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina ultimately led to Hayes’s being declared the winner by a specially created, Republican-dominated Electoral Commission after four tense months of political intrigue and threats of violence. President Grant took the threats seriously: he ordered armed federal troops into the streets of Washington to keep the peace. ... Fraud of the Century presents compelling evidence that fraud by Republican vote-counters in the three southern states, and especially in Louisiana, robbed Tilden of the presidency. It is at once a masterful example of political reporting and an absorbing read.}}

The concurrent 1876 South Carolina gubernatorial election in particular was extremely close, and rife with violence and likely electoral fraud. Chamberlain ran against Democrat Wade Hampton III, who was a Lieutenant General in the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia during the Civil War, and a leader of the Redeemers. Hampton's campaign for governor was marked by extensive violence by the Red Shirts, who intimidated and suppressed Black voters in the state in the same way as the Mississippi Plan of 1874–1875.{{cite book |last=Rod|first=Andrew |date=19 May 2008|title=Wade Hampton: Confederate Warrior to Southern Redeemer|publisher=University of North Carolina Press|pages=408–410|isbn=978-0807831939}} Immediately after the 1876 South Carolina gubernatorial results were announced, both the Republican and Democratic parties accused each other of fraud. Hampton received 92,261 votes to Chamberlain's 91,127, that is 50.3% to 49.7%. However, the State Board of Canvassers, which was composed of five Republicans, declared that the elections in Edgefield County and Laurens County were so tainted by fraud that their results would be excluded from the final tally. This changed the Republican tally from a 1,134-vote loss to a 3,145-vote victory.{{cite journal |last=King|first=Ronald|s2cid=145297405|title=Counting the Votes: South Carolina's Stolen Election of 1876|journal=The Journal of Interdisciplinary History|year=2001|volume=32|issue=2|pages=169–191|location=Cambridge|publisher=MIT Press|doi=10.1162/002219501750442369|jstor=3656976}}

To summarize, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was ultimately elected president by winning the Electoral College 185-184, despite losing the popular vote 47.9-50.9%. The tipping-point state was South Carolina, which Hayes had won 91,786 to 90,897 (50.24% to 49.76%), for South Carolina's 7 electoral votes. And Democrat Wade Hampton III was elected governor of South Carolina, on the same ballot, 92,261 to 91,127 (50.3% to 49.7%). This was in a state whose elections had been conducted in an atmosphere of widespread violence and fraud, and led to the disputed government of South Carolina of 1876–77. In 2001, Ronald F. King used modern statistical techniques on the election returns and concluded: "Application of social science methodology to the gubernatorial election of 1876 in South Carolina confirms charges of fraud raised by Republicans at the time of the election.... [the result] was the product of massive voter fraud and intimidation of black voters."Ronald F. King, "Counting the Votes: South Carolina's Stolen Election of 1876" Journal of Interdisciplinary History (Autumn 2001), Vol. 32 Issue 2, pp 169–191.

From December 1876 to April 1877, the Republican and Democratic parties in South Carolina each claimed to be the legitimate government, declaring that they controlled the governorship and state legislature. Each government debated and passed laws, raised militias, collected taxes, and conducted other business as if the other did not exist. And not only were the presidential and gubernatorial elections in South Carolina disputed, but they were also disputed in Louisiana and Florida, causing similar dual government disputes in those two states. In Louisiana, Democrat Francis T. Nicholls had defeated Stephen B. Packard 84,487 to 76,477 (52.49% to 47.51%) in the 1876 Louisiana gubernatorial election, yet Republican Rutherford B. Hayes had defeated Democrat Samuel J. Tilden in Louisiana 75,315 to 70,508 (51.65% to 48.35%) on the same ballot. And in Florida, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes had defeated Democrat Samuel J. Tilden 23,849 to 22,927 (50.99% to 49.01%), yet on the same ballot Democrat George F. Drew defeated Republican Marcellus L. Stearns 24,613 to 24,116 (50.51% to 49.49%) in the 1876 Florida gubernatorial election. Most importantly, the 1876 presidential election was also disputed with Tilden having 184 electoral votes, Hayes having 165 electoral votes, and the 20 disputed electoral votes all needing to go to Hayes to give him a majority of 185 out of 369 electoral votes.

To resolve the 1876 presidential election, an "Electoral Commission" was created, consisting of fifteen members: five representatives selected by the House, five senators selected by the Senate, four Supreme Court justices named in the law, and a fifth Supreme Court justice selected by the other four. Originally, it was planned that the commission would consist of seven Democrats and seven Republicans, with an independent (Justice David Davis) as the fifteenth member of the commission. According to historian Roy Morris Jr., "no one, perhaps not even Davis himself, knew which presidential candidate he preferred." Just as the Electoral Commission Bill was passing Congress, Davis was elected to the Senate by Democrats in the Illinois legislature, who believed that they had purchased Davis' support for Tilden, but this was a miscalculation: Davis promptly excused himself from the commission and resigned as a Justice in order to take his Senate seat. Because of this, Davis was unable to assume the spot, always intended for him, as one of the Supreme Court's members of the Commission. His replacement on the Commission was Republican Supreme Court Justice Joseph P. Bradley, resulting in an 8–7 majority for Republicans, which in turn awarded Hayes the 20 disputed electoral votes on party-line votes, and thus Hayes had won the presidency by an electoral vote of 185–184 despite losing the popular vote 47.9% to 50.9%.

Hayes was peacefully sworn in as president privately on Saturday, March 3, 1877 and publicly on Monday March 5, 1877. On March 31, Hampton and Chamberlain met with President Hayes to discuss the situation in South Carolina. On April 3, Hayes ordered the withdrawal of federal troops from South Carolina, which they did on April 10. Chamberlain, realizing that he could not continue in his role without the support of federal troops, resigned on April 11, 1877.{{cite web |url=http://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/election-of-1876/|last=Rubin III|first=Hyman S.|title=Election of 1876 |date=17 May 2016|publisher=South Carolina Encyclopedia|access-date=13 June 2020}} Embittered, Chamberlain blamed the President for having betrayed the mass of South Carolina's voters; the state's population was 58% African American. After conceding the governorship to Hampton, Chamberlain stated, "If a majority of people in a State are unable by physical force to maintain their rights, they must be left to political servitude." After Chamberlain's concession, Hampton was declared the sole governor of South Carolina. Chamberlain left the state and moved to New York City, and became a successful Wall Street attorney. South Carolina would not elect another Republican governor until 1974, 100 years after Chamberlain was elected in 1874.{{Cite book|title=The Bloody South Carolina Election of 1876: Wade Hampton III, the Red Shirt Campaign for Governor and the End of Reconstruction|first1=Jerry L.|last1=West|publisher=McFarland|date=November 12, 2010|isbn=978-0786448890 }} Hampton was later elected to the U.S. Senate by the South Carolina legislature for two terms, from 1879 to 1891.

This series of events is referred to as the Compromise of 1877, a corrupt bargain by which Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was elected president despite losing the popular vote while Southern Democrats were given state-level power in the former Confederate states despite having committed violence and electoral fraud against African Americans. The loser of the Compromise of 1877 were African Americans, as Republicans allowed Southern Democrats to create hegemony in the former Confederate states, depriving African Americans of the protection of federal troops and the ability to elect Republican candidates in statewide and congressional races. Republicans never won a single Deep South state again until they won Louisiana in 1956, and Republican Barry Goldwater won all the Deep South states in 1964. This was despite the fact that African Americans constituted a majority or near-majority of the populations of the Deep South states, at least until the Great Migration.

{{Main|Lodge Bill}}

{{See also|George H. Tinkham}}

File:Henry Cabot Lodge.jpg in 1905]]

File:StephenGroverCleveland.jpg (1885–1889 and 1893–1897)]]

File:Pach Brothers - Benjamin Harrison (cropped) (cropped).jpg (1889–1893)]]

Republican Henry Cabot Lodge was an American politician and statesman from Massachusetts, who served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1887 to 1893, and in United States Senate from 1893 to 1924.{{cn|date=March 2025}} In 1890, Lodge co-authored the Federal Elections Bill, along with Senator George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts, that guaranteed federal protection for African American voting rights. Although the proposed legislation was supported by President Benjamin Harrison, the bill was blocked due to the efforts of filibustering Democrats{{cite book |last1=Wilson |first1=Kirt H. |title=The Politics of Place and Presidential Rhetoric in the United States, 1875–1901 |publisher=Texas A&M University Press |year=2005 |isbn=978-1-58544-440-3 |pages=32, 33 |chapter=1 |access-date=November 19, 2011 |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=oxAy2SDXvBkC&q=Civil+rights+rhetoric+and+the+American+presidency&pg=PP1}}{{Dead link|date=July 2024|bot=InternetArchiveBot|fix-attempted=yes}} and Republican William M. Stewart of Nevada in the Senate.

Republican William M. Stewart described how he helped defeat the Lodge Bill in his own memoir, published in 1908. Stewart worked with other Democrats, including Arthur Pue Gorman of Maryland, to defeat the Lodge Bill.{{cn|date=May 2025}}

Democrat Grover Cleveland was elected governor of New York in 1882, and was elected President in 1884, becoming the first Democratic President after the Civil War.

During the late 19th century, the state of New York was a swing state in presidential elections. Cleveland won the popular vote in all three of his presidential elections, but these were suspect due to the disenfranchisement of African Americans who mostly favored Harrison in the South, as was noted by Republican politicians at the time and by modern scholars. In particular, Republican Benjamin Harrison won Cleveland's home state of New York in 1888, which single-handedly cost Cleveland the 1888 presidential election given New York had 36 electoral votes.{{Cite journal|last=Geruso|first=Michael|year=2022|title=Inversions in US Presidential Elections: 1836–2016|journal=Am Econ J Appl Econ |volume=14|issue=1 |pages=327–357|doi=10.1257/app.20200210 |pmid=38213750 |pmc=10782436 }}Gorman, Joseph (1979). "The Election of 1888: Electoral College 'Misfire' or Reflection of the Popular Will?: An Analysis of Grover Cleveland's Popular Vote Pluralities in Selected Southern States." (For the Library of Congress.) Congressional Record: Volume 125, Part 12 (June 13, 1979), [http://books.google.com/books?id=UIow7xssVpgC&pg=PA14627 pp. 14627–14638].Beatty, Bess (1987). A revolution gone backward: the Black response to national politics, 1876–1896. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, Inc., [https://books.google.com/books?id=z7TOEAAAQBAJ p. 104].

Also, the former Confederate state of Virginia was competitive in the first two of Cleveland's three elections. Cleveland won Virginia in 1884 by 2.15% and Virginia in 1888 by just 0.53%, but won Virginia in 1892 by 17.46%.

In 1892, Cleveland had campaigned against the Lodge Bill,James B. Hedges (1940), "North America", in William L. Langer, ed., An Encyclopedia of World History, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Part V, Section G, Subsection 1c, p. 794. which would have strengthened voting rights protections through the appointing of federal supervisors of congressional elections upon a petition from the citizens of any district. The Enforcement Act of 1871 had provided for a detailed federal overseeing of the electoral process, from registration to the certification of returns. Cleveland succeeded in ushering in the 1894 repeal of this law.Congressional Research Service (2004), The Constitution of the United States: Analysis and Interpretation – Analysis of Cases Decided by the Supreme Court of the United States to June 28, 2002, Washington: Government Printing Office, "Fifteenth Amendment", "Congressional Enforcement", "Federal Remedial Legislation", p. 2058.

The failure of the Lodge Bill led to unsuccessful attempts to have the federal courts protect voting rights in Williams v. Mississippi (1898) and Giles v. Harris (1903). These cases were a few years after Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which had upheld "separate but equal" racial segregation laws.{{citation needed|date=November 2024}}

Ultimately, national Republicans gave up on voting rights for African Americans and winning the eleven former Confederate states, both because of opposition from Southern Democrats and the fact they did not need them to win presidential elections and majorities in Congress. In the 1896 presidential election, Republican William McKinley won the popular vote 51.0% to 46.7% and the Electoral College 271-176. McKinley did win the border states Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, and Kentucky (except for 1 electoral vote in the latter), but lost all the 11 former Confederate states. Republicans did not win even a single former Confederate state from 1880 until they won Tennessee in the 1920 presidential election, though they may have been able to had the Lodge Bill passed.

When a group of white supremacists violently overthrew the duly elected government of Wilmington, North Carolina, on November 10, 1898, in an event that came to be recognized as the Wilmington massacre of 1898, Republican President William McKinley refused requests by Black leaders to send in federal marshals or federal troops to protect black citizens,{{cite news|title=The 1898 Wilmington Massacre Is an Essential Lesson in How State Violence Has Targeted Black Americans

|url=https://time.com/5861644/1898-wilmington-massacre-essential-lesson-state-violence/|date=July 1, 2020|newspaper=Time Magazine}} and ignored city residents' appeals for help to recover from the widespread destruction of the predominantly black neighborhood of Brooklyn, the majority-black neighborhood in Wilmington.{{cite news|title=Letter from an African American citizen of Wilmington to the President|url=http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-newsouth/4714|date=November 13, 1898|newspaper=Learn NC, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill}} This was despite the fact that McKinley was the last president to have served in the American Civil War; he was the only one to begin his service as an enlisted man and ended it as a brevet major. McKinley had voted for the Lodge Bill, and was defeated in the 1890 U.S. House elections as a representative from Ohio.{{cn|date=March 2025}}

In 1900, as the 56th Congress considered proposals for apportioning its seats among the 45 states following the 1900 Federal Census, Representative Edgar D. Crumpacker (R-IN) filed an independent report urging that the Southern states be stripped of seats due to the large numbers of voters they had disfranchised. He noted this was provided for in Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which provided for stripping representation from states that reduced suffrage due to race. From 1896 until 1900, the House of Representatives with a Republican majority had acted in more than thirty cases to set aside election results from Southern states where the House Elections Committee had concluded that "[B]lack voters had been excluded due to fraud, violence, or intimidation".{{cite book |last1=Sherman |first1=Richard B. |title=The Republican Party and Black America from McKinley to Hoover, 1896–1933 |date=1973 |publisher=Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia |isbn=978-0-8139-0467-2 |page=18 |url=https://archive.org/details/republicanparty00rich/page/18/mode/1up |access-date=28 May 2022}} However, in the early 1900s, it began to back off, after Democrats won a majority, which included Southern delegations that were solidly in Democratic hands. However, concerted opposition by the Southern Democratic bloc was aroused, and the effort failed.{{cite book |last1=Valelly |first1=Richard M. |title=The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement |date=2009 |publisher=University of Chicago Press |pages=146–14 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=V4__EYITWk4C&pg=PA128 |access-date=October 21, 2015 |isbn=978-0-226-84527-2}}

===Scale of the disfranchisement===

File:G. H. Tinkham ggbain.29405 - retouched.jpg {{circa}} 1918]]

Some Northern Congressmen continued to raise the issue of Black disfranchisement and resulting malapportionment. For instance, on December 6, 1920, Representative George H. Tinkham (R-MA) offered a resolution for the Committee of Census to investigate the alleged disfranchisement of African Americans. Tinkham argued there should be reapportionment in the House related to the voting population of southern states, rather than the general population as enumerated in the census. Such reapportionment was authorized by the Constitution, and would reflect reality so that the South should not get representation for voters it had disfranchised.

