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The Solid South was the electoral voting bloc for the Democratic Party in the Southern United States between the end of the Reconstruction era in 1877 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. During this period, the Democratic Party controlled southern state legislatures and most local, state and federal officeholders in the South were Democrats. During the late 19th century and the early 20th century, Southern Democrats disenfranchised nearly all blacks in all the former states of the Confederate States of America. This resulted in a one-party system, in which a candidate's victory in Democratic primary elections was tantamount to election to the office itself. White primaries were another means that the Democrats used to consolidate their political power, excluding blacks from voting.

The "Solid South" included all 11 former Confederate states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. It also included to a lesser extent Oklahoma and Kentucky, which remained electorally competitive during the Jim Crow era. Delaware, Maryland, and West Virginia were rarely identified with the Solid South after the 1896 United States presidential election, while Missouri became a bellwether state after the 1904 United States presidential election.

The Solid South can also refer to the "Southern strategy" that has been employed by Republicans since the 1960s to increase their electoral power in the South. Republicans have been the dominant party in most political offices within the South since 2010. The main exception to this trend has been the state of Virginia.

Background

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.

The southern slave states that stayed in the Union were Maryland, Missouri, 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.

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.

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, Missouri in 1865, one of the Confederate states, Tennessee in 1865, West Virginia in 1865, and the District of Columbia in 1862. However, slavery persisted in Delaware, Kentucky, 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.

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.

History

1870s to 1910s

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.

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. The bi-racial Readjuster Party existed in Virginia from 1877 to 1895, electing William E. Cameron as the 39th Governor of Virginia from 1882 to 1886. Also, in the 1890s 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, including in North Carolina.

In North Carolina, Republican Daniel Lindsay Russell was elected in 1896 as the 49th governor of North Carolina, serving from 1897 to 1901. 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. 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.

To prevent such coalitions in the future and to end the violence associated with suppressing the black vote during elections, Southern Democrats acted to disfranchise both black people and poor white people. From 1890 to 1910, beginning with Mississippi, 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. These devices applied to all citizens; in practice they disfranchised most black citizens and also "would remove 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". 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.)

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.

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.

White Democrats passed "Jim Crow" laws which reinforced white supremacy through racial segregation. 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.

Electoral dominance

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". Journalist Matthew Yglesias argues:

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.

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.

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. 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. In Louisiana, non-partisan tendencies remained strong among wealthy sugar planters in Acadiana (Cajun Country) and within the business elite of New Orleans.

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. In particular, Tennessee's 1st and 2nd congressional districts have been continuously held by Republicans since 1881 and 1867, respectively, to the present day.

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 "lack voters had been excluded due to fraud, violence, or intimidation". 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.

1920s onwards

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. 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. North Carolina abolished its poll tax in 1920.

In the 1928 presidential election, Al Smith received serious backlash as a Catholic in the largely Protestant South in 1928. 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. 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. 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. 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.

Southern demography also began to change. 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.

However, with the Democratic national landslide of 1932, the South again became solidly Democratic. 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. 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.

In the 1930s, black voters outside the South largely switched to the Democrats, 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, as did Florida in 1937.

The Republican Party began to make gains in the South after World War II, as the South industrialized and urbanized. 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. 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."

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. 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. 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.

Oklahoma

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. 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). Oklahoma had a strong Republican presence in Northwestern Oklahoma, which had close ties to neighboring Kansas, a Republican stronghold.

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. However, some tribes and bands sided with the Union, resulting in bloody conflict in the territory, with severe hardships for all residents. 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.

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. 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. 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.

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.

Border states

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. Note that Missouri is classified as a Midwestern state by the Census bureau, and also did not disenfranchise its African American population.

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.

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.

West Virginia

For West Virginia, "reconstruction, in a sense, began in 1861". Unlike the other border states, West Virginia did not send the majority of its soldiers to the Union. 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. 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. For nearly a generation West Virginia was part of the Solid South.

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. 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).

Kentucky

Kentucky did usually vote for the Democratic Party in presidential elections from 1877 to 1964, but was still a competitive state at both the state and federal levels. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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).

Maryland

Maryland very narrowly, by a vote of 30,174 to 28,380 (52% to 48%), abolished slavery in 1864. 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.

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. 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. 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.

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).

Delaware

Despite Delaware 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).

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. 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. 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.

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.

Missouri

Although a border state during the Civil War, Missouri abolished slavery in January 1865, before the Civil War ended. Missouri enacted racial segregation, but did not disenfranchise African Americans, who comprised less than 10% of the state's population from 1870 to 1960. Between the Civil War and the end of World War II, Missouri transitioned from a rural economy to a hybrid industrial-service-agricultural economy as the Midwest rapidly industrialized. 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. Missouri also elected some Republican governors before 1964, beginning with Herbert S. Hadley (1909-1913).

