Southern Democrats

[1] Defunct Newspapers Journals TV channels Websites Other Congressional caucuses Economics Gun rights Identity politics Nativist Religion Watchdog groups Youth/student groups Miscellaneous Other Before the American Civil War, Southern Democrats were mostly whites living in the South who believed in Jacksonian democracy.

The United States presidential election of 1860 formalized the split in the Democratic Party and brought about the American Civil War.

[4][5] Many scholars have stated that southern whites shifted to the Republican Party after a civil rights culture change and accepted social conservatism.

[12] The title of "Democrat" has its beginnings in the South, going back to the founding of the Democratic-Republican Party in 1793 by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

After being the dominant party in U.S. politics from 1801 to 1829, the Democratic-Republicans split into two factions by 1828: the federalist National Republicans (who became the Whigs), and the Democrats.

After the election of Abraham Lincoln, Southern Democrats led the charge to secede from the Union and establish the Confederate States.

Kentucky and Missouri were both governed by pro-secessionist Southern Democratic Governors who vehemently rejected Lincoln's call for 75,000 troops.

Southern Democrats in Maryland faced a Unionist Governor Thomas Holliday Hicks and the Union Army.

Armed with the suspension of habeas corpus and Union troops, Governor Hicks was able to stop Maryland's secession movement.

The Democrats emphasized that since Jefferson and Jackson they had been the party of states rights, which added to their appeal in the White South.

By 1948 the protection of segregation led Democrats in the Deep South to reject Truman and run a third party ticket of Dixiecrats in the 1948 United States presidential election.

FDR was adept at holding White Southerners in the coalition[15] while simultaneously beginning the erosion of Black voters away from their then-characteristic Republican preferences.

[16] A series of court decisions, rendering primary elections as public instead of private events administered by the parties, essentially freed the Southern region to change more toward the two-party behavior of most of the rest of the nation.

In 1964, Republican presidential nominee Goldwater, who had voted against the Civil Rights Act,[18] won many of the "Solid South" states over Democratic presidential nominee Lyndon B. Johnson, himself a Texan, and with many this Republican support continued and seeped down the ballot to congressional, state, and ultimately local levels.

[19] The trend toward acceptance of Republican identification among Southern White voters was bolstered in the next two elections by Richard Nixon.

Several prominent conservative Democrats switched parties to become Republicans, including Strom Thurmond, John Connally and Mills E. Godwin Jr.[22] In the 1974 Milliken v. Bradley decision, however, the ability to use forced busing as a political tactic was greatly diminished when the U.S. Supreme Court placed an important limitation on Swann and ruled that students could only be bused across district lines if evidence of de jure segregation across multiple school districts existed.

After two welfare reform bills sponsored by the Republican-controlled Congress were successfully vetoed by the President,[30] a compromise was eventually reached and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act was signed into law on August 22, 1996.

[29] During the Clinton administration, the southern strategy shifted towards the so-called "culture war," which saw major political battles between the Religious Right and the secular Left.

[31] This tendency of many Southern Whites to vote for the Republican presidential candidate but Democrats from other offices lasted until the 2010 midterm 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.

Additionally, in 2014, Democrats lost four U.S. Senate seats in the South (in West Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Louisiana) that they had previously held.

By 2017, Southern Democrats only controlled both branches of the Delaware General Assembly and the Maryland General Assembly, along with the Council of the District of Columbia; they had lost control of both houses of the state legislatures in Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and West Virginia.

Following the November 2010 elections, John Barrow of Georgia was left as the only White Democratic U.S. House member in the Deep South, and he lost reelection in 2014.

Southern Democrats saw some additional successes in 2019, as Andy Beshear was elected governor of Kentucky and won re-election in 2023.

Due to growing urbanization and changing demographics in many Southern states, more liberal Democrats have found success in the South.

Dr. Ralph Northam, a Democrat and the governor of Virginia (2018–22), admitted that he voted for George W. Bush in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections.

George Wallace of Alabama was in presidential politics as a conservative Democrat except 1968, when he left the party and ran as an independent.