Tinkham detailed how outsized the South's representation was related to the total number of voters in the former Confederate states in the 1918 U.S. House elections, compared to other states with the same number of representatives, as shown in the following table:{{Cite news|title=DEMANDS INQUIRY ON DISFRANCHISING; Representative Tinkham Aims to Enforce 14th and 15th Articles of Constitution. ASKS REAPPORTIONMENT House Resolution Will Point Out Disparity Between Southern Membership and Votes Cast|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1920/12/06/archives/demands-inquiry-on-disfranchising-representative-tinkham-aims-to.html|newspaper=The New York Times|access-date=September 4, 2012|date=December 6, 1920|last1=Times|first1=Special to The New York}}

Tinkham was defeated by the Democratic Southern Bloc, and also by fears amongst the northern business elites of increasing the voting power of Northern urban working classes,Smith, J. Douglas; On Democracy's Doorstep: The Inside Story of How the Supreme Court Brought "One Person, One Vote" to the United States; pp. 4–18 {{ISBN|0809074249}} whom both northern business and Southern planter elites believed would vote for large-scale income redistribution at a Federal level.See Rodden, Jonathan A.; [https://web.stanford.edu/~jrodden/wp/shadow.pdf ‘The Long Shadow of the Industrial Revolution: Political Geography and the Representation of the Left’]

{{clear}}

{{main article|Disfranchisement after the Reconstruction era}}

File:Solid South 1880 to 1912.jpg

By 1876, "Redeemer" Democrats had taken control of all state governments in the South. From then until the 1960s, state and local government in the South was almost entirely monopolized by Democrats. The Democrats elected all but a handful of U.S. Representatives and Senators, and Democratic presidential candidates regularly swept the region – from 1880 through 1944, winning a cumulative total of 182 of 187 states. The Democrats reinforced the loyalty of white voters by emphasizing the suffering of the South during the war at the hands of "Yankee invaders" under Republican leadership, and the noble service of their white forefathers in "the Lost Cause". This rhetoric was effective with many Southerners. However, this propaganda was totally ineffective in areas that had been loyal to the Union during the war, such as East Tennessee. Most of East Tennessee welcomed U.S. troops as liberators, and voted Republican even in the Solid South period.Gordon B. McKinney, Southern Mountain Republicans, 1865–1900: Politics and the Appalachian Community (1998)

Despite White Southerners' complaints about Reconstruction, several Southern states kept most provisions of their Reconstruction constitutions for more than two decades, until late in the 19th century.W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1868–1880, New York: Oxford University Press, 1935; reprint, New York: The Free Press, 1998 Disfranchisement of African Americans was a gradual and sometimes haphazard process, and began first in the Deep South states that had the largest African American populations.Kousser, J. Morgan; The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910, p. 213 {{ISBN|0-300-01973-4}} In Georgia, a poll tax was first imposed in 1877. In South Carolina, an indirect literacy test and multiple-ballot box law, called the "Eight Box Law," was enacted in 1882.{{cite book| last =Holt| first =Thomas| author-link =Thomas C. Holt| title =Black over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction| publisher =University of Illinois Press| year =1979| location=Urbana }}

Even after white Democrats regained control of state legislatures, some black candidates were elected to local offices and state legislatures in the South. Black U.S. Representatives were elected from the South as late as the 1890s, usually from overwhelmingly black areas. Intimidation of African American voters and outright electoral fraud were common, before widespread disfranchisement began after the failure of the Lodge Bill of 1890.Perman, Michael; Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908, p. 6 {{ISBN|0807860255}}

In Virginia, the bi-racial Readjuster Party existed from 1877 to 1895, electing William E. Cameron in 1881 as the 39th Governor of Virginia from 1882 to 1886.{{Cite web|url=http://www.ourcampaigns.com/RaceDetail.html?RaceID=262813|title=Our Campaigns – VA Governor Race – Nov 08, 1881}} William Mahone served as a U.S. Senator from Virginia from 1881 to 1887 as a member of the Readjuster Party.{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=DJyBCwAAQBAJ&q=james+barbour+readjuster&pg=PT85|title=A Saga of the New South: Race, Law, and Public Debt in Virginia|last=Tarter|first=Brent|publisher=University of Virginia Press|year=2016|isbn=9780813938769|location=Charlottesville, VA|language=en|oclc=950985518}} Democratic president Grover Cleveland narrowly won Virginia in 1884 51.05% to 48.90%, and won Virginia in 1888 by just 49.99% to 49.46%, a 0.53 percentage point margin and the closest the Republican Party came to winning a former Confederate state until Warren G. Harding won Tennessee in 1920.Dave Leip's U.S. Election Atlas; [https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/compare.php?year=1948&fips=51&f=1&off=0&elect=0&type=state Presidential General Election Results Comparison — Virginia]

In Arkansas, the 1888 and 1890 gubernatorial elections were competitive, with Democrat James Philip Eagle winning only 54.09% to 45.91% and 55.51% to 44.49%, respectively. Eagle ran against a fusion ticket of the Union Labor and Republican parties, with the Republican party endorsing the Union Labor party candidates.McCollom, Jason. [https://www.jstor.org/stable/40543181 "The Agricultural Wheel, the Union Labor Party, and the 1889 Arkansas Legislature."] Arkansas Historical Quarterly 68.2 (2009): 157-175. Wealthy white landowners were extremely angry that poor blacks and whites might be uniting against them. In 1891, the Arkansas Democratic Party thus introduced a poll tax that would weigh extremely heavily upon poor Union Labor supporters and also introduced the secret ballot which would make it more difficult for illiterate blacks and poor whites to cast a vote even if they could pay the poll tax.{{cite book|last1=Whayne|first1=Jeannie M.|last2=DeBlack|first2=Thomas A.|last3=Sabo|first3=George|title=Arkansas: A Narrative History|date=July 2014 |page=280|publisher=University of Arkansas Press |isbn=978-1610750431}}

{{See also|People's Party (United States)}}

File:Daniel Lindsay Russell.jpg (1897 to 1901)]]

The People's Party, usually known as the Populist Party or simply the Populists, was an agrarian populist party political party that was founded in 1892.{{cite book |last1=Goodwyn |first1=Lawrence |title=The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America |url=https://www.amazon.com/Populist-Moment-History-Agrarian-America-ebook/dp/B006TCBJXA/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.W287C2qtXYCxTqL-srDFDg.cSf1fYRV2bXXTLMhsTV1MVYEiwUpJxlsiY-jL6OK2TU&qid=1742346551&sr=8-1 |url-access=registration |date=1978 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=9780199736096 }} The Populists developed a following in the South, among poor white people who resented the Democratic Party establishment. Populists formed alliances with Republicans (including black Republicans) and challenged the Democratic bosses. In some cases, the Populists and their allies defeated their Democratic opponents.C. Van Woodward, The Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (1951) pp 235–290

Unfortunately, the success of Populist Party was a major impetus for even more thorough disfranchisement. The Populist Party was dissolved in 1909, by which point disfranchisement of African Americans was virtually complete. The Populist Party did win some U.S. House seats in the former Confederate states, including Thomas E. Watson of Georgia (1891–1893) and several representatives in North Carolina.{{cite web |last1=Bouie |first1=Jamelle |title=America holds onto an undemocratic assumption from its founding: that some people deserve more power than others. |url=https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/republicans-racism-african-americans.html |author-link=Jamelle Bouie |work=The New York Times |access-date=20 August 2019 |date=August 14, 2019 |quote=Despite insurgencies at home — the Populist Party, for example, swept through Georgia and North Carolina in the 1890s — reactionary white leaders were able to maintain an iron grip on federal offices until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.}} The Populists also elected North Carolina U.S. Senator Marion Butler (1895–1901).{{cite web|url=http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/butler93/bio.html|title=Marion Butler, 1863–1938|publisher=docsouth.unc.edu|access-date=2015-05-12|last=Durden|first=Robert F.|author1-link=Robert Franklin Durden}}

In North Carolina, Republican Daniel Lindsay Russell was elected Governor of North Carolina in 1896 on a fusionist ticket, a collaboration between Republicans and Populists, and served as the 49th governor of North Carolina from 1897 to 1901.[http://www.ourcampaigns.com/RaceDetail.html?RaceID=133687 Our Campaigns – NC Governor Race – Nov 03, 1896] at www.ourcampaigns.com On November 8, 1898, a part-black fusion slate won elections in Wilmington, then the state's largest city and with a black majority. Alfred Waddell, whom Russell had defeated for Congress in 1878, led thousands of white rioters in the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898; they seized the city government by force, and destroyed the only black-owned newspaper in the state.[http://www.history.ncdcr.gov/1898-wrrc/report/Chapter5.pdf "Chapter 5"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090321002041/http://www.history.ncdcr.gov/1898-wrrc/report/Chapter5.pdf |date=March 21, 2009 }}, 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission Report, North Carolina Dept. of Cultural Resources Although Russell was not up for election in 1898, Democrats used him as a foil in their campaign that year, attacking him for undermining "white supremacy" and fanning fears of "negro rule" to regain control of the state legislature.[http://www.history.ncdcr.gov/1898-wrrc/report/Chapter3.pdf "Chapter 3: Practical Politics"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150924030434/http://www.history.ncdcr.gov/1898-wrrc/report/Chapter3.pdf |date=September 24, 2015 }}, 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission Report, North Carolina Dept. of Cultural Resources To prevent fusionist coalitions or Republicans winning office again, in 1899 the Democrats used their control of the North Carolina legislature to pass an amendment that effectively disenfranchised blacks and many poor whites. As a result, voter rolls dropped dramatically, blacks were excluded from the political system, and the Republican Party was crippled in the state.{{Cite book|title=Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy|first1=David|last1=Zucchino|quote=But North Carolina’s white supremacist Democrats had a different strategy. They were plotting to take back the state legislature in November “by the ballot or bullet or both,” and then use the Manly editorial to trigger a “race riot” to overthrow Wilmington’s multi-racial government. Led by prominent citizens including Josephus Daniels, publisher of the state’s largest newspaper, and former Confederate Colonel Alfred Moore Waddell, white supremacists rolled out a carefully orchestrated campaign that included raucous rallies, race-baiting editorials and newspaper cartoons, and sensational, fabricated news stories. With intimidation and violence, the Democrats suppressed the black vote and stuffed ballot boxes (or threw them out), to win control of the state legislature on November eighth. Two days later, more than 2,000 heavily armed Red Shirts swarmed through Wilmington, torching the Record office, terrorizing women and children, and shooting at least sixty black men dead in the streets. The rioters forced city officials to resign at gunpoint and replaced them with mob leaders. Prominent blacks—and sympathetic whites—were banished. Hundreds of terrified black families took refuge in surrounding swamps and forests. This brutal insurrection is a rare instance of a violent overthrow of an elected government in the U.S. It halted gains made by blacks and restored racism as official government policy, cementing white rule for another half century. It was not a “race riot,” as the events of November 1898 came to be known, but rather a racially motivated rebellion launched by white supremacists. In Wilmington’s Lie'', Pulitzer Prize-winner David Zucchino uses contemporary newspaper accounts, diaries, letters and official communications to create a gripping and compelling narrative that weaves together individual stories of hate and fear and brutality. This is a dramatic and definitive account of a remarkable but forgotten chapter of American history.|publisher=Atlantic Monthly Press|date=January 7, 2020|isbn=978-0802148650 }}

In Alabama, Reuben Kolb sought to unite poor farmers and sharecroppers with industrial workers and Black voters as a Populist in 1892 and 1894. The gubernatorial elections he lost in 1892 and 1894 are considered to have had widespread vote tampering and fraud.{{cite web | title=Governor's Election of 1892 | website=Encyclopedia of Alabama | date=2023-03-27 | url=https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/governors-election-of-1892/ | access-date=2024-09-06}}{{cite web|url=https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/reuben-f-kolb/|publisher=Encyclopedia of Alabama|title=Reuben F. Kolb|last=Warren|first=Danielle N.|date=22 Jan 2010|access-date=25 Jun 2023}} In 1894, Kolb retreated from his brief flirtation with the idea of Black rights, "a telling reflection of the shallow commitment of Kolb and many of his followers to the notion of racial equality." And, after the Populist party's electoral failure in 1896, "Kolb confessed his apostasy and pathetically pleaded to be allowed to return to the party of white supremacy."{{Cite book|last=Carter|first=Dan T.|url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/32739924|title=The politics of rage : George Wallace, the origins of the new conservatism, and the transformation of American politics|publisher=Simon & Schuster|year=1995|isbn=0-684-80916-8|location=New York|pages=39|oclc=32739924}}{{cite web|url=http://www.ourcampaigns.com/RaceDetail.html?RaceID=262837|title=AL Governor 1896|publisher=Our Campaigns|access-date=October 27, 2016}}

In Louisiana, the 1896 Louisiana gubernatorial election was competitive, with incumbent Democratic governor Murphy J. Foster defeating the Republican-Populist fusion candidate John Newton Pharr (1829–1903), a sugar planter from St. Mary Parish. Pharr had possibly gained a majority of votes cast and won twenty-six of the then fifty-nine parishes, with his greatest strength in north central Louisiana and the Florida Parishes to the east of Baton Rouge.William C. Havard, Rudolf Heberle, and Perry H. Howard, The Louisiana Elections of 1960, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Studies, 1963, p. 24 With the assistance of the Democratic political machine based in New Orleans, Foster officially received 116,116 votes (57 percent) to Pharr's 87,698 ballots (43 percent).{{cite book|title=Louisiana Almanac: 2006-2007|author=Frois, J.|date=2006|publisher=Pelican Publishing Company|isbn=9781455607693|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=-RU-0TRnuhsC|page=543|access-date=2014-10-24}} The election was heavily marked by fraud which benefited Foster and widespread violence to suppress black Republican voting, and a clear accounting of the election results is unknown.Henry E. Chambers, History of Louisiana, Vol. 2 (Chicago: American Historical Society, 1925), pp. 15-16. Subsequently, as governor, Foster signed off on the new Louisiana Constitution of 1898, establishing a poll tax, literacy test, grandfather clause, and the secret ballot that made voting by poor whites much more difficult and producing a reduction in the number of registered black voters by 96 percent, from 130,334 to 5,320. After Foster's re-election in 1896, Louisiana general elections were non-competitive. The only competition took place in Democratic primaries.{{cite journal|last1=Dethloff|first1=Henry C.|last2=Jones|first2=Robert R.|title=Race Relations in Louisiana, 1877-98|journal=Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association|date=Autumn 1968|volume=9|issue=4|pages=301–323|publisher=Louisiana Historical Association}}

In Georgia, Thomas E. Watson had long supported black enfranchisement throughout the South, as a basic tenet of his populist philosophy. He condemned lynching and tried to protect black voters from lynch mobs. The Populists made significant runs for governor in 1892, 1894, and 1896, which would have been stronger but for large scale electoral fraud.{{Cite book|first1=J. Morgan.|last1=Kousser|title=The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910|page=211|date=January 1, 1974|isbn=0300016964 }} However, after 1900 Watson's interpretation of populism shifted. He no longer viewed the populist movement as being racially inclusive. By 1908, Watson identified as a white supremacist and ran as such during his presidential bid. He used his highly influential magazine and newspaper to launch vehement diatribes against blacks.{{Cite web|url=https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/thomas-e-watson-1856-1922|title=Thomas E. Watson|last=Pierannunzi|first=Carol|date=January 23, 2004|website=New Georgia Encyclopedia|access-date=April 29, 2019}}

To prevent bi-racial and Populist coalitions in the future and to stop relying on violence and electoral fraud associated with suppressing the black vote during elections, Southern Democrats acted to disfranchise both black people and poor white people.6 J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Rise of the One-Party South, 1880–1910 (Yale UP, 1974). From 1890 to 1910, after the failure of the Lodge Bill and beginning with Mississippi in 1890, all 11 former Confederate states adopted new constitutions and other laws which included various devices to restrict voter registration. These changes disfranchised virtually all black and many poor white residents.{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=V4__EYITWk4C&pg=PA128|title=The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement|first=Richard M.|last=Valelly|date=October 2, 2009|publisher=University of Chicago Press|isbn=9780226845272 |via=Google Books}} These devices applied to all citizens; in practice they disfranchised most black citizens and also "would remove [from voter registration rolls] the less educated, less organized, more impoverished whites as well – and that would ensure one-party Democratic rules through most of the 20th century in the South".[https://ssrn.com/abstract=224731 Richard H. Pildes, "Democracy, Anti-Democracy, and the Canon"], Constitutional Commentary, Vol.17, 2000, p.10, Accessed 10 Mar 2008Glenn Feldman, The Disenfranchisement Myth: Poor Whites and Suffrage Restriction in Alabama, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004, pp. 135–136 All the Southern states adopted provisions that restricted voter registration and suffrage, including new requirements for poll taxes, longer residency, and subjective literacy tests. Some also used the device of grandfather clauses, exempting voters who had a grandfather voting by a particular year (usually before the Civil War, when black people could not vote.)Michael Perman. Struggle for Mastery: Disenfranchisement (sic) in the South, 1888–1908 (2001), Introduction

In 1900, U.S. Senator Benjamin Tillman explained how African Americans were disenfranchised in his state of South Carolina in a white supremacist speech:

In my State there were 135,000 negro voters, or negroes of voting age, and some 90,000 or 95,000 white voters.... Now, I want to ask you, with a free vote and a fair count, how are you going to beat 135,000 by 95,000? How are you going to do it? You had set us an impossible task.

We did not disfranchise the negroes until 1895. Then we had a constitutional convention convened which took the matter up calmly, deliberately, and avowedly with the purpose of disfranchising as many of them as we could under the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. We adopted the educational qualification as the only means left to us, and the negro is as contented and as prosperous and as well protected in South Carolina to-day as in any State of the Union south of the Potomac. He is not meddling with politics, for he found that the more he meddled with them the worse off he got. As to his "rights"—I will not discuss them now. We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will.... I would to God the last one of them was in Africa and that none of them had ever been brought to our shores.{{cite news

|first=Benjamin

|last=Tillman

|title=Speech of Senator Benjamin R. Tillman

|date=March 23, 1900

|magazine=Congressional Record, 56th Congress, 1st Session

|pages=3223–3224

|others=(Reprinted in Richard Purday, ed., Document Sets for the South in U. S. History [Lexington, MA.: D.C. Heath and Company, 1991], p. 147.)

|url=http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/55/}}

White Democrats also opposed Republican economic policies such as the high tariff and the gold standard, both of which were seen as benefiting Northern industrial interests at the expense of the agrarian society of the South during the 19th century. Nevertheless, holding all political power was at the heart of their resistance. From 1876 through 1944, the national Democratic party opposed any calls for civil rights for black people. In Congress, Southern Democrats blocked such efforts whenever Republicans targeted the issue.Jeffery A. Jenkins, Justin Peck, and Vesla M. Weaver. "Between Reconstructions: Congressional Action on Civil Rights, 1891–1940." Studies in American Political Development 24#1 (2010): 57–89. [http://faculty.virginia.edu/jajenkins/race_SAPD.pdf online]{{Cite book|title=Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America's Deep South, 1944–1972|url=https://www.amazon.com/Paths-Out-Dixie-Democratization-Authoritarian-ebook/dp/B007BOK3A0/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=|first1=Robert|last1=Mickey|date=February 19, 2015}}

White Democrats passed "Jim Crow" laws which reinforced white supremacy through racial segregation.[https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4172453 Connie Rice: Top 10 Election Myths to Get Rid Of : NPR] The situation in Louisiana was an example—see John N. Pharr, Regular Democratic Organization#Reconstruction and aftermath, and the note to Murphy J. Foster (who served as governor of Louisiana from 1892 to 1900). The Fourteenth Amendment provided for apportionment of representation in Congress to be reduced if a state disenfranchised part of its population. However, this clause was never applied to Southern states that disenfranchised black residents. No black candidate was elected to any office in the South for decades after the turn of the century. Black residents were also excluded from juries and other participation in civil life.

