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Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press President Obama greeting audience members after speaking at Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans in 2010, on the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. In some Southern states, the Republican advantage among white voters is nearly nine to one in presidential elections, a level of loyalty rivaling that of African-Americans for Democrats.

After President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he reportedly told a fellow Democrat that the party had lost the South for a long time to come. It took more than a generation for old Southern loyalties to the Democrats to fade, but that vision is on the verge of being realized this weekend.

If Mary Landrieu, a Democratic Senator from Louisiana, loses re-election in Saturdays runoff election, as expected, the Republicans will have vanquished the last vestige of Democratic strength in the once solidly Democratic Deep South. In a region stretching from the high plains of Texas to the Atlantic coast of the Carolinas, Republicans would control not only every Senate seat, but every governors mansion and every state legislative body.

Democrats held or controlled nearly every one of them when Mr. Johnson signed that bill in 1964. And they still held a majority as recently as a decade ago. Ms. Landrieus defeat would essentially mark an end to the era of the Southern Democrats: the conservative, Southern, white officials, supported by white Southerners, whose conflicted views helped define American politics for half a century.

Today, nearly all of the Democrats holding federal or statewide office in the South will represent so-called majority-minority districts or areas with a large number of new residents from outside the region. Democrats will control Senate seats or governors mansions only in Virginia and Florida. Not coincidentally, those are the two Southern states where people born outside the state represent a majority of the population. These Democrats bear little resemblance to the Southern Democrats who won by attracting conservative white voters.

The dramatic decline of the Southern Democrats represents the culmination of a half-century of political realignment along racial and cultural lines. Some of it is about Obama; most of it is about the longer-term realignment of white voter preferences, said Guy Molyneux, a Democratic strategist. The shift has contributed to the polarization of national politics by replacing conservative Democrats, who often voted across party lines, with conservative Republicans who do not.

Southern Democrats allowed the party to pass sweeping social programs, like the New Deal and the Great Society, even as they opposed civil rights legislation. They allowed Democrats to hold the House and the Senate, even when the party was at a severe disadvantage in presidential elections. The new alignment makes it all but impossible for Democrats to enact their agenda on issues like climate change, immigration and income inequality. It gives the Republicans a real opportunity, despite all of their demographic challenges, to control the House, Senate and presidency after the 2016 presidential election.

In some states, the Republican advantage among white voters is nearly nine to one in presidential elections, a level of loyalty that rivals that of African-Americans for Democrats. What has changed is that Southern white voters are now nearly as hostile to born-and-bred Southern Democrats, like Ms. Landrieu, as they were to John Kerry or Barack Obama.

White supremacist Democrats seized control of the South after the end of Reconstruction, the period that followed the Civil War. They instituted so-called Jim Crow laws disenfranchising African-American voters, who favored Republicans, the party of Lincoln. The so-called Solid South all but unanimously supported Democrats for more than half a century, with states like South Carolina and Mississippi routinely offering Democrats more than 95 percent of the vote, even to losing presidential candidates.

The Democratic hold on the South in presidential elections began to change in 1948, when the Democratic National Convention backed President Harry Trumans position on civil rights. Many Southern Democrats left the convention and nominated Strom Thurmond as the presidential candidate of the States Rights Democratic Party.

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Demise of the Southern Democrat Is Now Nearly Complete

The Democrat-Academia junk science axis digs in
The Democrat-Academia junk science axis digs in.

By: Cappleman

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The Democrat-Academia junk science axis digs in - Video

December 2 Senate Democrat Leadership Press Conference
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid discussed a reported House spending measure, retroactive tax extender bills and executive nominations at his weekly news conference Dec. 2. Website: ...

By: Roll Call

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December 2 Senate Democrat Leadership Press Conference - Video

TIME History politics What Makes a Democrat a Democrat and a Republican a Republican? Its More Complicated Than You Think It remains the case that a large majority of the public has liberal views on some issues and conservative views on others

History News Network

This post is in partnership with the History News Network, the website that puts the news into historical perspective. The article below was originally published at HNN.