Presidential voting

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". 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. Missouri was a bellwether state from 1904 to 2004, voting for the winner of every presidential election except in 1956. 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.

In 1928, Herbert Hoover, benefiting from bias against his Democratic opponent Al Smith (who was a Roman Catholic and opposed Prohibition), 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. The only place where Smith's Catholicism helped him in the South was heavily-Catholic Acadiana in Louisiana. Smith nearly lost Alabama, which he held by 3%, which had Hoover won, would have physically split the Solid South.

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.

After World War II

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. 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, prompted many Southerners to walk out of the Democratic National Convention and form the Dixiecrat Party. This splinter party played a significant role in the 1948 election; the Dixiecrat candidate, Strom Thurmond, carried Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, his native South Carolina, and one electoral vote from Tennessee.

Despite this, in one of the greatest election upsets in American history, 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. Three former Confederate states repealed their poll taxes after World War II, specifically Georgia (1945), South Carolina (1951), and Tennessee (1953).

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. 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.

In the 1960 election, the Democratic nominee, John F. Kennedy, continued his party's tradition of selecting a Southerner as the vice presidential candidate (in this case, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas). Kennedy and Johnson, however, both supported civil rights. In October 1960, when Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested at a peaceful sit-in in Atlanta, Georgia, Kennedy placed a sympathetic phone call to King's wife, Coretta Scott King, and 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.

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; 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.

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. 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.

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." 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. 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.

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. 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.

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.

Southern strategy

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. 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.

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.

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. When looked at broadly, studies have shown that White Southerners tend to be more conservative, both fiscally and socially, than most non-Southerners and African Americans. Historically, Southern Democrats were generally more conservative than non-Southern Democrats, joining factions such as the conservative coalition and Boll weevils.

1965 to 1980

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. 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. This tactic was described in 2007 by David Greenberg in Slate as "dog-whistle politics". According to an article in The American Conservative, Nixon adviser and speechwriter Pat Buchanan disputed this characterization.

The independent candidacy of George Wallace, former Democratic governor of Alabama, partially negated Nixon's Southern Strategy. 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".

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. 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.

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. 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. The Republicans took all the region's electoral votes in the 1984 election and every state except West Virginia in 1988.

1980 to 1999

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the South was still overwhelmingly Democratic at the state level, with majorities in all state legislatures and most U.S. House delegations. 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.

Over the next 30 years, this gradually changed. Veteran Democratic officeholders retired or died, and older voters who were still rigidly Democratic died off. 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. There were also increasing numbers of migrants from other areas, especially in Florida, Georgia, Texas, North Carolina, and Virginia.

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.

In the 1992 and 1996 elections, when the Democratic ticket consisted of two Southerners (Bill Clinton and Al Gore), the Democrats and Republicans split the region. 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. 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. The year 1996 was the last year a Democratic presidential candidate won Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, Kentucky, and West Virginia.

Northeast realignment

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.

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. 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. The gypsy moth is an invasive species destructive to trees in the Northeastern United States.

In Harry S. Truman's 1948 upset victory, he only won the Northeastern states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. 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.

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. 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.

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. 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.

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. In the 2008 election, as some areas in the South became more urbanized, liberal, and demographically diverse, Barack Obama won the former Republican strongholds of Virginia and North Carolina as well as Florida. Obama narrowly lost Missouri in 2008, ending its bellwether status, as the state has not supported a Democratic presidential candidate since 1996.

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). 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 it can now be called a solidly red state. After the 2010 elections, West Virginia had a majority-Republican U.S. House delegation for the first time since 1949.

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.

2010 to present

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 nonpresidential level until the elections of November 2010. 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, 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.

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, with Mississippi and Louisiana flipping a year later during their off-year elections. 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.

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. Shelley Moore Capito also became the first Republican Senator from West Virginia in 2014 for the first time since 1956. 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. 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).

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. Republicans would control every state legislature in the former Confederate states until Democrats regained both Houses of the Virginia Legislature in 2019.

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. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won only Virginia while narrowly losing Florida and North Carolina. 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. In 2024, Kamala Harris won only Virginia while narrowly losing Georgia and North Carolina.

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. Republicans also control 10 of the 11 state legislatures in the former Confederacy, the sole exception being the Virginia General Assembly.

Virginia

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). 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), 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. The Democratic Party has won most statewide races in Virginia since 2005, including consistently at the presidential level since 2008.

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.

Solid South in presidential elections

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. This table includes data for all 16 states considered part of the Southern United States by the Census Bureau.