File:Map of USA South.svg]]

File:1916 United States presidential election results map by county.svg, Democratic President Woodrow Wilson won almost every single county in the Deep South.]]

Democratic candidates won by large margins in a majority of Southern states in every presidential election from 1876 to 1948, except for 1928, when the Democratic candidate was Al Smith, a Catholic New Yorker. Even in that election, the divided South provided Smith with nearly three-fourths of his electoral votes. Scholar Richard Valelly credited Woodrow Wilson's 1912 election to the disfranchisement of black people in the South, and also noted far-reaching effects in Congress, where the Democratic South gained "about 25 extra seats in Congress for each decade between 1903 and 1953".{{efn|Despite the South's excessive representation relative to voting population, the Great Migration did cause Mississippi to lose Congressional districts following the 1930 and 1950 Censuses, whilst South Carolina and Alabama also lost Congressional seats after the former Census and Arkansas following the latter. }} Journalist Matthew Yglesias argues:

{{blockquote|The weird thing about Jim Crow politics is that white southerners with conservative views on taxes, moral values, and national security would vote for Democratic presidential candidates who didn't share their views. They did that as part of a strategy for maintaining white supremacy in the South.See [https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2007/08/why-did-the-south-turn-republican/45956/ Matthew Yglesias, "Why did the South turn Republican?"], The Atlantic August 24, 2007.}}

Some of the former Confederate states, particularly those that were not majority-African American, likely would have still voted Democratic even if African Americans were not disenfranchised due to partisan loyalty. In particular, Texas had never voted for a Republican presidential candidate until 1928, even during Reconstruction.Dave Leip's U.S. Election Atlas; [https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/compare.php?year=1920&fips=48&f=1&off=0&elect=0&type=state Presidential General Election Results Comparison – Texas] The border state of Kentucky still remained a Democratic stronghold in presidential elections, even though it did not disenfranchise African Americans.

In the Deep South (South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana), Democratic dominance was overwhelming, with Democrats routinely receiving 80%–90% of the vote, and only a tiny number of Republicans holding state legislative seats or local offices. Mississippi and South Carolina were the most extreme cases – between 1900 and 1944, only in 1928, when the three subcoastal Mississippi counties of Pearl River, Stone and George went for Hoover, did the Democrats lose even one of these two states' counties in any presidential election.[http://geoelections.free.fr/USA/elec_comtes/1900.htm Presidential election of 1900 – Map by Counties] (and subsequent years)

The German-American Texas counties of Gillespie and Kendall, Arkansas Ozarks counties of Newton and Searcy, and a number of counties in Appalachian parts of Alabama and Georgia would vote Republican in presidential elections through this period.Sullivan, Robert David; [http://www.americamagazine.org/content/unconventional-wisdom/how-red-and-blue-map-evolved-over-past-century ‘How the Red and Blue Map Evolved Over the Past Century’]; America Magazine in The National Catholic Review; June 29, 2016 Arkansas consistently voted Democratic from 1876 to 1964, though Democratic margins were lower than in the Deep South. Even in 1939, Florida was described as "still very largely an empty State," with only North Florida largely settled until after World War II.{{cite book|title=Florida. A Guide to the Southernmost State|date=1939|place=New York|author=Federal Writers' Project|publisher=Oxford University Press|page=7}} In Louisiana, non-partisan tendencies remained strong among wealthy sugar planters in Acadiana (Cajun Country) and within the business elite of New Orleans.{{cite journal|last=Schott|first=Matthew J.|title=Progressives against Democracy: Electoral Reform in Louisiana, 1894–1921|journal=Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association|volume=20|issue=3|date=Summer 1979|pages=247–260}}

In East Tennessee, Western North Carolina, and Southwest Virginia, Republicans retained a significant presence in these remote Appalachian regions which supported the Union during the Civil War and had few African Americans, winning occasional U.S. House seats and often drawing over 40% in presidential votes statewide.{{cite book|last=Menendez|first=Albert J.|year=2005|publisher=McFarland & Company|location=Jefferson, North Carolina|title=The Geography of Presidential Elections in the United States, 1868–2004|pages=149–153|isbn=0786422173}} In particular, Tennessee's 1st and 2nd congressional districts have been continuously held by Republicans since 1881 and 1867, respectively, to the present day. Although Tennessee disenfranchised African Americans, support for Republicans remained high in East Tennessee and kept the state relatively competitive during the Jim Crow era, although Democrats almost always still won statewide.{{cite web|url=http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/imagegallery.php?EntryID=S044|title=Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture: Slavery|website=tennesseeencyclopedia.net|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070927190846/http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/imagegallery.php?EntryID=S044|archive-date=2007-09-27}}

File:1920 Electoral Map.png, all the former Confederate states except Tennessee voted for the Democratic Party, and all other states except Kentucky voted for the Republican Party.]]

By the 1920s, as memories of the Civil War faded, the Solid South cracked slightly. For instance, a Republican was elected U.S. Representative from Texas in 1920, serving until 1932. The Republican national landslides in 1920 and 1928 had some effects.{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=9WaaAAAAIAAJ |title=The Presidential Vote, 1896–1932 – Google Books |publisher=Stanford University Press |access-date=August 12, 2014|year=1934|isbn=9780804716963 }} In the 1920 elections, Tennessee elected a Republican governor and five out of 10 Republican U.S. Representatives, and became the first former Confederate state to vote for a Republican candidate for U.S. President since Reconstruction.{{cite journal|last=Grantham|first=Dewey W.|title=Tennessee and Twentieth-Century American Politics|journal=Tennessee Historical Quarterly|volume=54|issue=3|date=Fall 1995|pages=210–229}} North Carolina abolished its poll tax in 1920.‘Vote for Constitutional Amendments by Counties’, in North Carolina Manual (1920), pp. 324–328{{cite book|last=Schuyler|first=Lorraine Gates|title=The Weight of Their Votes: Southern Women and Political Leverage in the 1920s|page=190 |isbn=9780807857762}}

In the 1928 presidential election, Al Smith received serious backlash as a Catholic in the largely Protestant South in 1928.{{cite book |last=Farris |first=Scott |year=2012 |title=Almost President: The Men Who Lost The Race But Changed The Nation |publisher= Lyons Press |isbn=9780762763788 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=4j1OBwAAQBAJ |location=Ottawa}} Southern Baptist churches ordered their followers to vote against Smith, claiming that he would close down Protestant churches, end freedom of worship, and prohibit reading the Bible. However, it was widely believed that Republican Herbert Hoover supported integration or at least was not committed to maintaining racial segregation, overcoming opposition to Smith's campaign in areas with large nonvoting black populations. Smith only managed to carry Arkansas (the home state of his running mate Joseph T. Robinson) and the 5 states of the Deep South, and nearly lost Alabama by less than 3%.

The boll weevil, a species of beetle that feeds on cotton buds and flowers, crossed the Rio Grande near Brownsville, Texas, to enter the United States from Mexico in 1892.{{Cite journal|last1=Lange|first1=Fabian|last2=Olmstead|first2=Alan L.|last3=Rhode|first3=Paul W.|date=2009-09-01|title=The Impact of the Boll Weevil, 1892–1932|url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/div-classtitlethe-impact-of-the-boll-weevil-18921932div/B726479ED1550ECE8F28A7D8115F5A52|journal=The Journal of Economic History|volume=69|issue=3|pages=685–718|doi=10.1017/S0022050709001090|s2cid=154646873|issn=1471-6372}} It reached southeastern Alabama in 1909, and by the mid-1920s had entered all cotton-growing regions in the U.S., traveling 40 to 160 miles per year. The boll weevil contributed to Southern farmers' economic woes during the 1920s, a situation exacerbated by the Great Depression in the 1930s.Economic impacts of the boll weevil: {{cite web|url=http://www.bollweevil.ext.msstate.edu/history.html|title=History of the Boll Weevil in the United States |author=Mississippi State University}} The boll weevil infestation has been credited with bringing about economic diversification in the Southern US, including the expansion of peanut cropping. The citizens of Enterprise, Alabama, erected the Boll Weevil Monument in 1919, perceiving that their economy had been overly dependent on cotton, and that mixed farming and manufacturing were better alternatives."History of Enterprise". City of Enterprise, Alabama. Archived from the original on 2013-07-03. Retrieved December 21, 2020. By 1922, it was taking 8% of the cotton in the country annually. A 2020 NBER paper found that the boll weevil spread contributed to fewer lynchings, less Confederate monument construction, less KKK activity, and higher non-white voter registration.{{Cite journal|last1=Feigenbaum|first1=James J|last2=Mazumder|first2=Soumyajit|last3=Smith|first3=Cory B|date=2020|title=When Coercive Economies Fail: The Political Economy of the US South After the Boll Weevil|series=Working Paper Series |journal= Social Science Research |doi=10.3386/w27161|s2cid=219441177|url=http://www.nber.org/papers/w27161|doi-access=free}}

Southern demography also began to change.Harold D, Woodman, "Economic Reconstruction and the Rise of the New South, 1865–1900" in John B. Boles, and Evelyn Thomas Nolen, eds., Interpreting Southern history: Historiographical essays in honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham (LSU Press, 1987) pp. 254–307, quoting pp 273–274. From 1910 through 1970, about 6.5 million black Southerners moved to urban areas in other parts of the country in the Great Migration, and demographics began to change Southern states in other ways. The failures of the South's cotton crop due to the boll weevil was a major impetus for the Great Migration, although not the only one.{{Cite web|url=https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/migrations/great-migration|title=The Great Migration (1910–1970)|date=May 20, 2021|access-date=March 21, 2022|archive-date=September 27, 2022|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220927001728/https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/migrations/great-migration|url-status=live}}

However, with the Democratic national landslide of 1932, the South again became solidly Democratic.Richard J. Jensen, "The Last Party System: Decay of Consensus, 1932–1980", in The Evolution of American Electoral Systems (Paul Kleppner et al. eds.) (1981) pp. 219–225. A number of conservative Southern Democrats felt chagrin at the national party's growing friendliness to organized labor during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, forming the conservative coalition with conservative Republicans in 1937 to stymie further New Deal legislation.{{cite book|first=James T.|last=Patterson|title=Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Y8MfBgAAQBAJ&pg=PR7|year=1967|publisher=University Press of Kentucky|pages=vii–viii|isbn=9780813164045}} Roosevelt was unsuccessful in attempting to purge some of these conservative Southern Democrats in white primaries in the 1938 elections, such as Senator Walter George of Georgia and Senator Ellison Smith of South Carolina, in contrast to successfully ousting representative and chair of the House Rules Committee John J. O'Connor of New York.Susan Dunn, Roosevelt's Purge: How FDR Fought to Change the Democratic Party (2010) passim, esp. p. 204.

In the 1930s, black voters outside the South largely switched to the Democrats,{{cite book|last=Topping|first=Simon|title= Lincoln's Lost Legacy: The Republican Party and the African American Vote, 1928–1952|pages=11, 14–16|publisher=University Press of Florida|year=2008|isbn=978-0813032283}} and other groups with an interest in civil rights (notably Jews, Catholics, and academic intellectuals) became more powerful in the party. Louisiana abolished its poll tax in 1934,{{cite book|last=Sindler|first=Allan P.|title=Huey Long's Louisiana: State politics, 1920–1952|year=1956|publisher=Johns Hopkins University Press|location=Baltimore|pages=84–85}} as did Florida in 1937.Teeples, Ronald K. (1970); The Economics of Voter Turnout, p. 111 Published by University of California Press, Los Angeles

The Republican Party began to make gains in the South after World War II, as the South industrialized and urbanized.Ralph C. Hon, "The South in a War Economy" Southern Economic Journal8#3 (1942), pp. 291–308 [https://www.jstor.org/stable/1052610 online] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200819011852/https://www.jstor.org/stable/1052610|date=August 19, 2020}} World War II marked a time of dramatic change within the South from an economic standpoint, as new industries and military bases were developed by the federal government, providing much-needed capital and infrastructure in the former Confederate states.Morton Sosna, and James C. Cobb, Remaking Dixie: The Impact of World War II on the American South (UP of Mississippi, 1997). Per capita income jumped 140% from 1940 to 1945, compared to 100% elsewhere in the United States. Dewey Grantham said the war "brought an abrupt departure from the South's economic backwardness, poverty, and distinctive rural life, as the region moved perceptively closer to the mainstream of national economic and social life."Grantham, The South in modern America (1994) p 179.Dewey W. Grantham, The South in modern America (1994) pp 172–183.George B. Tindall, The Emergence of the New South pp.694–701, quoting p. 701.

Florida began to expand rapidly after World War II, with retirees and other migrants in Central and South Florida becoming a majority of the state's population. Many of these new residents brought their Republican voting habits with them, diluting traditional Southern hostility to the Republicans.Doherty, Herbert J. (junior); 'Liberal and Conservative Politics in Florida'; The Journal of Politics, vol. 14, no. 3 (August 1952), pp. 403–417 In 1944, the Supreme Court ruled 8–1 in Smith v. Allwright against white primary systems, and most Southern states ended their racially discriminatory primary elections.Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944) They retained other techniques of disenfranchisement, such as poll taxes and literacy tests, which in theory applied to all potential voters, but in practice were administered in a discriminatory manner by white officials.Beyerlein, Kraig and Andrews, Kenneth T.; ‘Black Voting during the Civil Rights Movement: A Micro-Level Analysis’; Social Forces, volume 87, No. 1 (September 2008), pp. 65–93

{{see also|United States congressional delegations from Oklahoma}}

File:Oklahoma Presidential Election Results 1920.svg won Oklahoma in the 1920 presidential election, while losing all the former Confederate states except Tennessee.{{cite web |url=https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?year=1920&fips=40&f=0&off=0&elect=0 |title=1920 Presidential General Election Results – Oklahoma|access-date=2013-08-02 |publisher=Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections}}]]

Oklahoma was considered part of the Solid South, but did not become a state until 1907, and shared characteristics of both the border states and the former Confederate states in the Upper South. Oklahoma disenfranchised its African American population, which comprised less than 10% of the state's population from 1870 to 1960.Finkelman, Paul; African-Americans and the right to vote (Garland Publishing, 1992), pp. 418, 438 However, Oklahoma did not enact a poll tax and remained electorally competitive at the state and federal levels during the Jim Crow era. Oklahoma elected three Republican U.S. Senators before 1964: John W. Harreld (1921–1927), William B. Pine (1925–1931), and Edward H. Moore (1943–1949).{{cite book|last1=Bateman|first1=David A.|last2=Katznelson|first2=Ira|last3=Lapinski|first3=John S.|title=Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy After Reconstruction|year=2018|publisher=Princeton University Press|page=375|isbn=978-0691126494}} Oklahoma had a strong Republican presence in Northwestern Oklahoma, which had close ties to neighboring Kansas, a Republican stronghold.Gaddie, Ronald Keith. [http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/R/RE030.html Republican Party] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110903125824/http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/R/RE030.html |date=2011-09-03 }}, Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture (accessed February 11, 2010).