Political scientists will often say that peoples political party affiliations are major causes of their voting behavior and of their opinions on various policy issues. Yet this line often neglects evidence that, to understand political party affiliations, one needs to focus on voters opinions on various policy issues.

Fifty years ago, Democrat Lyndon Johnson battled Republican Barry Goldwater for the presidency. At that time, no Republican presidential candidate had carried the Deep South since Reconstruction. Nonetheless, Goldwater carried the line of states from Louisiana to South Carolina (as well as his home state of Arizona) but no other states. The reason for his victory in these southern states had to do with Goldwaters opposition to the Civil Rights Act, which Johnson, in contrast, had championed. In the election, many southern whites voted on the basis of this issue, at the expense of their traditional party.

Further, as the pace of social change accelerated in the early 1960s, the Supreme Court issued a line of controversial decisions on school prayer, birth control, and abortion. These previously sleepy issues took on greater public prominence. As the political parties adopted their contrasting positions in the 1970s, key voting groups began shifting. White churchgoers (including many southerners and Catholics who had previously been solid supporters of Democrats) increasingly voted Republican, while the growing group of non-religious whites leaned more towards Democrats.

More recently, the Reagan years saw the opening of a new gender gap in party voting, driven not by abortion (an issue on which men and women have never, it turns out, differed much on average), but by the gender gap in support for government safety-net programs. In addition, more recently, Republicans have become increasingly associated with anti-immigrant views (a major milestone occurring in 1994, when Republican Governor Pete Wilson supported Californias Proposition 187), and, as a result, Latinos have become increasingly solid Democratic supporters.

To make sense of contemporary politics, its more crucial than ever to understand what drives the publics contrasting views on a wide range of hot-button issues taxes, healthcare, affirmative action, immigration, school prayer, same-sex marriage, abortion, marijuana legalization, and others. One needs to be able to see how these issues relate to the demographic splits that increasingly guide political analysis.

In The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind (Princeton, 2014), we offer a fresh perspective on these topics. We combine the data-driven analyses typical of political professionals with growing psychological insights into human motives.

We sift through large surveys for connections between peoples lives and their politics, focusing attention on the biggest links. A key point is that different kinds of issues involve different major demographic predictors.

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What Makes a Democrat a Democrat and a Republican a Republican? Its More Complicated Than You Think

Southern Democrats who lost key races this election cycle

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

New Orleans (CNN) -- The 2014 elections seemed like the final reckoning for Southern Democrats, the culmination of a political metamorphosis that began in the Civil Rights era and concluded under the nation's first black President.

Wiped out in governors' races, clobbered in Senate contests, irrelevant in many House districts and boxed out of state legislatures, Democrats in the South today look like a rump party consigned to a lifetime of indignity.

"I can't remember it being any gloomier for Democrats in the South than it is today," said Curtis Wilkie, the longtime journalist and observer of Southern life who lectures at the University of Mississippi. "The party has been demonized by Republicans. It's very bleak. I just don't see anything good for them on the horizon."

Democrats are looking everywhere for solutions to their Southern problem. They hope population changes will make states such as Georgia and North Carolina more hospitable. They want more financial help from the national party. Some are even clinging to the dim hope that Hillary Clinton might help make inroads with white working class voters in Arkansas in 2016.

Success here is crucial for the party. There's virtually no way for Democrats to win back a majority in the Senate -- much less the House -- without finding a way to compete more effectively in the South. But the truth is there are no easy answers for a party so deep in the hole.

White voters have abandoned Democrats for decades, and the flight has only hastened under President Barack Obama. The migration has created a troublesome math problem: Democrats across the region now depend on African-American voters and not much else.

It's a disastrous formula in low-turnout midterms dominated by white voters. In Louisiana, Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu won only 18% of white voters on Election Day. She won't do much better in what's expected to be another knife-twisting loss for Democrats in the state's runoff election here on Saturday. If she loses, there won't be a single Democratic senator or governor anywhere south of Virginia.

READ: Landrieu, Cassidy spar in final Senate debate

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Death of the Southern Democrat