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