During the Civil War, most of present-day Oklahoma was designated as Indian Territory and permitted slavery, with most tribal leaders aligning with the Confederacy.{{cite news|last=Pollard|first=Bryan|date=November 23, 2020|title=How the US Civil War Divided Indian Nations|website=History.com|url=https://www.history.com/news/civil-war-native-american-indian-territory-cherokee-home-guard|access-date=August 29, 2022}} However, some tribes and bands sided with the Union, resulting in bloody conflict in the territory, with severe hardships for all residents.Annie Heloise Abel, "The Indians in the Civil War", American Historical Review Vol. 15, No. 2 (Jan. 1910), pp. 281–296. {{JSTOR|1838335|issn=00028762}}John Spencer and Adam Hook, The American Civil War in Indian Territory (2006) The Oklahoma Territory was settled through a series of land runs from 1889 to 1895, which included significant numbers of Republican settlers from the Great Plains.Debo, Angie; And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes, pp. 318–319 {{ISBN|9780691005782}}

Oklahoma did not have a Republican governor until Henry Bellmon was elected in 1962, though Republicans were still able to draw over 40% of the vote statewide during the Jim Crow era.{{cite web |title=1958–1966 results |url=https://oklahoma.gov/content/dam/ok/en/elections/election-results/results-prior-to-1980/1958-1966-results.pdf |publisher=Oklahoma State Election Board |page=35}} Democrats were strongest in Southeast Oklahoma, known as "Little Dixie", whose white settlers were Southerners seeking a start in new lands following the American Civil War.{{cite book|last1=Bateman|first1=David A.|last2=Katznelson|first2=Ira|last3=Lapinski|first3=John S.|title=Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy After Reconstruction|year=2018|publisher=Princeton University Press|page=375|isbn=978-0691126494}} In Guinn v. United States (1915), the Supreme Court invalidated the Oklahoma Constitution's "old soldier" and "grandfather clause" exemptions from literacy tests. Oklahoma and other states quickly reacted by passing laws that created other rules for voter registration that worked against blacks and minorities.Richard M. Valelly, The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, p.141

However, Oklahoma did not enact a poll tax, unlike the former Confederate states. As a result, Oklahoma was still competitive at the presidential level, voting for Warren G. Harding in 1920 and Herbert Hoover in 1928. Oklahoma shifted earlier to supporting Republican presidential candidates, with the state voting for every Republican ticket since 1952, except for Lyndon B. Johnson in his 1964 landslide. Oklahoma is the only Southern state to have never voted for a Democratic presidential candidate after 1964. It was one of only two Southern states, the other being Virginia, to be carried by Republican Gerald Ford in the 1976 presidential election.Sullivan, Robert David; [http://www.americamagazine.org/content/unconventional-wisdom/how-red-and-blue-map-evolved-over-past-century ‘How the Red and Blue Map Evolved Over the Past Century’]; America Magazine in The National Catholic Review; June 29, 2016.

File:ElectoralCollege1896.svg, Republican William McKinley won Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, and Kentucky (except for 1 electoral vote in the latter).]]

In contrast to the 11 former Confederate states, where almost all blacks were disenfranchised during the first half to two-thirds of the twentieth century, for varying reasons blacks remained enfranchised in the border states despite movements for disfranchisement during the 1900s.Ranney, Joseph A.; In the Wake of Slavery: Civil War, Civil Rights, and the Reconstruction of Southern Law; p. 141 {{ISBN|0275989720}} Note that Missouri is classified as a Midwestern state by the Census bureau, and also did not disenfranchise its African American population.Lawrence O. Christensen and Gary R. Kremer, A History of Missouri: Volume IV, 1875 to 1919 (2004)

The border states, being the northern region of the Upper South, had close ties to the industrializing and urbanizing Northeast and Midwest, experiencing a realignment in the 1896 United States presidential election.Diamond, William; ‘Urban and Rural Voting in 1896’; The American Historical Review, vol. 46, no. 2 (January 1941), pp. 281–305R. Hal Williams, Realigning America: McKinley, Bryan and the Remarkable Election of 1896 (U Press of Kansas, 2010), pp. xi, 169–170.

African Americans generally comprised a significantly lower percentage of the populations of the border states than the percentages in the former Confederate states from 1870 to 1960. Less than 10% of the populations of West Virginia and Missouri were African American. In Kentucky, 5–20% of the state's population was African American. In Delaware, 10–20% of the state's population was African American. In Maryland, 15–25% of the state's population was African American.{{cite web |url=https://mapmaker.rutgers.edu/REFERENCE/Hist_Pop_stats.pdf |title=Population Division Working Paper No. 56 |access-date=2018-08-17 |archive-date=2018-09-30 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180930174019/http://mapmaker.rutgers.edu/REFERENCE/Hist_Pop_stats.pdf |url-status=live }}

For West Virginia, "reconstruction, in a sense, began in 1861".Foner, Eric, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, Harper Collins, 2002, p. 38 Unlike the other southern border states, West Virginia did not send the majority of its soldiers to the Union and a substantial portion of the state continued to be controlled by the Confederacy till later in the war.Snell, Mark A., West Virginia and the Civil War. History Press, 2011, p. 28 West Virginia was the last slave state admitted into the Union in 1863, and was the only state in the Border South to also participate in the 1863 Confederate elections. The prospect of those returning ex-Confederates prompted the Wheeling state government to implement laws that restricted their right of suffrage, practicing law and teaching, access to the legal system, and subjected them to "war trespass" lawsuits.Bastress, Robert M., The West Virginia State Constitution, Oxford Univ. Press, 2011, p. 21 The lifting of these restrictions in 1871 resulted in the election of John J. Jacob, a Democrat, to the governorship. It also led to the rejection of the war-time constitution by public vote and a new constitution written under the leadership of ex-Confederates such as Samuel Price, Allen T. Caperton and Charles James Faulkner. In 1876 the state Democratic ticket of eight candidates were all elected, seven of whom were Confederate veterans.Ambler, Charles Henry, A History of West Virginia, Prentice-Hall, 1937, p. 376. For nearly a generation West Virginia was part of the Solid South.Herbert, Hilary Abner Why the Solid South? Or, Reconstruction and Its Results, R. H. Woodward, 1890, pp. 258–284

However, Republicans returned to power in 1896, controlling the governorship for eight of the next nine terms, and electing 82 of 106 U.S. Representatives until 1932.Williams, John Alexander, West Virginia, a History, W. W. Norton, 1984, p. 94 In 1932, as the nation swung to the Democrats, West Virginia again became solidly Democratic. It was perhaps the most reliably Democratic state in the nation between 1932 and 1996, being one of just two states (along with Minnesota) to vote for a Republican president as few as three times in that interval. Moreover, unlike Minnesota (or other nearly as reliably Democratic states like Massachusetts and Rhode Island), it usually had a unanimous (or nearly unanimous) congressional delegation and only elected two Republicans as governor (albeit for a combined 20 years between them).{{cite news | url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2013/10/26/a-blue-states-road-to-red/ | title=A Blue State's Road to Red | newspaper=The Washington Post | date=26 October 2013 | access-date=24 July 2016 | author=Tumulty, Karen}}

Kentucky did usually vote for the Democratic Party in the majority of presidential elections from 1877 to 1964 and was generally considered part of the Solid South, but was still a competitive state at both the state and federal levels.Phillips, Kevin P.; The Emerging Republican Majority, p. 350 {{ISBN|978-0-691-16324-6}} The Democratic Party in the state was heavily divided over free silver and the role of corporations in the middle 1890s, and lost the governorship for the first time in forty years in 1895.Brown, Thomas J.; ‘’The Roots of Bluegrass Insurgency: An Analysis of the Populist Movement in Kentucky; The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Vol. 78, No. 3 (Summer 1980), pp. 219–242 In contrast to the former Confederate States, Kentucky was part of the Upper South and bordered the industrial Midwest across the Ohio River, and had a significant urban working class who supported Republicans.Shannon, Jasper Berry and McQuown, Ruth; Presidential Politics in Kentucky, 1824–1948: A Compilation of Election Statistics and an Analysis of Political Behavior (1950), p. 96 In the 1896 presidential election, the state was exceedingly close, with McKinley becoming the first Republican presidential candidate to carry Kentucky, by a mere 277 votes, or 0.06352%. McKinley's victory was, by percentage margin, the seventh-closest popular results for presidential electors on record.{{efn|The closer ones, beginning with the closest, are Florida in 2000, Maryland in 1832, Maryland in 1904, California in 1912, California in 1892 and Hawaii in 1960.}}

Before the Civil War, Kentucky had a southern plantation economy heavily relying on slavery with tobacco plantations in the central and western portions of the state. Kentucky remained mostly in the Union during the Civil War, though it was heavily contested, with the Confederacy controlling half the state early in the war. Delegates from 68 of 110 Kentucky counties signed an ordinance of secession at the Russellville Convention and formed the Confederate government of Kentucky, joining the CSA on December 10, 1861 with the signature of Jefferson Davis. However, some pro-Union eastern counties in the state have never voted Democratic to this day, similar to neighboring East Tennessee. The secessionist central and western areas of the state were strongly Democratic during the Jim Crow era.

Kentucky remained extremely competitive at the state level even after the failure of the Lodge Bill, due to the state being mostly White and the divide between formerly secessionist and unionist areas. Lexington's city government had passed a poll tax in 1901, but it was declared invalid in state circuit courts. Six years later, a new state legislative effort to disenfranchise blacks failed because of the strong organization of the Republican Party in the pro-Union regions of the state.Klotter, Jeames C.; Kentucky: Portrait in Paradox, 1900–1950; pp. 196–197 {{ISBN|0916968243}}

Republicans won Kentucky in the 1924 and 1928 presidential elections, the former of which was the only state that Warren G. Harding lost in the 1920 presidential election, but Coolidge won in the 1924 presidential election.Copeland, James E.; ‘Where Were the Kentucky Unionists and Secessionists’; The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, volume 71, no. 4 (October 1973), pp. 344–363See Bolin, Janes Duane; Bossism and Reform in a Southern City: Lexington, Kentucky, 1880–1940, pp. 82–83 {{ISBN|9780813121505}} Kentucky also elected some Republican governors during this period, such as William O'Connell Bradley (1895–1899), Augustus E. Willson (1907–1911), Edwin P. Morrow (1919–1923), Flem D. Sampson (1927–1931), and Simeon Willis (1943–1947).Harrison, Lowell Hayes; A New History of Kentucky, p. 352 {{ISBN|9780813176307}}

{{See also|History of Maryland|United States presidential elections in Maryland}}

Before the Civil War, Maryland had a southern plantation economy focused around tobacco plantations using slavery centered in Southern Maryland and the Eastern Shore. During the war despite initially voting against secession, due to Southern sympathies in the state and requests by the state for Northern troops to leave the state. the Federal government put Maryland very quickly under Northern military occupation and imprisoned a portion of the state legislature, as well as suspending Habeas Corpus to force the state to stay in the Union and deter any attempts at secession. Maryland very narrowly, by a vote of 30,174 to 28,380 (52% to 48%), abolished slavery in 1864.{{cite book |last= Myers |first= William Starr |date= 1901 |title= The Maryland Constitution of 1864 |publisher= Johns Hopkins Press |url= https://archive.org/details/marylandconstitu00myerrich/page/98/mode/2up }} Maryland voted for the Democratic Party presidential candidate from 1868 to 1892, but the 1896 presidential election was a realignment in the state, similar to West Virginia. Maryland voted for the Republican Party presidential candidate from 1896 to 1928, except for Democrat Woodrow Wilson in 1912 and 1916.{{cite web|url=https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/compare.php?year=1916&fips=24&f=0&off=0&elect=0&type=state|title=Presidential General Election Results Comparison – Maryland|publisher=Dave Leip’s U.S. Election Atlas}}

In contrast to the former Confederate states, nearly half the African American population was free before the Civil War, and some had accumulated property. Literacy was high among African Americans and, as Democrats crafted means to exclude them, suffrage campaigns helped reach blacks and teach them how to resist.{{cite web |url=http://www.brandonkendhammer.com/democratization_Spring2013/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Tuck-2007.pdf |first=Stephen |last=Tuck |title=Democratization and the Disfranchisement of African Americans in the US South during the Late 19th Century |date=Spring 2013 |department=Reading for "Challenges of Democratization" |via=Brandon Kendhammer, Ohio University |author-link=Stephen Tuck |access-date=February 11, 2014 |archive-date=February 23, 2014 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140223124800/http://www.brandonkendhammer.com/democratization_Spring2013/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Tuck-2007.pdf |url-status=dead }} In 1895, a biracial Republican coalition enabled the election of Lloyd Lowndes, Jr. as governor (1896 to 1900).

The Democrat-dominated state legislature tried to pass disfranchising bills in 1905, 1907, and 1911, but was rebuffed on each occasion, in large part because of black opposition and strength. Black men comprised 20% of the electorate and had established themselves in several cities, where they had comparative security. In addition, immigrant men comprised 15% of the voting population and opposed these measures. The legislature had difficulty devising requirements against blacks that did not also disadvantage immigrants.Shufelt, Gordeon H.; 'Jim Crow among strangers: The growth of Baltimore's Little Italy and Maryland's disfranchisement campaigns'; Journal of American Ethnic History; vol. 19, issue 4 (Summer 2000), pp. 49–78 In 1910, the legislature proposed the Digges Amendment to the state constitution. It would have used property requirements to effectively disenfranchise many African American men as well as many poor white men (including new immigrants). The Maryland General Assembly passed the bill, which Governor Austin Lane Crothers supported. Before the measure went to popular vote, a bill was proposed that would have effectively passed the requirements of the Digges Amendment into law. Due to widespread public opposition, that measure failed, and the amendment was also rejected by the voters of Maryland with 46,220 votes for and 83,920 votes against the proposal.{{Cite book|title=The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement|last=Valelly|first=Richard|publisher=The University of Chicago Press|year=2004|isbn=0-226-84530-3|location=Chicago|pages=123–124}}

Nationally Maryland citizens achieved the most notable rejection of a black-disfranchising amendment. The power of black men at the ballot box and economically helped them resist these bills and disfranchising effort. In 1911, Republican Phillips Lee Goldsborough (1912 to 1916) was elected governor, succeeding Crothers. Maryland elected two more Republican governors from 1877 to 1964, Harry Nice (1935 to 1939) and Theodore McKeldin (1951 to 1959).{{cite book |last=White, Jr. |first=Frank F.|date=1970|title=The Governors of Maryland 1777–1970|url=https://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc3500/sc3520/001400/001477/html/1477extbio.html |location=Annapolis|publisher=The Hall of Records Commission|pages=239–242|isbn=978-0942370010|access-date= 11 September 2018}}

{{See also|United States presidential elections in Delaware}}

Before the war, Delaware used slavery in the southern portion of the state but it was very sparse compared to other southern states even in the Upper South. During the war, despite there being some Southern sympathies in the state, the state legislature very quickly rejected secession and didnt consider it further. Despite Delaware being a southern border state and not abolishing slavery until the ratification of the 13th amendment, due its proximity to the Northeast and not bordering any of the former Confederate States, Delaware voted for the Republican Party in a majority of presidential elections from 1876 to 1964 (12 out of 23).{{cite book |last1=Munroe |title=History of Delaware |date=2001 |pages=165–169}}

For a generation bitter memories of Republican actions during the Civil War had kept the Democrats firmly in control of the government throughout Delaware. However, during this period gas executive J. Edward Addicks, a Philadelphia millionaire, established residence in Delaware, and began pouring money into the Republican Party, especially in Kent and Sussex County.{{cite book |title=Pirates & Patriots, Tales of the Delaware Coast |author=Morgan, Michael |year=2004 |publisher=Algora Publishing |isbn=0-87586-337-X |page=150}} He succeeded in reigniting the Republican Party, which would soon become the dominant party in the state. In 1894, Republican Joshua H. Marvil was elected as the first Republican governor of Delaware since Reconstruction.{{cite web|url=https://www.senate.gov/about/origins-foundations/electing-appointing-senators/contested-senate-elections/084Henry_DuPont.htm|title=The Election Case of Henry A. Du Pont of Delaware (1897)|work=United States Senate|year=1995}} The allegiance of industries with the Republican party allowed them to gain control of Delaware's governorship throughout most of the twentieth century. The Republican Party ensured Black people could vote because of their general support for Republicans and thus undid restrictions on Black suffrage.{{cite book |last1=Munroe |title=History of Delaware |date=2001 |pages=180–181}}

Delaware voted for the Democratic Party presidential candidate from 1876 to 1892, but then consistently voted for the Republican Party presidential candidate from 1896 to 1932, except in 1912 for Woodrow Wilson when the Republican Party split. Delaware voted for Republican Herbert Hoover in 1932, despite Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt winning in a landslide.{{cite web|url=https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/stats.php?year=1932&f=0&off=0&elect=0|title=1932 Presidential Election Statistics|publisher=Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections|access-date=2018-03-05}}

{{See also|United States presidential elections in Missouri}}

Although a southern border state during the Civil War and heavily contested and claimed by the Confederacy with the Confederate government of Missouri, Missouri abolished slavery in January 1865, before the Civil War ended.{{cite news| url=https://www.nytimes.com/1865/01/15/news/tennessee-state-convention-slavery-declared-forever-abolished-parson-brownlow.html |title=TENNESSEE STATE CONVENTION: Slavery Declared Forever Abolished; Emancipation Rejoicings in St. Louis. |work=The New York Times |date=January 14, 1865}} Missouri enacted racial segregation, but did not disenfranchise African Americans, who comprised less than 10% of the state's population from 1870 to 1960. In particular, Missouri never implemented a poll tax as a requirement to vote, unlike even neighboring Kentucky or Tennessee.{{cite journal | last1=Williams | first1=Frank B. Jr. |title=The Poll Tax as a Suffrage Requirement in the South, 1870–1901 |journal=The Journal of Southern History |date=November 1952 |volume=18 |issue=4 |pages=469–496 |doi=10.2307/2955220 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/2955220 |access-date=28 October 2020 |publisher=Southern Historical Association |location=Athens, Georgia |jstor=2955220 |issn=0022-4642}}

Between the Civil War and the end of World War II, Missouri transitioned from a rural southern state to a hybrid industrial-service-agricultural midwestern state as the Midwest rapidly industrialized and expanded into Missouri. Missouri received major Midwestern migration after the war, overtaking the state's original Southern population, including in Kansas City, Missouri and St. Louis. Missouri voted for the Republican presidential candidate in the 1904 presidential election for the first time since 1872, repositioning itself from being associated with the Solid South to being seen as a bellwether state throughout the twentieth century. From 1904 until 2004, Missouri only backed a losing presidential candidate once, in 1956.{{cite news | url=https://www.chicagotribune.com/2004/11/03/bush-leads-in-bellwether-state/ | title=Bush leads in bellwether state | newspaper=Chicago Tribune | date=November 3, 2004 | access-date=June 24, 2012 | author=Witt, Howard}} Missouri also elected some Republican governors before 1964, beginning with Herbert S. Hadley (1909–1913).{{cite book|title=Dictionary of Missouri Biography|year=1999|publisher=University of Missouri Press|location=Columbia, Missouri|isbn=0-8262-1222-0|pages=362–363|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=6gyxWHRLAWgC&q=herbert%20hadley%20missouri&pg=PA362|editor1=Lawrence O. Christensen |editor2=William E. Foley |editor3=Gary R. Kremer |editor4=Kenneth H. Winn}}

File:McCutcheonMysteriousStrange.jpg in the 1904 election. (Cartoon by John T. McCutcheon.)]]

