Editing Southern Democrats (section)

===1933–1981===
During the 1930s, as the [[New Deal]] began to move Democrats as a whole to the left in economic policy, Southern Democrats were mostly supportive, although by the late 1930s there was a growing [[conservatism in the United States|conservative faction]]. Both factions supported Roosevelt's foreign policies. 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]]. After 1964, Southern Democrats lost major battles during the [[Civil Rights Movement]]. Federal laws ended segregation and restrictions on black voters.

During the Civil Rights Movement, Democrats in the South initially still voted loyally with their party. After the signing of the [[Civil Rights Act of 1964]], the old argument that all Whites had to stick together to prevent civil rights legislation lost its force because the legislation had now been passed. More and more Whites began to vote Republican, especially in the suburbs and growing cities. Newcomers from the North were mostly Republican; they were now joined by conservatives and wealthy Southern Whites, while liberal Whites and poor Whites, especially in rural areas, remained with the Democratic Party.<ref>Byron E. Shafer and Richard Johnston, ''The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South'' (2009) pp. 173–74</ref>

The [[New Deal]] program of [[Franklin D. Roosevelt|Franklin Delano Roosevelt]] (FDR) generally united the party factions for over three decades, since Southerners, like Northern urban populations, were hit particularly hard and generally benefited from the massive governmental relief program. FDR was adept at holding White Southerners in the coalition<ref>As in declining to invite African-American [[Jesse Owens]], hero of the [[1936 Summer Olympics|1936 Olympics]], to the White House.</ref> while simultaneously beginning the erosion of Black voters away from their then-characteristic Republican preferences. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s catalyzed the end of this Democratic Party coalition of interests by magnetizing Black voters to the Democratic label and simultaneously ending White supremacist control of the Democratic Party apparatus.<ref>Until the 1960s the Democratic Party [[Partisan primary|primaries]] were [[tantamount to election]] in most of the South and, being restricted largely to caucasians, were openly called [[White primary|White primaries]].</ref> 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 the presidential elections of [[U.S. presidential election, 1952|1952]] and [[U.S. presidential election, 1956|1956]] Republican nominee [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]], a popular [[World War II]] [[General (United States)|general]], won several Southern states, thus breaking some White Southerners away from their Democratic Party pattern. The [[Seniority in the United States Senate|senior]] position of Southern Congressmen and Senators, and the discipline of many groups such as the [[Southern Caucus]]<ref>{{cite web | url=https://time.com/archive/6888376/national-affairs-go-west-lyndon/ | title=National Affairs: Go West, Lyndon | date=February 23, 1959 }}</ref> meant that Civil Rights initiatives tended to be blunted despite popular support.

The passage of the [[Civil Rights Act of 1964]] was a significant event in converting the [[Deep South]] to the Republican Party; in that year most [[U.S. senator|Senatorial]] Republicans supported the Act (most of the opposition came from Southern Democrats). Democratic preference. After the passage of this Act, however, their willingness to support Republicans on a national level increased demonstrably. In 1964, Republican presidential nominee [[Barry Goldwater|Goldwater]], who had voted against the Civil Rights Act,<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/goldwater-barry-m|title = Goldwater, Barry M|date = April 26, 2017}}</ref> won many of the "Solid South" states over Democratic presidential nominee [[Lyndon B. Johnson]], himself a [[Texas|Texan]], and with many this Republican support continued and seeped down the ballot to congressional, state, and ultimately local levels. A further significant item of legislation was the [[Voting Rights Act of 1965]], which targeted for preclearance by the [[U.S. Department of Justice]] any election-law change in areas where African-American voting participation was lower than the norm (most but not all of these areas were in the South); the effect of the Voting Rights Act on southern elections was profound, including the by-product that some White Southerners perceived it as meddling while Black voters universally appreciated it. Nixon aide Kevin Phillips told ''The New York Times'' in 1970 that "Negrophobe" Whites would quit the Democrats if Republicans enforced the Voting Rights Act and blacks registered as Democrats.<ref>{{Cite web| title=Nixon's Southern strategy 'It's All In the Charts' | website=[[The New York Times]] | url=https://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/phillips-southern.pdf | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060616072807/http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/phillips-southern.pdf | archive-date=2006-06-16}}</ref> The trend toward acceptance of Republican identification among Southern White voters was bolstered in the next two elections by [[Richard Nixon]].
[[File:JimmyCarterPortrait2.jpg|thumb|upright|39th U.S. President [[Jimmy Carter]], a [[Southern Democrat]] from the state of [[Georgia (U.S. state)|Georgia]] and the longest-lived president in U.S. history.]]
Denouncing the [[forced busing]] policy that was used to enforce school desegregation,<ref>{{cite journal|title=The Politics of Principle: Richard Nixon|author=Lawrence J McAndrews|journal=The Journal of Negro History|volume=83|pages = 187–200|number=3|date=Summer 1998|doi=10.2307/2649015|jstor=2649015|s2cid=141142915}}</ref> [[Richard Nixon]] courted populist conservative Southern Whites with what is called the [[Southern Strategy]], though his speechwriter [[Jeffrey Hart]] claimed that his campaign rhetoric was actually a "[[Border states (American Civil War)|Border State]] Strategy" and accused the press of being "very lazy" when they called it a "Southern Strategy".<ref>{{cite video | people=[[Jeffrey Hart|Hart, Jeffrey]] | date=February 9, 2006 | title = The Making of the American Conservative Mind | medium=television | location=[[Hanover, New Hampshire]] | publisher=[[C-SPAN]]}}</ref> In the 1971 ''[[Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education]]'' ruling, the power of the federal government to enforce forced busing was strengthened when the Supreme Court ruled that the federal courts had the discretion to include busing as a desegregation tool to achieve racial balance. Some southern Democrats became Republicans at the national level, while remaining with their old party in state and local politics throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Several prominent conservative Democrats switched parties to become Republicans, including [[Strom Thurmond]], [[John Connally]] and [[Mills E. Godwin Jr]].<ref>{{cite book|author=Joseph A. Aistrup|title=The Southern Strategy Revisited: Republican Top-Down Advancement in the South|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=oKMeBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA135|year=2015|page=135|publisher=University Press of Kentucky |isbn=9780813147925}}</ref> 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.

In [[1976 United States presidential election|1976]], former [[Governor of Georgia|Georgia]] governor [[Jimmy Carter]] won every Southern state except Oklahoma and Virginia in his successful presidential campaign as a Democrat, being the last Democratic presidential candidate to win a majority of the states in the South as of 2024. In [[U.S. presidential election, 1980|1980]] Republican presidential nominee [[Ronald Reagan]] won every southern state except for Georgia, although Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee were all decided by less than 3%.