The 1896 election resulted in the first break in the Solid South. Florida politician Marion L. Dawson, writing in the North American Review, observed: "The victorious party not only held in line those States which are usually relied upon to give Republican majorities ... More significant still, it invaded the Solid South, and bore off West Virginia, Maryland, and Kentucky; caused North Carolina to tremble in the balance and reduced Democratic majorities in the following States: Alabama, 39,000; Arkansas, 29,000; Florida, 6,000; Georgia, 49,000; Louisiana, 33,000; South Carolina, 6,000; and Texas, 29,000. These facts, taken together with the great landslide of 1894 and 1895, which swept Missouri and Tennessee, Maryland and Kentucky over into the country of the enemy, have caused Southern statesmen to seriously consider whether the so-called Solid South is not now a thing of past history".Dawson, Marion L.,Will the South Be Solid Again?, The North American Review, Volume 164, 1897, pp. 193–198 [https://archive.org/stream/jstor-25150943/25150943#page/n1/mode/2up] The former Confederate states stayed mostly a single bloc until the 1960s, with a brief break in the 1920s, however.

In the 1904 election, Missouri supported Republican Theodore Roosevelt, while Maryland awarded its electors to Democrat Alton Parker, despite Roosevelt's winning by 51 votes.{{Cite web|url=https://msa.maryland.gov/msa/speccol/sc2200/sc2221/000031/000000/html/00000001.html|title=Too Close to Call: Presidential Electors and Elections in Maryland featuring the Presidential Election of 1904|website=msa.maryland.gov}} Missouri was a bellwether state from 1904 to 2004, voting for the winner of every presidential election except in 1956.{{cite book|last=Menendez|first=Albert J.|title=The Geography of Presidential Elections in the United States, 1868–2004|date=2005 |pages=239–246|publisher=McFarland |isbn=0786422173}} By the 1916 election, disfranchisement of blacks and many poor whites was complete, and voter rolls had dropped dramatically in the South. Closing out Republican supporters gave a bump to Woodrow Wilson, who took all the electors across the South (apart from Delaware and West Virginia), as the Republican Party was stifled without support by African Americans.

The 1920 presidential election was a referendum on President Wilson's League of Nations. Pro-isolation sentiment in the South benefited Republican Warren G. Harding, who won Tennessee, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Maryland. In 1924, Republican Calvin Coolidge won Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland.{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=9WaaAAAAIAAJ |title=The Presidential Vote, 1896–1932 – Google Books |publisher=Stanford University Press |access-date=August 12, 2014|year=1934|isbn=9780804716963 }}

File:1928 Electoral Map.png, Al Smith carried the Deep South, but lost all the other Southern states except Arkansas.]]

In 1928, Herbert Hoover, benefiting from bias against his Democratic opponent Al Smith (who was a Roman Catholic and opposed Prohibition),Allan J. Lichtman, Prejudice and the Old Politics: The Presidential Election of 1928 (1979) won not only those Southern states that had been carried by either Harding or Coolidge (Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Maryland), but also won Florida, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia, none of which had voted Republican since Reconstruction. He furthermore came within 3% of carrying the Deep South state of Alabama. Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover all carried the two Southern states that had supported Hughes in 1916, West Virginia and Delaware. Al Smith received serious backlash as a Catholic in the largely Protestant South in 1928, carrying only his running mate Joseph T. Robinson's home state of Arkansas and the 5 states of the Deep South.reprinted 1977, John A. Ryan, "Religion in the Election of 1928," Current History, December 1928; reprinted in Ryan, Questions of the Day (Ayer Publishing, 1977) p.91 The only place where Smith's Catholicism helped him in the South was heavily-Catholic Acadiana in Louisiana.{{cite journal|first=Barbara C.|last=Wingo|title=The 1928 Presidential Election in Louisiana|journal=Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association|volume=18|issue=4|date=Autumn 1977|pages=405–435|publisher=Louisiana Historical Association}} Smith nearly lost Alabama, which he held by 3%, which had Hoover won, would have physically split the Solid South.Neal R. Pierce, The Deep South States of America: People, Politics, and Power in the Seven States of the Deep South (1974), pp 123–61

The South appeared "solid" again during the period of Franklin D. Roosevelt's political dominance, as his New Deal welfare programs and military buildup invested considerable money in the South, benefiting many of its citizens, including during the Dust Bowl. Roosevelt carried all the 11 former Confederate states and Oklahoma in each of his four presidential elections.Sean J. Savage, Roosevelt: The Party Leader, 1932–1945. (University Press of Kentucky), 2014.

File:1948 Electoral Map.png, Democrat Harry S. Truman won in an upset despite Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond winning 39 electoral votes.]]

File:Educational separation in the US prior to Brown Map.svg (1954).]]

Democratic President Harry S. Truman, who grew up in the border state of Missouri where segregation was practiced and largely accepted, issued Executive Order 9981 in July 1948, prohibiting racial segregation in the armed forces.{{cite web |title=Harry S Truman and Civil Rights |url=https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/harry-s-truman-and-civil-rights.htm |website=U.S. National Park Service |language=en}} Truman's support of the civil rights movement, combined with the adoption of a civil rights plank in the 1948 Democratic platform proposed by future Vice President Hubert Humphrey,{{cite web|url=http://www2.mnhs.org/library/findaids/00442/pdfa/00442-00187.pdf |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20221009/http://www2.mnhs.org/library/findaids/00442/pdfa/00442-00187.pdf |archive-date=2022-10-09 |url-status=live|title=HUBERT H. HUMPHREY'S 1948 SPEECH ON CIVIL RIGHTS|author=Minnesota Historical Society|publisher=mnhs.org|date=April 24, 2013|access-date=September 1, 2014}} prompted many Southerners to walk out of the Democratic National Convention and form the Dixiecrat Party.Kari A. Frederickson, The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932–1968 (2001). This splinter party played a significant role in the 1948 election; the Dixiecrat candidate, Strom Thurmond, carried Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, his native South Carolina, and one electoral vote from Tennessee.{{Cite book|title=Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America's Deep South, 1944–1972|url=https://www.amazon.com/Paths-Out-Dixie-Democratization-Authoritarian-ebook/dp/B007BOK3A0/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=|first1=Robert|last1=Mickey|date=February 19, 2015}}

Despite this, in one of the greatest election upsets in American history,{{cite web |author=American Experience |title=General Article: Presidential Politics |url=https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/truman-politics/ |url-status=dead |publisher=PBS |access-date=September 17, 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170221085231/http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/truman-politics/ |archive-date=February 21, 2017}}{{cite web |last=Rosegrant |first=Susan |title=ISR and the Truman/Dewey upset |url=http://www.sampler.isr.umich.edu/2012/featured/isr-and-the-truman-dewey-upset/ |url-status=dead |editor=University of Michigan |publisher=isr.umich.edu |date=April 18, 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130402213551/http://www.sampler.isr.umich.edu/2012/featured/isr-and-the-truman-dewey-upset/ |archive-date=April 2, 2013 |df=mdy-all}} incumbent Democratic President Harry S. Truman defeated heavily favored Republican New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey. Truman vote every electoral vote in the former Confederate states not won by Thurmond.{{cite magazine |last=Cosgrove |first=Ben |title=Behind the Picture: 'DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN' |url=http://life.time.com/history/dewey-defeats-truman-the-story-behind-a-classic-political-photo/#1 |url-status=dead |magazine=Time |date=October 21, 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121022023613/http://life.time.com/history/dewey-defeats-truman-the-story-behind-a-classic-political-photo/#1 |archive-date=October 22, 2012}} Three former Confederate states repealed their poll taxes after World War II, specifically Georgia (1945), South Carolina (1951), and Tennessee (1953).{{cite news |author= |title=Poll Tax Dropped as S. C. Voting Requirement |url=https://www.newspapers.com/clip/65208417/the-index-journal/ |access-date=December 13, 2020 |agency=Associated Press |date=February 13, 1951 |newspaper=The Index-Journal |location=Greenwood, South Carolina |page=1 |via=Newspapers.com}}{{cite journal |last1=Wilkerson-Freeman |first1=Sarah |title=The Second Battle for Woman Suffrage: Alabama White Women, the Poll Tax, and V. O. Key's Master Narrative of Southern Politics |journal=The Journal of Southern History |volume=68 |issue=2 |year=2002 |pages=333–374 |jstor=3069935 |doi=10.2307/3069935 }}

In the elections of 1952 and 1956, the popular Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, commander of the Allied armed forces during World War II, carried several Southern states, with especially strong showings in the new suburbs.{{cite web|url=http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/data.php?year=1952&datatype=national&def=1&f=0&off=0&elect=0|title=1952 Presidential General Election Data – National |website=Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections |access-date=March 18, 2013}} Even in the Deep South, Eisenhower's performances were relatively competitive, sometimes winning at least 40% of the vote statewide.Buchholz, Michael O., The South in Presidential Politics: The End of Democratic Hegemony. Master of Arts (Political Science), August, 1973, p. 43 Most of the Southern states he carried had voted for at least one of the Republican winners in the 1920s, but in 1956, Eisenhower carried Louisiana, becoming the first Republican to win the state since Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876. The rest of the Deep South voted for his Democratic opponent, Adlai Stevenson.{{cite web|url=http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/data.php?year=1956&datatype=national&def=1&f=0&off=0&elect=0|title=1956 Presidential General Election Data – National|access-date=March 18, 2013}}

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).{{cite news|last1=Lawrence|first1=W. H.|title=Johnson is Nominated for Vice President; Kennedy Picks Him to Placate the South|url=https://partners.nytimes.com/library/politics/camp/600715convention-dem-ra.html|access-date=11 September 2016|work=New York Times|date=July 15, 1960}} Kennedy and Johnson, however, both supported civil rights.{{Cite journal|last=Middleton|first=Russell|date=March 1962|title=The Civil Rights Issue And Presidential Voting Among Southern Negroes And Whites|journal=Social Forces|volume=40|issue=3|pages=209–215|doi=10.2307/2573630|jstor=2573630}} 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 Kennedy's brother Robert F. Kennedy helped secure King's release. King expressed his appreciation for these calls. Although King made no endorsement, his father, who had previously endorsed Republican Richard Nixon, switched his support to Kennedy.{{Cite journal|last=Kuhn|first=Clifford|year=1997|title="There's a Footnote to History!" Memory and the History of Martin Luther King's October 1960 Arrest and Its Aftermath|journal=The Journal of American History|pages=586}}

By the mid-1960s, changes had come in many Southern states. Former Dixiecrat Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina changed parties in 1964; Texas elected a Republican Senator in 1961;{{cite web |title=TX US Senate – Special |url=https://www.ourcampaigns.com/RaceDetail.html?RaceID=30399 |website=OurCampaigns.com |access-date=April 4, 2020}} Florida and Arkansas elected Republican governors in 1966, as did Virginia in 1969. In the Upper South, where Republicans had always been a small presence, Republicans gained a few seats in the House and Senate.Everett Carll Ladd, Jr., with Charles D. Hadley. Transformations of the American Party System: Political Coalitions from the New Deal to the 1970s 2nd ed. (1978).

File:Senate vote on final passage of Civil Rights Act of 1964 (HR 7152).png of Texas was the only Senator from the 11 former Confederate states to vote in favor.]]

Because of these and other events, the Democrats lost ground with white voters in the South, as those same voters increasingly lost control over what was once a whites-only Democratic Party in much of the South.{{Cite book|last=Farrington|first=Joshua D.|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Ig8cDQAAQBAJ&q=%22king+sr%22+nixon+kennedy+republican&pg=PA111|title=Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP|date=September 20, 2016|publisher=University of Pennsylvania Press|isbn=978-0-8122-9326-5|language=en}} The 1960 election was the first in which a Republican presidential candidate received electoral votes from the former Confederacy while losing nationally. Nixon carried Virginia, Tennessee, and Florida. Though the Democrats also won Alabama and Mississippi, slates of unpledged electors, representing Democratic segregationists, awarded those states' electoral votes to Harry Byrd, rather than Kennedy.{{cite web|url=http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/data.php?year=1960&datatype=national&def=1&f=0&off=0&elect=0|title=1960 Presidential General Election Data – National|access-date=March 18, 2013}}

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 of 1964. 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."[http://www.digitalnpq.org/archive/1987_winter/second.html Second Thoughts: Reflections on the Great Society] New Perspectives Quarterly, Winter 1987 In contrast, Johnson's Republican opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, voted against the Civil Rights Act, believing it enhanced the federal government and infringed on the private property rights of businessmen.{{cite web|url = https://www.centralmaine.com/2014/07/19/goldwaters-vote-against-civil-rights-act-of-1964-unfairly-branded-him-a-racist/|title = Goldwater's vote against Civil Rights Act of 1964 unfairly branded him a racist|date = July 19, 2014|access-date = September 24, 2021|archive-date = September 24, 2021|archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20210924043349/https://www.centralmaine.com/2014/07/19/goldwaters-vote-against-civil-rights-act-of-1964-unfairly-branded-him-a-racist/|url-status = live}} Goldwater did support civil rights in general and universal suffrage, and voted for the 1957 Civil Rights Act (though casting no vote on the 1960 Civil Rights Act), as well as voting for the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which banned poll taxes as a requirement for voting. This was one of the devices that states used to disfranchise African Americans and the poor.{{cite journal|title=Senate – August 7, 1957|journal=Congressional Record|volume=103|issue=10|publisher=U.S. Government Printing Office|page=13900|url=https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1957-pt10/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1957-pt10-9-1.pdf|access-date=February 18, 2022|archive-date=October 8, 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211008164250/https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1957-pt10/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1957-pt10-9-1.pdf|url-status=live}}{{cite journal|title=Senate – August 29, 1957|journal=Congressional Record|volume=103|issue=12|publisher=U.S. Government Printing Office|page=16478|url=https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1957-pt12/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1957-pt12-6-1.pdf|access-date=February 18, 2022|archive-date=October 8, 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211008164318/https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1957-pt12/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1957-pt12-6-1.pdf|url-status=live}}{{cite journal|title=Senate – March 27, 1962|journal=Congressional Record|volume=108|issue=4|publisher=U.S. Government Printing Office|page=5105|url=https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1962-pt4/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1962-pt4-9-1.pdf|access-date=February 18, 2022|archive-date=January 31, 2022|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220131015659/https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1962-pt4/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1962-pt4-9-1.pdf|url-status=live}}

File:1964 Electoral Map.png, Republican Barry Goldwater won the 5 Deep South states, all but Louisiana for the first time since Reconstruction. The only other state he carried was his home state of Arizona.]]

In November 1964, 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: voters in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina had switched parties for the first time since Reconstruction.{{cite book|url=http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674012486|title=The Rise of Southern Republicans |first1= Earl|last1= Black|first2= Merle |last2= Black|date=September 30, 2003 |publisher=Harvard University Press|isbn=9780674012486 |access-date=June 9, 2018|quote=When the Republican party nominated Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater—one of the few senators who had opposed the Civil Rights Act—as their presidential candidate in 1964, the party attracted many southern whites but permanently alienated African-American voters. Beginning with the Goldwater-versus-Johnson campaign more southern whites voted Republican than Democratic, a pattern that has recurred in every subsequent presidential election. ... Before the 1964 presidential election the Republican party had not carried any Deep South state for eighty-eight years. Yet shortly after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, hundreds of Deep South counties gave Barry Goldwater landslide majorities.|archive-date=June 12, 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180612135934/http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674012486|url-status=live}} Goldwater notably won only in Southern states that had voted against Republican Richard Nixon in 1960, while not winning a single Southern state which Nixon had carried. Previous Republican inroads in the South had been concentrated on high-growth suburban areas, often with many transplants, as well as on the periphery of the South.{{cite journal|last1=Bullock|first1=Charles S.|last2=Hoffman|first2=Donna R.|last3=Gaddie|first3=Ronald Keith|date=2006|title=Regional Variations in the Realignment of American Politics, 1944–2004|journal=Social Science Quarterly|volume=87|issue=3|pages=494–518|doi=10.1111/j.1540-6237.2006.00393.x|issn=0038-4941|quote=The events of 1964 laid open the divisions between the South and national Democrats and elicited distinctly different voter behavior in the two regions. The agitation for civil rights by southern blacks continued white violence toward the civil rights movement, and President Lyndon Johnson's aggressive leadership all facilitated passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. ... In the South, 1964 should be associated with GOP growth while in the Northeast this election contributed to the eradication of Republicans.}}

Harold D, Woodman summarizes the explanation that external forces caused the disintegration of the Jim Crow South from the 1920s to the 1970s:

:When a significant change finally occurred, its impetus came from outside the South. Depression-bred New Deal reforms, war-induced demand for labor in the North, perfection of cotton-picking machinery, and civil rights legislation and court decisions finally... destroyed the plantation system, undermined landlord or merchant hegemony, diversified agriculture and transformed it from a labor- to a capital-intensive industry, and ended the legal and extra-legal support for racism. The discontinuity that war, invasion, military occupation, the confiscation of slave property, and state and national legislation failed to bring in the mid-19th century, finally arrived in the second third of the 20th century. A "second reconstruction" created a real New South.

{{main|Southern strategy}}{{further|Lily-white movement|Conservative Democrat}}

File:Conservative Gallup 8-10.svg poll:{{Cite web|last=Jones|first=Jeffrey M.|date=2019-02-22|title=Conservatives Greatly Outnumber Liberals in 19 U.S. States|url=https://news.gallup.com/poll/247016/conservatives-greatly-outnumber-liberals-states.aspx|url-status=live|access-date=2021-12-27|website=Gallup|language=en|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190222171445/https://news.gallup.com/poll/247016/conservatives-greatly-outnumber-liberals-states.aspx |archive-date=February 22, 2019 }}

{{legend|#b70000;|45% and above}}

{{legend|#e02727;|40–44%}}

{{legend|#ed6262;|35–39%}}

{{legend|#ed9191;|30–34%}}

{{legend|#ffb8b8;|25–29%}}

{{legend|#ffe3e3;|24% and under}}

]]

The "Southern strategy" was the long-term Republican Party electoral strategy to increase political support among white voters in the Southern United States since the 1960s. According to a quantitative analysis done by Ilyana Kuziemko and Ebonya Washington, racial backlash played a central role in the decline in relative white Southern Democratic identification.{{cite journal|first1=Ilyana|last1=Kuziemko|first2=Ebonya|last2=Washington|title= Why did the Democrats Lose the South? Bringing New Data to an Old Debate|series=Working Paper Series |journal=National Bureau of Economic Research|date=November 1, 2015|doi=10.3386/w21703 |access-date=May 21, 2023|url=https://www.nber.org/papers/w21703}}{{cite journal|last1=Miller|first1=Gary|last2=Schofield|first2=Norman|year=2008|title=The Transformation of the Republican and Democratic Party Coalitions in the U.S.|journal=Perspectives on Politics|volume=6|issue=3|pages=433–450|doi=10.1017/S1537592708081218|s2cid=145321253|issn=1541-0986|quote=1964 was the last presidential election in which the Democrats earned more than 50 percent of the white vote in the United States.}} Support for the civil rights movement in the 1960s by Democratic presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson solidified the Democrats' support within the African American community. African Americans have consistently voted between 85% and 95% Democratic since the 1960s.{{cite web |last=Jackson |first=Brooks |date=April 18, 2008 |title=Blacks and the Democratic Party |url=http://www.factcheck.org/2008/04/blacks-and-the-democratic-party/ |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20111103050026/http://www.factcheck.org/2008/04/blacks%2Dand%2Dthe%2Ddemocratic%2Dparty/ |archive-date=November 3, 2011 |access-date=October 30, 2011 |publisher=FactCheck.org}}{{Cite web |last=Bositis |first=David |title=Blacks and the 2012 Democratic National Convention; page 9, table 1: black votes in presidential elections, 1936 – 2008 |url=https://jointcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Blacks-and-the-2012-Democratic-National-Convention.pdf |website=Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies}}{{Cite web|url=https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/partisanship-by-race-ethnicity-and-education/|date=April 9, 2024|title=Partisanship by race, ethnicity and education|access-date=April 26, 2024|website=Pew Research Center}}

Although Richard Nixon carried 49 states in 1972, including every Southern state, the Republican Party remained quite weak at the local and state levels across the entire South for decades. Glenn Feldman argues that "the South did not become Republican so much as the Republican Party became southern." Republicans first won a majority of U.S. House seats in the South in the 1994 "Republican Revolution", and only began to dominate the South after the 2010 elections. Many analysts believe the Southern Strategy that has been employed by Republicans since the 1960s is now virtually complete, with Republicans in dominant, almost total, control of political offices in the South since the 2010s.{{Cite web|url=https://washingtonmonthly.com/2014/11/10/from-yellow-dogs-to-blue-dogs-to-new-dogs/|title=From Yellow Dogs To Blue Dogs To New Dogs|first1=Ed|last1=Kilgore|date=November 10, 2014|website=Washington Monthly|access-date=December 24, 2016|quote=Everything about the Blue Dogs (at least in the South) was designed to convince ancestral conservative white Democrats to persist in their ancient voting habits on the non-presidential level on grounds of solidarity with said Democrats’ grievances with the national party. ... Even more to the point, once the ancient white Democratic voting habits were broken, there was really no going back. Blue Dogs were a fading echo of the Yellow Dog tradition in the South, in which the Democratic Party was the default vehicle for day-to-day political life, and the dominant presence, regardless of ideology, for state and local politics.}}{{cite web|url=http://www.salon.com/2014/11/12/bye_bye_blue_dog_democrats_what_the_end_of_conservative_dems_means_for_america/|title=Bye-bye, blue dog "Democrats": What the end of conservative Dems means for America|last=Parton|first=Heather Digby|website=Salon|date=November 12, 2014|access-date=December 24, 2016}}{{Cite web|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/24/upshot/southern-whites-loyalty-to-gop-nearing-that-of-blacks-to-democrats.html|title=Southern Whites' Loyalty to GOP Nearing that of Blacks to Democrats|first1=Nate|last1=Cohn|website=The New York Times|date=April 23, 2014|quote=President Obama’s landslide victory in 2008 was supposed to herald the beginning of a new Democratic era. And yet, six years later, there is not even a clear Democratic majority in the country, let alone one poised for 30 years of dominance. It’s not because Mr. Obama’s so-called new coalition of young and nonwhite voters failed to live up to its potential. They again turned out in record numbers in 2012. The Democratic majority has failed to materialize because the Republicans made large, countervailing and unappreciated gains of their own among white Southerners. From the high plains of West Texas to the Atlantic Coast of Georgia, white voters opposed Mr. Obama’s re-election in overwhelming numbers. In many counties 90 percent of white voters chose Mitt Romney, nearly the reversal of the margin by which black voters supported Mr. Obama.}}

Scholars have debated the extent to which ideological "divisions over the size of government (including taxes, social programs, and regulation), national security, and moral issues such as abortion and gay rights, with racial issues only one of numerous areas about which liberals and conservatives disagree," were responsible for the realignment.{{cite journal | journal = American Journal of Political Science | volume = 49 | issue = 3 | pages = 672–88 | doi = 10.1111/j.1540-5907.2005.00136.x | author1 = Valentino NA|author-link1=Nicholas Valentino|author2=Sears DO|author-link2=David O. Sears | title = Old Times There Are Not Forgotten: Race and Partisan Realignment in the Contemporary South | year = 2005 | url = http://web.posc.jmu.edu/seminar/readings/4a-realignment/race+party%20realignment%20in%20the%20south%20old%20times%20not%20forgotten.pdf| archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20120905151945/http://web.posc.jmu.edu/seminar/readings/4a-realignment/race+party%20realignment%20in%20the%20south%20old%20times%20not%20forgotten.pdf| url-status = dead| archive-date = 2012-09-05}}{{cite journal |last1=Chappell |first1=David |title=Did Racists Create the Suburban Nation? |journal=Reviews in American History |date=March 2007 |volume=V 35 |issue=1 |pages=89–97|doi=10.1353/rah.2007.0004 |jstor=30031671|s2cid=144202527 |quote=In an original analysis of national politics, Lassiter carefully rejects "racereductionist narratives" (pp. 4, 303). Cliches like "white backlash" and "southern strategy" are inadequate to explain the conservative turn in post-1960s politics. ... Racism has not been overcome. One might say rather that it has become redundant. One of Lassiter's many fascinating demonstrations of racism's superfluousness is his recounting of the actual use of the "southern strategy." The strategy obviously failed the Dixiecrats in 1948 and the GOP in 1964. The only time Nixon seriously tried to appeal to southern racism, in the 1970 midterm elections, the South rejected his party and elected Democrats like Jimmy Carter and Dale Bumpers instead (pp. 264–74). To win a nationwide majority, Republicans and Democrats alike had to appeal to the broad middle-class privileges that most people believed they had earned. Lassiter suggests that the first step on the way out of hypersegregation and resegregation is to stop indulging in comforting narratives. The most comforting narratives attribute the whole problem to racists and the Republicans who appease them.}} When looked at broadly, studies have shown that White Southerners tend to be more conservative, both fiscally and socially,{{cite book|author=Lamis, Alexander P.|title=Southern Politics in the 1990s|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=GNr40qOoXOoC&pg=PA7|year=1999|publisher=Louisiana State University Press|isbn=978-0-8071-2374-4|pages=7–8, 26}}{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=loMDqAdFnAcC&dq=%22All%20you%20have%20to%20do%20to%20keep%20the%20South%20is%20for%20Reagan%22&pg=PA140|title=The Persuadable Voter|isbn=978-1400831593|last1=Sunshine Hillygus|first1=D.|last2=Shields|first2=Todd G.|year=2014|publisher=Princeton University Press }} than most non-Southerners and African Americans.{{cite journal |first1 = Christopher A. |last1 = Cooper |first2 = H. Gibbs |last2 = Knotts |title = Declining Dixie: Regional Identification in the Modern American South |journal = Social Forces |volume = 88 |issue = 3 |year = 2010 |pages = 1083–1101 |doi = 10.1353/sof.0.0284 |s2cid = 53573849 }}{{cite journal|first1 = Tom W. |last1 = Rice |first2 = William P. |last2 = McLean |first3 = Amy J. |last3 = Larsen |title = Southern Distinctiveness over Time: 1972–2000 |journal = American Review of Politics |volume = 23 |year = 2002 |pages = 193–220 |doi = 10.15763/issn.2374-7781.2002.23.0.193-220|doi-access = free}} Historically, Southern Democrats were generally more conservative than non-Southern Democrats, joining factions such as the conservative coalition and Boll weevils.Ira Katznelson, Kim Geiger, and Daniel Kryder, Limiting Liberalism: The Southern Veto in Congress, 1933–1950. Political Science Quarterly 108 (1993): 283–306 [http://hist590.pbworks.com/f/Katznelson%2Bet%2Bal%2BLimiting%2BLiberalism.pdf online] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200411013134/http://hist590.pbworks.com/f/Katznelson+et+al+Limiting+Liberalism.pdf |date=2020-04-11 }}{{Cite journal|last=Bartho|first=Jonathan|date=2020|title=Reagan's Southern Comfort: The "Boll Weevil" Democrats in the "Reagan Revolution" of 1981|journal=Journal of Policy History|language=en|volume=32|issue=2|pages=214–238|doi=10.1017/S0898030620000044|issn=0898-0306|doi-access=}}

Yellow dog Democrats is a term for voters in the Southern United States who voted solely for Democratic Party candidates, though they would often split their tickets and vote for Republican presidential candidates. Some have argued that the South remained Democratic for decades because it was only until Yellow dog Democrats died out or stopped ticket-splitting for Democrats that Republicans began to dominate the South. The conservative coalition lasted until 1994, and Bill Clinton was far less liberal than 21st century Democrats.

File:1968 Electoral Map.png]]

File:ElectoralCollege1976.svg, former Governor of Georgia Jimmy Carter won every former Confederate state except Virginia.]]

In the 1968 election, Richard Nixon saw the cracks in the Solid South as an opportunity to tap into a group of voters who had historically been beyond the reach of the Republican Party. With the aid of Harry Dent and South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who had switched to the Republican Party in 1964, Nixon ran his 1968 campaign on states' rights and "law and order". As a key component of this strategy, he selected as his running mate Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew.{{Cite magazine|date=1969-11-14|title=Nation: Spiro Agnew: The King's Taster|language=en-US|magazine=Time|url=https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,840345-2,00.html|access-date=2021-10-17|issn=0040-781X}} Liberal Northern Democrats accused Nixon of pandering to Southern whites, especially with regard to his "states' rights" and "law and order" positions, which were widely understood by black leaders to legitimize the status quo of Southern states' discrimination.{{cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1968/08/13/archives/negro-leaders-see-bias-in-call-of-nixon-for-law-and-order.html |title=Negro Leaders See Bias in Call of Nixon for 'Law and Order'|last=Johnson|first=Thomas A.|date=August 13, 1968|work=The New York Times|page=27|access-date=2008-08-02}}{{subscription required}} This tactic was described in 2007 by David Greenberg in Slate as "dog-whistle politics".{{cite news|last=Greenberg|first=David|title=Dog-Whistling Dixie: When Reagan said 'states' rights', he was talking about race|url=http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history_lesson/2007/11/dogwhistling_dixie.html|newspaper=Slate|date=November 20, 2007|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120112144213/http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history_lesson/2007/11/dogwhistling_dixie.html|archive-date=January 12, 2012|url-status=live}} According to an article in The American Conservative, Nixon adviser and speechwriter Pat Buchanan disputed this characterization.[http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/nixon-in-dixie/ "Nixon in Dixie"], The American Conservative magazineTed Van Dyk. [https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB121944770970665183 "How the Election of 1968 Reshaped the Democratic Party"], Wall Street Journal, 2008

The independent candidacy of George Wallace, former Democratic governor of Alabama, partially negated Nixon's Southern Strategy.{{cite news|last=Childs|first=Marquis|title=Wallace's Victory Weakens Nixon's Southern Strategy|url=https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=hy9IAAAAIBAJ&pg=1221,5431957&dq=southern-strategy&hl=en|newspaper=The Morning Record|date=June 8, 1970}} With a much more explicit attack on integration and black civil rights, Wallace won all but two of Goldwater's states (the exceptions being South Carolina and Arizona) as well as Arkansas and one of North Carolina's electoral votes. Nixon picked up Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Missouri, and Delaware. The Democrat, Hubert Humphrey, won Texas, heavily unionized West Virginia, and heavily urbanized Maryland. Writer Jeffrey Hart, who worked on the Nixon campaign as a speechwriter, said in 2006 that Nixon did not have a "Southern Strategy", but "Border State Strategy" as he said that the 1968 campaign ceded the Deep South to George Wallace. Hart suggested that the press called it a "Southern Strategy" as they are "very lazy".{{cite video | people=Hart, Jeffrey | date=2006-02-09 | title = The Making of the American Conservative Mind | medium=television | location=Hanover, New Hampshire | publisher=C-SPAN}}

The 1968 election had been the first election in which both the Upper South and Deep South bolted from the Democratic party simultaneously. The Upper South had backed Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, as well as Nixon in 1960.{{cite book|last1=Black |first1=Earl |author-link1=Earl Black (political scientist) |last2=Black |first2=Merle |author-link2=Merle Black |title=The Rise of Southern Republicans |publisher=Harvard University Press |date=2002 |url=https://archive.org/details/riseofsouthernre00earl_0 |isbn=067400728X}} The Deep South had backed Goldwater just four years prior. Despite the two regions of the South still backing different candidates, Wallace in the Deep South and Nixon in the Upper South, only Texas, Maryland, and West Virginia had held up against the majority Nixon-Wallace vote for Humphrey. By 1972, Nixon had swept the South altogether, Upper and Deep South alike, marking the first time in American history a Republican won every Southern state.{{cite book|last1=Black |first1=Earl |author-link1=Earl Black (political scientist) |last2=Black |first2=Merle |author-link2=Merle Black |title=The Vital South: How Presidents Are Elected |publisher=Harvard University Press |date=1992 |url=https://archive.org/details/vitalsouthhowpre0000blac |isbn=0674941306}}

In the 1976 election, former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter gave Democrats a short-lived comeback in the South, winning every state in the old Confederacy except for Virginia, which was narrowly lost.{{cite web|url=http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/data.php?year=1976&datatype=national&def=1&f=0&off=0&elect=0|title=1976 Presidential General Election Data – National|access-date=March 18, 2013}} However, in his unsuccessful 1980 re-election bid, the only Southern states he won were his native state of Georgia, West Virginia, and Maryland. The year 1976 was the last year a Democratic presidential candidate won a majority of Southern electoral votes, or won Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina in a presidential election.{{Cite book|first1=Angie|last1=Maxwell|first2=Todd|last2=Shields|url=https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-long-southern-strategy-9780190265960?cc=us&lang=en&The%20Long%20Southern%20Strategy#|title=The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics|year=2019|publisher=Oxford University Press|isbn=978-0190265960|location=Oxford, New York}} The Republicans took all the region's electoral votes in the 1984 election and every state except West Virginia in 1988.{{cite book|last1=Aistrup|first1=Joseph A.|title=The Southern Strategy Revisited: Republican Top-Down Advancement in the South|date=2015|publisher=University Press of Kentucky|isbn=978-0-8131-4792-5|page=48|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=oKMeBgAAQBAJ&q=%22southern%20strategy%22%20%22welfare%20queen%22&pg=PA44}}

File:United States House of Representatives elections, 1994.png marked the beginning of the end for commanding Democratic Party presence in the South (Republican gains are marked in dark red).]]

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the South was still overwhelmingly Democratic at the state level, with majorities in all state legislatures, most U.S. House delegations, and many so-called New South governorships. These New South governors were still relatively conservative, but avoided race-baiting. Some supported new government services, but typically avoided large tax increases and redistributionist programs.{{cite encyclopedia| title = New South Governors| first = Gordon E.| last = Harvey| encyclopedia = Law and Politics| series = The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture| volume = 10| pages = 374–375| date = 2014| publisher = UNC Press Books| isbn = 9781469616742|url= https://books.google.com/books?id=YCyaAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA374}} Many conservative Southern white voters split their tickets, supporting conservative Democrats for local and statewide office while simultaneously voting for Republican presidential candidates.

Republicans held 10 of the 22 US Senate seats and 39 seats in the US House of Representatives from the South after the 1980 elections, after winning control of the U.S. Senate for the first time since 1952. Republican president Ronald Reagan was able to form a governing majority due to a coalition between Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats, known as the boll weevils, named after the species of beetle destructive to cotton crops.{{cite book|editor-last1=Moreland |editor-first1=Laurence |editor-last2=Steed |editor-first2=Robert |editor-last3=Baker |editor-first3=Tod |title=The 1988 Presidential Election in the South: Continuity Amidst Change in Southern Party Politics |publisher=Praeger Publishers |date=1991 |url=https://archive.org/details/1988presidential0000unse |isbn=0275931455}}

Over the next 30 years, this gradually changed. Veteran Democratic officeholders retired or died, and older voters who were still rigidly Democratic died off.{{cite book|last1=Feldman|first1=Glenn|title=Painting Dixie Red: When, Where, Why and How the South Became Republican|date=2011|publisher=University Press of Florida|pages=5, 16, 80}} As part of the Republican Revolution in the 1994 elections, Republicans captured a majority of the U.S. House's southern seats for the first time, which allowed them to win control of the U.S. House for the first time since 1952.{{cite news |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/11/us/1994-elections-south-rising-gop-tide-overwhelms-democratic-levees-south.html|title=THE 1994 ELECTIONS: THE SOUTH; The Rising G.O.P. Tide Overwhelms the Democratic Levees in the South|author=Peter Applebome |date=November 11, 1994| access-date=September 22, 2014 |work=The New York Times}} There were also increasing numbers of migrants from other areas, especially in Florida, Georgia, Texas, North Carolina, and Virginia.Mary E. Odem and Elaine Lacy, eds. Latino Immigrants and the Transformation of the U.S. South (U of Georgia Press, 2009).

Some former Southern Democrats became Republicans, such as Kent Hance (1985), Rick Perry (1989), and Ralph Hall (2004) from Texas; Billy Tauzin (1995) and Jimmy Hayes (1995) from Louisiana; Richard Shelby (1994) and Kay Ivey (2002) from Alabama; and Nathan Deal (1995) and Sonny Perdue (1998) from Georgia.{{Cite news |title=Southern Democrats Coaxed to GOP Dance |work=Christian Science Monitor |url=https://www.csmonitor.com/1995/0622/22031.html |access-date=2023-01-05 |issn=0882-7729 |archive-date=2023-01-05 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230105045813/https://www.csmonitor.com/1995/0622/22031.html |url-status=live }}{{cite journal|last1=Miller|first1=Gary|last2=Schofield|first2=Norman|year=2003|title=Activists and Partisan Realignment in the United States|journal=American Political Science Review|volume=97|issue=2|pages=245–260|doi=10.1017/S0003055403000650|doi-broken-date=1 November 2024 |s2cid=12885628|issn=1537-5943|quote=By 2000, however, the New Deal party alignment no longer captured patterns of partisan voting. In the intervening 40 years, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts had triggered an increasingly race-driven distinction between the parties. ... Goldwater won the electoral votes of five states of the Deep South in 1964, four of them states that had voted Democratic for 84 years (Califano 1991, 55). He forged a new identification of the Republican party with racial conservatism, reversing a century-long association of the GOP with racial liberalism. This in turn opened the door for Nixon's "Southern strategy" and the Reagan victories of the eighties.}}

In the 1992 and 1996 elections, when the Democratic ticket consisted of two Southerners (Bill Clinton and Al Gore),{{Cite web|url=https://www.vox.com/2016/7/26/12280198/democrats-changed-since-1992|title=Bill Clinton is still a star, but today's Democrats are dramatically more liberal than his party|first1=Matthew|last1=Yglesias|website=Vox|date=July 16, 2016|access-date=March 6, 2025|quote=This wasn’t the old days before the great realignment. Democratic Party wins in the South were grounded in the African-American community, and most whites voted Republican. But Democrats ran well enough to win in those states where incomes were the lowest, bringing along downscale whites for whom multigenerational political allegiances still meant something. But this allegiance also meant something to the Clinton-era national party. Bill was a Southerner, and so was Al Gore. And the party’s values had at least one foot in the cultural norms of the white South. Unlike his two Yankee predecessors as Democratic nominee, Clinton backed the death penalty. He backed school uniforms. He backed the V-chip, an ultimately doomed effort to keep salacious television programming away from children. He signed the Defense of Marriage Act, and he was aloof to labor unions. This was the politics of what was called, at the time, the New South. Not politically dominated by white supremacy anymore. Forward-looking and interested in economic development. But still in some fundamental ways conservative. Churchy. Patriotic. Skeptical of radicals and agitators and the political left.}} the Democrats and Republicans split the region.{{cite web|url=http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/data.php?year=1992&datatype=national&def=1&f=0&off=0&elect=0|title=1992 Presidential General Election Data – National|website=Uselectionatlas.org|access-date=February 11, 2012}}[http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/data.php?year=1996&datatype=national&def=1&f=0&off=0&elect=0 1996 Presidential General Election Data – National], Uselectionatlas.org. In both elections, Clinton won Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware, while the Republican won Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and Oklahoma.{{cite journal |last1=Lipset |first1=Seymour Martin |title=The Significance of the 1992 Election |journal=PS: Political Science and Politics |date=1993 |volume=26 |issue=1 |pages=7–16 |doi=10.2307/419496 |jstor=419496 |s2cid=227288247 }} Bill Clinton won Georgia in 1992, but lost it in 1996 to Bob Dole. Conversely, Clinton lost Florida in 1992 to George H.W. Bush, but won it in 1996.{{Cite news|date=November 6, 1996|title=Clinton Rides Landslide First Democrat To Be Re-Elected Since Roosevelt|work=The Spokesman-Review|url=https://www.spokesman.com/stories/1996/nov/06/clinton-rides-landslide-first-democrat-to-be-re/|access-date=August 14, 2021}} The year 1996 was the last year a Democratic presidential candidate won Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, Kentucky, and West Virginia.

File:Self-identified liberals 2018 Gallup.svg poll.{{legend|#0f0fd6;|32% and above}}{{legend|#3333ff;|28–31%}}{{legend|#7373ff;|24–27%}}{{legend|#9f9fff;|20–23%}}{{legend|#bbbbff;|16–19%}}{{legend|#dcdcff;|15% and under}}]]

While the South was shifting from the Democrats to the Republicans, the Northeastern United States went the other way. The Northeastern United States is defined by the US Census Bureau as Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and the New England States. Maryland and Delaware also are included in some definitions of the Northeast, being located in the Northeast megalopolis.{{cite book|title=Across This Land: A Regional Geography of the United States and Canada|author=John C. Hudson|year=2002|page=81 ff|publisher=JHU Press |isbn=0-8018-6567-0}}{{cite book|title=North America: The Historical Geography of a Changing Continent|author1=Thomas F. McIlwraith|author2=Edward K. Muller|year=2001|page=[https://archive.org/details/northamericahist00mcil/page/190 190]|publisher=Rowman & Littlefield |isbn=0-7425-0019-5|url=https://archive.org/details/northamericahist00mcil/page/190}}{{cite book|title=Political Geography of the United States|editor=Shelley, Fred M.|publisher=Guilford Press|year=1996|isbn=1-57230-048-5}}

The argument that the South shifted to the Republicans in part by having higher ideological support for conservatism gains support from the Northeast having higher ideological support for liberalism and shifting to the Democrats.{{cite book|title=Counter Realignment: Political Change in the Northeastern United States|author1=Reiter, Howard L. |author2=Jeffrey M. Stonecash |name-list-style=amp |publisher=Cambridge University Press|year=2011|isbn=978-1-139-49313-0}} In the 1980s, the term gypsy moth Republican described Republicans from the Northeast who voted against the Ronald Reagan administration's proposed cuts in aid to economically distressed people, contrasting with boll weevil Southern Democrats who voted for these cuts.{{cite news |url=https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2457&dat=19810921&id=4N00AAAAIBAJ&pg=4532,2205035&hl=en |title='Gypsy Moth Republicans' |last=McManus |first=Michael J. |work=Bangor Daily News |date=September 21, 1981 |page=16 |volume=93 |number=97 |quote=What was needed was a Northern counterweight to the "Boll Weevil Democrats", some 50 Southerners who consistently voted with [President Reagan] to whack at [aid to economically distressed people] ... some 20 Frostbelt Republicans have decided to defect from their lockstop White House support ... |access-date=April 28, 2016 |archive-date=December 8, 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201208191839/https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2457&dat=19810921&id=4N00AAAAIBAJ&pg=4532%2C2205035&hl=en |url-status=live }}{{cite web |url=http://politicaldictionary.com/words/gypsy-moth-republican/ |title=Gypsy moth |last=Goddard |first=Taegan |website=Taegan Goddard's Political Dictionary |access-date=October 6, 2015 |archive-date=October 7, 2015 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151007090007/http://politicaldictionary.com/words/gypsy-moth-republican/ |url-status=live }} The gypsy moth is an invasive species destructive to trees in the Northeastern United States.{{cite web |title=Gypsy Moth |url=http://datcp.wi.gov/Environment/Gypsy_Moth/index.aspx |publisher=Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection |access-date=April 29, 2016 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110831145736/http://datcp.wi.gov/Environment/Gypsy_Moth/index.aspx |archive-date=August 31, 2011 }}

In Harry S. Truman's 1948 upset victory, he only won the Northeastern states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island.{{Cite book|date=October 23, 2012|url=https://www.amazon.com/Trumans-Triumphs-Election-Presidential-Elections-ebook/dp/B07C2ZBWQL/ref=sr_1_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.FZWBs3bGfvpsJTSH-l7NPw.Os81tf348jy8K3_af4kaVYZ_5EM3gwAZzqPG0iY03UI&dib_tag=se&keywords=Truman%27s+Triumphs%3A+The+1948+Election+and+the+Making+of+Postwar+America&qid=1723403199&sr=8-1|title=Truman's Triumphs: The 1948 Election and the Making of Postwar America|first1=Andrew E.|last1=Busch|publisher=University Press of Kansas}} Truman won every Southern electoral vote not won by Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond except for the border states of Maryland and Delaware, which he narrowly lost to Republican Thomas E. Dewey.{{cite web|url=http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/data.php?year=1948&datatype=national&def=1&f=0&off=0&elect=0|title=1948 Presidential General Election Data – National|access-date=April 8, 2013}}

In his close 1976 presidential election victory, former governor of Georgia Jimmy Carter lost the Northeastern states of New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine while winning every former Confederate state except Virginia. Well into the 1980s, much of the Northeast – in particular the heavily suburbanized states of New Jersey and Connecticut, and the rural states of northern New England – were strongholds of the Republican Party.{{cite news |title=G.O.P. a Dying Breed in New England |newspaper=USA Today |author=Susan Haigh |date=November 9, 2008 |access-date=April 18, 2014 |url=http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/politics/2008-11-09-4237129098_x.htm}} The Democratic Party made steady gains there, however, and from 1992 through 2012, all nine Northeastern states plus Maryland and Delaware voted Democratic, with the exception of New Hampshire's plurality for George W. Bush in 2000.{{cite web|url=http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/12/politics/blue-wall-democrats-election/index.html|title=Holding Democratic 'blue wall' was crucial for Obama victory - CNNPolitics.com|first=Paul|last=Steinhauser|website=CNN|date=12 November 2012|access-date=9 May 2017|archive-date=31 October 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201031184142/https://www.cnn.com/2012/11/12/politics/blue-wall-democrats-election/index.html|url-status=live}}

Although Republican presidents had dominated the South during landslide victories in the late 20th century, the South only became a Republican stronghold at the presidential level in the 21st century. In 2000, Al Gore received no electoral votes from the South, even from his home state of Tennessee, apart from heavily urbanized and uncontested Maryland and Delaware. The popular vote in Florida was extraordinarily close in awarding the state's electoral votes to George W. Bush.{{Cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/09/us/the-2000-elections-tennessee-loss-in-home-state-leaves-gore-depending-on-florida.html?mcubz=0|title = THE 2000 ELECTIONS: TENNESSEE; Loss in Home State Leaves Gore Depending on Florida|newspaper = The New York Times|date = 9 November 2000|last1 = Perez-Pena|first1 = Richard}} This pattern continued in the 2004 election; the Democratic ticket of John Kerry and John Edwards received no electoral votes from the South apart from Maryland and Delaware, even though Edwards was from North Carolina, and was born in South Carolina.[http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/data.php?year=2004&datatype=national&def=1&f=0&off=0&elect=0 2004 Presidential General Election Data – National], Uselectionatlas.org.

The border states of the Upper South have split in the 21st century, with Maryland and Delaware being Democratic strongholds while Missouri, Kentucky, and West Virginia are Republican strongholds.{{cite web|title=State of the States: Political Party Affiliation|date=January 28, 2009|url=http://www.gallup.com/poll/114016/state-states-political-party-affiliation.aspx|access-date=September 25, 2013|archive-date=September 27, 2013|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130927035445/http://www.gallup.com/poll/114016/state-states-political-party-affiliation.aspx|url-status=live}} In particular, Appalachia remained a Democratic stronghold until the 21st century. The region gradually realigned towards Republicans, particularly the state of West Virginia.{{cite web|last1=Schwartzman|first1=Gabe|url=http://www.dailyyonder.com/how-coalfields-went-gop/2015/01/13/7668/|title=How Central Appalachia Went Right|website=Daily Yonder|date=January 13, 2015|quote=With Central Appalachia firmly in the Republican win column in recent elections, it’s tempting to think that it’s always been the case. A combination of coal politics, declining power of unions and – probably – race have contributed to the change.}}

File:ElectoralCollege2004.svg, Republican George W. Bush won every former Confederate state while losing every Northeastern state.]]

West Virginia was perhaps the most reliably Democratic state in the nation between 1932 and 1996, being one of just two states (along with Minnesota) to vote for a Republican president as few as three times in that interval. Moreover, unlike Minnesota (or other nearly as reliably Democratic states like Massachusetts and Rhode Island), it usually had a unanimous (or nearly unanimous) congressional delegation and only elected two Republicans as governor (albeit for a combined 20 years between them).{{cite journal|last=Woodruff |first=Betsy|date=October 29, 2014|title=Goodbye West Virginia |url=http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/10/republicans_are_turning_west_virginia_red_how_the_democrats_lost_control.html|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170721085311/http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/10/republicans_are_turning_west_virginia_red_how_the_democrats_lost_control.html|archive-date=July 21, 2017|journal=Slate}} West Virginian voters shifted toward the Republican Party from 2000 onward, as the Democratic Party became more strongly identified with environmental policies anathema to the state's coal industry and with socially liberal policies, and is now a solidly red state. After the 2010 elections, West Virginia had a majority-Republican U.S. House delegation for the first time since 1949.

In the 2008 election, as some areas in the South became more urbanized, liberal, and demographically diverse,{{cite book |first=Michael |last=Dennis |title=The New Economy and the Modern South |location=Gainesville |publisher=University Press of Florida |year=2009 |isbn=978-0-8130-3291-7}} Barack Obama won the former Republican strongholds of Virginia and North Carolina as well as Florida.{{cite web |last=Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives |author-link=Clerk of the United States House of Representatives |title=Statistics of the Presidential and Congressional Election of November 4, 2008 |url=https://clerk.house.gov/member_info/electionInfo/2008election.pdf |pages=63 & 64}} However, Obama narrowly lost Missouri in 2008, ending its bellwether status, as the state has not supported a Democratic presidential candidate since 1996.{{cite web |url=http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2012/10/missouri_politics_why_the_swing_state_is_now_a_red_state_.html |title=Swung State |first=David |last=Weigel |date=October 3, 2012 |work=Slate |access-date=July 19, 2015}} Obama lost further ground in the Upland South, becoming the first person to win the presidency while losing Missouri since 1956, Kentucky and Tennessee since 1960, and Arkansas since 1968. Obama also became the first president to win without carrying West Virginia since 1916.

The tendency of many Southern Whites to split their tickets, voting for Republican presidential candidates but Democrats for state offices, lasted until the 2010 United States elections. In the November 2008 elections, Democrats won 3 out of 4 U.S. House seats from Mississippi, 3 out of 4 in Arkansas, 5 out of 9 in Tennessee, and achieved near parity in the Georgia and Alabama delegations. In 2016, Republican Donald Trump won Elliott County in Kentucky, which had previously never voted for a Republican presidential candidate since its creation in 1869. Elliott County was the last majority-White rural county in the South to have never voted Republican, until 2016.{{cite web |last1=Nelson |first1=Ellot |title=Democratic Party Survives in Rural Elliott County, Kentucky |url=https://www.huffpost.com/entry/solid-south-democratic-party-kentucky_n_3151539 |website=Huffington Post |date=May 10, 2013 |access-date=June 28, 2019|quote=In 2004, Elliott was one of 11 rural Kentucky counties to vote Democratic. In the 2008, that number dwindled to four. In 2012, Elliott became the last county to vote Democratic – not just in Kentucky, but among all predominantly white counties in the rural South. Elliott remains the last embodiment in the region of the Democratic principles that "Song of the South" highlighted: a belief in the power of government to help people and improve their daily lives. When the county supports a Republican presidential nominee – and recent election results suggest that time might be soon – it will mark the final victory of conservative social values over progressive economic interests in the region, and the end of a once-powerful Democratic voting bloc whose roots can be traced back to the Civil War.}}{{cite web |last1=Simon |first1=Jeff |title=How Trump Ended Democrats' 144-Year Winning Streak in One County |url=http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/09/politics/elliott-county-kentucky-democratic-streak-broken-by-donald-trump/index.html |date=December 9, 2016 |publisher=CNN |access-date=December 10, 2016}}

Even after 2010, Democrats have still been competitive in some Southern swing states in presidential elections. Obama won Virginia and Florida again in 2012 and lost North Carolina by only 2.04 percent.{{cite web|url=https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/federalelections2012.pdf#page=11|title=Federal Elections 2012|website=Federal Election Commission|access-date=January 20, 2021|year=2013|location=Washington, D.C.}} In 2016, Hillary Clinton won only Virginia while narrowly losing Florida and North Carolina.{{cite web|url=https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/federalelections2016.pdf#page=11|title=Federal Elections 2016|website=Federal Election Commission|access-date=January 20, 2021|year=2013|location=Washington, D.C.}} In 2020, Joe Biden won Virginia, a growing stronghold for Democrats, and narrowly won Georgia, in large part due to the rapidly growing Atlanta metropolitan area, while narrowly losing Florida and North Carolina.{{cite web|url=https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/federalelections2020.pdf#page=11|title=Federal Elections 2020|website=Federal Election Commission|access-date=January 20, 2021|year=2013|location=Washington, D.C.}} In 2024, Kamala Harris won only Virginia while narrowly losing Georgia and North Carolina.{{Cite web |url=https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/2024presgeresults.pdf |title=2024 Presidential Election Results |publisher=Federal Election Commission |date=January 16, 2025 |access-date=January 16, 2025}}

Although Republicans gradually began doing better in presidential elections in the South starting in 1952, Republicans did not finish taking over Southern politics at the non-presidential level until the elections of November 2010.{{Cite news|url=https://www.economist.com/united-states/2010/11/11/the-long-goodbye|date=November 11, 2010|newspaper=The Economist|title=The long goodbye|quote=In 1981 Republicans took control of the Senate for the first time since 1953, but most Southern elected officials remained white Democrats. When Republicans took control of the House in 1995, white Democrats still comprised one-third of the South's tally. ... white Southern Democrats have met their Appomattox: they will account for just 24 of the South's 155 senators and congressmen in the 112th United States Congress. ... This does not indicate a disappearance of liberals. White Southern Democrats were largely conservative before, and the Democratic domination of Congress in the second half of the 20th century rested on an uneasy coalition between men such as James Eastland, a senator from Mississippi who insisted three years after Brown v. Board of Education banned segregation that “the vast majority of Negroes want their own schools, their own hospitals, their own churches, their own restaurants”, and northern urban liberals such as Ted Kennedy. Strom Thurmond, Richard Shelby and Phil Gramm—Southern Republican stalwarts all—were first elected as Democrats, and of the 37 Democrats who voted against the health-care bill in March, 16 were Southern whites.|access-date=February 20, 2023}} On the eve of the 2010 elections, Democrats had a majority in the Alabama, North Carolina, Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana Legislatures, a majority in the Kentucky House of Representatives and Virginia Senate, a near majority of the Tennessee House of Representatives,{{cite web |url=https://www.ncsl.org/documents/statevote/legiscontrol_2009.pdf |title=2009 State and Legislative Partisan Composition |date=January 26, 2009 |work=www.ncsl.org |publisher=National Conference of State Legislatures |access-date=February 14, 2021 |archive-date=May 22, 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220522210246/https://www.ncsl.org/documents/statevote/legiscontrol_2009.pdf |url-status=dead }} and a majority of the U.S. House delegations from Arkansas, North Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia, as well as near-even splits of the Georgia and Alabama U.S. House delegations.Dan Balz, [https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/13/AR2010111302389.html The GOP takeover in the states], Washington Post (November 13, 2010).

File:2010 House elections.svg (Republican gains in dark red) marked the beginning of Republican dominance of the South at the state and federal levels.]]

However, during the 2010 midterm elections, Republicans swept the South, successfully reelecting every Senate incumbent, electing freshmen Marco Rubio in Florida and Rand Paul in Kentucky, and defeating Democratic incumbent Blanche Lincoln in Arkansas for a seat now held by John Boozman. In the House, Republicans reelected every incumbent except for Joseph Cao of New Orleans, defeated several Democratic incumbents, and gained a number of Democratic-held open seats. They won the majority in the congressional delegations of every Southern state. Most Solid South states, with the exceptions of Arkansas, Kentucky, North Carolina, and West Virginia, also elected or reelected Republicans governors. Most significantly, Republicans took control of both houses of the Alabama and North Carolina State Legislatures for the first time since Reconstruction,[http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/statevote-2010.aspx Map of Post 2010 Election Partisan Composition of State Legislatures: Republicans Make Historic Gains], National Conference of State Legislatures. with Mississippi and Louisiana flipping a year later during their off-year elections.{{cite web |title=State legislative elections, 2011 |work=Ballotpedia |access-date=December 26, 2022 |url=https://ballotpedia.org/State_legislative_elections,_2011}} Even in Arkansas, the GOP won three of six statewide down-ballot positions for which they had often not fielded candidates. They also went from eight to 15 out of 35 seats in the state senate and from 28 to 45 out of 100 in the State House of Representatives. In 2012, the Republicans finally took control of the Arkansas State Legislature and the North Carolina Governorship.{{Cite web|url=https://ballotpedia.org/State_legislative_elections,_2012|title=State legislative elections, 2012|access-date=July 22, 2023|website=Balloptedia}}

In 2014, both houses of the West Virginia legislature were finally taken by the GOP, and most other legislative chambers in the South up for election that year saw increased GOP gains.{{Cite web|url=https://ballotpedia.org/State_legislative_elections,_2014|title=State legislative elections, 2014|access-date=July 22, 2023|website=Balloptedia}} Shelley Moore Capito also became the first Republican Senator from West Virginia in 2014 for the first time since 1956.{{cite web|url=https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/republican-shelley-moore-capito-wins-senate-seat-wv-26688989 | title=Republican Shelley Moore Capito Wins Senate Seat in WV|work=ABC News|date=November 4, 2014}} Arkansas' governorship finally flipped GOP in 2014 when incumbent Mike Beebe was term-limited, as did every other statewide office not previously held by the Republicans.{{cite web|url=http://results.enr.clarityelections.com/AR/53237/149537/Web01/en/summary.html |title=November 4, 2014 General election and nonpartisan runoff election Official results|publisher=Arkansas Secretary of State |access-date=November 23, 2014}} Georgia Representative John Barrow was defeated in 2014, being the last white Democratic Representative in a state that George Wallace won in 1968 (Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia).{{cite news |last1=Cahn |first1=Emily |title=How Republicans Caught Their White Whale: John Barrow |url=https://rollcall.com/2014/11/10/how-republicans-caught-their-white-whale-john-barrow/ |access-date=June 21, 2024 |work=Roll Call |date=November 10, 2014}}

Following the 2016 elections, when Republicans won the Kentucky House of Representatives, every state legislative chamber in the South had a Republican majority for the first time ever.{{Cite web|url=https://ballotpedia.org/State_legislative_elections,_2016|title=State legislative elections, 2016|access-date=July 22, 2023|website=Balloptedia}} Republicans would control every state legislature in the former Confederate states until Democrats regained both Houses of the Virginia Legislature in 2019.{{Cite news|url=https://www.wsj.com/articles/election-results-2019-democrats-take-control-of-virginia-senate-11573008587|title=Election Results 2019: Democrats Take Control of Virginia Legislature|first=Scott Calvert and Jon|last=Kamp|newspaper=Wall Street Journal|date=November 6, 2019 }}

Today, the South is considered a Republican stronghold at the state and federal levels. As of 2024, Republicans account for a majority of every Southern state's House delegation apart from Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware.{{Cite web|url=https://history.house.gov/Institution/Election-Statistics/|title=Election Statistics: 1920 to Present|website=United States House of Representatives|access-date=July 22, 2023}} Republicans also control 10 of the 11 state legislatures in the former Confederacy, the sole exception being the Virginia General Assembly.

In 2024, Republican president Donald Trump won the majority of Hispanics in Texas and Florida, making substantial gains in majority-Hispanic counties in South Texas and South Florida in the 2024 presidential election. This signals a potential realignment among Hispanic Americans in the South towards Republicans to further strengthen the party's power in the region. In particular, Trump won Miami-Dade County for the first time since 1988, Osceola County, Florida for the first time since 2004, and Hendry County, Florida. Trump also won all but four counties in South Texas, some of which had not voted Republican in over a century.

{{see also|United States presidential elections in Virginia}}

File:US House 2022.svg (Democrats in blue and dark blue) showcased Republican political domination in the South, with most of the few Democratic districts in the South being demographically majority-minority.]]

The biggest exception to Republican gains in the former Confederate states has been the commonwealth of Virginia. It got an earlier start in the trend towards the Republican Party than the rest of the region. It voted Republican for president in 13 of the 14 elections between 1952 and 2004, the exception being Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 landslide, while no other former Confederate state did so more than 9 times (that state being Florida).Sullivan, Robert David; [http://www.americamagazine.org/content/unconventional-wisdom/how-red-and-blue-map-evolved-over-past-century ‘How the Red and Blue Map Evolved Over the Past Century’]; America Magazine in The National Catholic Review; June 29, 2016 Moreover, it had a Republican Governor more often than not between 1970 and 2002, and Republicans held at least half the seats in the Virginia congressional delegation from 1968 to 1990 (although the Democrats had a narrow minority throughout the 1990s),{{cite news|url=https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_commentary/commentary_by_geoffrey_skelley/the_new_dominion_virginia_s_ever_changing_electoral_map|title=The New Dominion: Virginia's Ever-Changing Electoral Map |first= Geoffrey |last= Skelley |date= July 13, 2017 |website= Rasmussen Reports |access-date= July 30, 2020}} while with single-term exceptions (Alabama from 1965 to 1967, Tennessee from 1973 to 1975, and South Carolina from 1981 to 1983) and the exception of Florida (which had its delegation turn majority Republican in 1989), Democrats held at least half the seats in the delegations of the rest of the Southern states until the Republican Revolution of 1994.

This is largely due to massive population growth in Northern Virginia, part of the strongly Democratic Washington metropolitan area, which is politically oriented with the Northeast.{{Cite news|title=Without Northern Virginia, Trump would have won the state|work=Inside Nova|url=https://www.insidenova.com/headlines/without-northern-virginia-trump-would-have-won-the-state/article_c937d4de-2516-11eb-9178-bbdf2f2c7b16.html|access-date=17 November 2020}} The Democratic Party has won most statewide races in Virginia since 2005, including consistently at the presidential level since 2008.{{cite news | url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-virginias-purple-is-starting-to-look-rather-blue/2012/11/16/d7b9b14c-2ddc-11e2-9ac2-1c61452669c3_story.html | title=Why Virginia's purple is starting to look rather blue | newspaper=The Washington Post | date=16 November 2012 | access-date=24 July 2016 | last1=Farnswoth |first1=Stephen |last2=Hanna |first2=Stephen}}

Virginia was the only former Confederate state to vote Democratic in the 2016 and 2024 presidential elections. As of 2024, the Virginia General Assembly is the only state legislature Democrats control in the former Confederate States.{{cite news|url=https://wtop.com/local-politics-elections-news/2023/11/tallying-is-underway-which-party-will-take-hold-of-virginias-general-assembly/|title=Democrats sweep Virginia elections to take control of General Assembly|first=Jessica|last=Kronzer|publisher=WTOP|date=November 7, 2023|accessdate=November 8, 2023}}

While Republicans occasionally won southern states in elections in which they won the presidency in the Solid South, it was not until 1960 that a Republican carried any of the 11 former Confederate states, Kentucky, or Oklahoma, while losing the election.{{cite web|url=http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/data.php?year=1960&datatype=national&def=1&f=0&off=0&elect=0|title=1960 Presidential General Election Data – National|access-date=March 18, 2013}} This table includes data for all 16 states considered part of the Southern United States by the Census Bureau.

{{Sticky table start}}

{{sticky table end}}

Bold denotes candidates elected as president

Officials who acted as governor for less than ninety days are excluded from this chart. This chart is intended to be a visual exposition of party strength in the solid south and the dates listed are not exactly precise. Governors not elected in their own right are listed in italics.{{Cite web|url=https://www.nga.org/former-governors/|website=National Governors Association|title=Former Governors|access-date=July 22, 2023}}

The parties are as follows: {{legend2|#CCEEFF|Democratic|border=1px solid #AAAAAA}} (D), {{legend2|#66FF99|Farmers' Alliance|border=1px solid #AAAAAA}} (FA), {{legend2|#ff00ff|Prohibition|border=1px solid #AAAAAA}} (P), {{legend2|#CCFF99|Readjuster|border=1px solid #AAAAAA}} (RA), {{legend2|#FFB6B6|Republican|border=1px solid #AAAAAA}} (R).

{{div col|colwidth=30em}}

• Bible Belt
• Blue wall
• Bourbon Democrat
• Conservative Democrat
• Culture of the Southern United States
• Democrat in Name Only
• History of the Southern United States
• Left Coast
• Neo-Confederates
• Southern Democrats
• Tantamount to election
• Yellow dog Democrat

{{div col end}}

{{Notelist}}

{{Reflist}}

• Zucchino, David (2020) Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy New York, NY: Atlantic Monthly Press.
• Feldman, Glenn (2015). The Great Melding: War, the Dixiecrat Rebellion, and the Southern Model for America's New Conservatism. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.
• Feldman, Glenn (2013). The Irony of the Solid South: Democrats, Republicans, and Race, 1864–1944. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.
• Lemann, Nicholas (2007). Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Perman, Michael (2003). Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888-1908 Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press
• Frederickson, Kari A. (2001). The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932–1968. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
• Grantham, Dewey W. (1992). The Life and Death of the Solid South. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.
• Sabato, Larry (1977). The Democratic Party Primary in Virginia: Tantamount to Election No Longer. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia.
• Herbert, Hilary A., et al. (1890). [https://archive.org/details/whysolidsouth00herb Why the Solid South? Or, Reconstruction and Its Results.] Baltimore, MD: R. H. Woodward & Co.

{{Regions of the United States}}

Category:1876 establishments in the United States

Category:1964 disestablishments in the United States

Category:Democratic backsliding in the United States

Category:Electoral geography of the United States

Category:History of the Southern United States

Category:United States presidential elections terminology

Category:Politics of the Southern United States

Category:History of the Democratic Party (United States)

Category:White supremacy in the United States

Category:Political history of the United States