The South, the GOP and the White House
By Rhodes Cook
Editor, The Rhodes Cook Letter

As originally published in the February 2003 issue of "The Rhodes Cook Letter".

ELECTION ANALYSIS ARCHIVES

The Fight to be First Unusual Turnout Dynamic Keys Big Democratic Comeback Voter Turnout and Congressional Change Halfway to November 2006 Primary Season Opens in Texas 2005: An Eventful Year Competition and Congruency A Bush Mandate? The Election of 2004: A First Take More Voters Steering Away from Party Labels Primary Analysis Charts Bush, The Democrats and 'Red and Blue' America Winning "the Invisible Primary" The South, the GOP and the White House 2000 1996

Congressional/Gubernatorial 2002: Leaning Republican Fit to be Tied: The Battle to Control Congress in 2002 Do the Math, and the Result Is: Not Much of a Contest Parties Could Do Better in 'Civics 101' A Good Start for Incumbents Charts: Summary of Election Results What's Up in 2002 Gubernatorial and Senate Nominations at a Glance House Casualties 2000: A Few Incumbents Under Fire

Election Wrap-Up 2000: Part Retro, Part New Age

Trent Lott’s kind words about the 1948 presidential candidacy of Strom Thurmond late last year had a number of ramifications, not the least of which was to throw a spotlight on the critical role that the South has played in the development of the modern Republican Party.

Over its nearly 150-year history, the Republican Party has won presidential elections with support from the South and without it. And arguably, the middle of the 20th century was an important demarcation point in the party’s evolution. Through the 1948 election, the GOP regularly lost the South but often won the White House by sweeping every other part of the country.

Yet since the middle of the last century, Republicans have become increasingly dependent on the South – to the point that in each of the last three presidential elections, the region has provided the GOP with at least 60% of the party’s electoral votes.

Over the past generation or two, Republicans have gone from being viewed as the party of Abraham Lincoln and “the War of Northern Aggression” to the party of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, states’ rights and the “Southern strategy.”

They were aided in this transition by the regional, race-oriented third-party efforts of Thurmond in 1948 and George Wallace in 1968, each of which left the Republicans a bit stronger among white voters in the South than they were before. The Thurmond and Wallace candidacies provided vehicles for conservative white Southern Democrats to exit the party of their ancestors without the trauma of directly entering the GOP, regarded by many in Dixie at the time as its own axis of evil.

The Party of Lincoln

In its formative years, the GOP had literally no appeal in the South. The party’s first presidential nominee in 1856, the explorer John C. Fremont, drew not a single recorded vote in any Southern state. Four years later, Lincoln did little better, drawing 1% in Virginia and his native Kentucky and nothing, nada, zilch, in the other Southern states. Put another way, of the roughly 1 million votes counted across the South in 1860, Lincoln won just 3,251 of them.

But Lincoln’s election showed that Republicans could win the White House without any support from the South. Before the Civil War, the party was identified with opposition to slavery. For decades after the Civil War, it “waved the bloody shirt” of Union victory. And the GOP triumphed with regularity well into the 20th century, winning all but four of the 18 presidential elections from 1860 through 1928.

During that period of almost total Republican hegemony, the party garnered only a small fraction of its electoral votes from the South and those basically came in two clusters of elections.

The first was during Reconstruction immediately after the Civil War, when federal troops occupied much of the region. In 1868 and again in 1872, the Republican candidate, former Union General Ulysses S. Grant, won the White House with the support from six states in the region he helped subjugate. In 1876, disputed electoral votes from three Southern states (Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina) gave Republican Rutherford B. Hayes the White House.

But with the end of Reconstruction and the withdrawal of federal forces, Republicans carried only one Southern state over the next40 years, and that just barely, as William McKinley won Kentucky in 1896 by 277 votes out of nearly 450,000 cast.

Republicans did not make any other inroads in the South until the 1920s, when bitter factional infighting within the Democratic Party between rural “drys” and urban “wets” gave the GOP a temporary opening. Warren Harding won two Southern states in 1920 (Oklahoma and Tennessee). Calvin Coolidge carried one (Kentucky) in 1924. And in 1928, when Democrats nominated Al Smith, a Roman Catholic from New York, Republican Herbert Hoover was able to win seven states across the largely Protestant South.

Yet in the Deep South, where the black population has been highest, race (and party loyalty) trumped religion. Smith held all the Deep South states from South Carolina on the east to Arkansas and Louisiana on the west – including the four states that supported Thurmond in 1948 (Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina) and the five that backed Wallace in 1968 (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi).

But the GOP inroads were short-lived. Through the five Democratic election victories (1932-48) that followed, Republicans failed to carry a single Southern state. And in 1948, Republican Thomas E. Dewey reached 40% of the vote only in Kentucky and Virginia on the fringes of the region. Even with Thurmond on the ballot, Dewey came within 10 percentage points of carrying just one Southern state, Virginia. And in Mississippi and South Carolina, the Republican ticket was virtually invisible, drawing less than 5% of the vote.

From Beachheads to Hegemony

Yet the election of 1948 still marked the end of an era. In nearly three-fourths of the elections from 1856 through 1948 (17 of 24), the GOP failed to carry a single Southern state. And for the entire period, Republicans averaged just 10 electoral votes per election from the entire region.

From 1952 through 2000, though, the GOP has received on average more than 100 electoral votes per election from the South, and in only one contest (in 1976) carried less than five Southern states.

But Republican strength did not appear full blown across the South overnight. The GOP went from being a non-factor in the region to a stable presence, before ultimately becoming the major player – helped along by a repositioning of the two parties on the issue of race.

From 1952 through 1968, Republicans carried from five to seven Southern states per election. However, it was not until 1964 – when Goldwater mounted his campaign sympathetic to individual and states’ rights – that the GOP was able to sweep the entire Deep South from South Carolina to Louisiana for the first time ever. Goldwater’s breakthrough proved to be a harbinger of things to come, for in 1972, Richard Nixon became the first Republican presidential candidate to carry every Southern state.

A gradual role reversal had taken place since 1948. Long the party of Lincoln and the Negro, the GOP had become the party of the Southern strategy and the white South. From 1972 through 1988, Republicans swept every state in the region three different times with three different candidates (Nixon in 1972, Ronald Reagan in 1984 and George Bush in 1988). And in 1980, Reagan carried all but one Southern state.

Yet in all four of these elections, the South merely provided icing on the Republican cake. The GOP would have won each contest without the region’s electoral votes.

Ironically, the one president the South could claim to have elected during this period was a Democrat, Jimmy Carter of Georgia, who swept all but two states from his native South (Oklahoma and Virginia) in narrowly winning the White House in 1976.

Unfortunatley for the Democrats, Carter’s showing in 1976 did not prove to be a harbinger of a Democratic revival. When Carter sought reelection in 1980, the entire South deserted him with the exception of Georgia. When Arkansas’ Bill Clinton won the White House in the 1990s, he put together a winning coalition that each time included only five Southern states. And when Democrat Al Gore sought the presidency in 2000, he lost the entire South including his home state of Tennessee.

In short, even with a Southerner atop the ticket, the Democrats have settled into a position rather similar to the one that Republicans were in for nearly a century after the Civil War – having to look to the rest of the country for virtually all of their electoral votes.

Meanwhile, Republicans have found themselves in the opposite position - having to rely on solid support from the South to win the presidency, to the point that in 2000 Bush swept the entire region with its large block of electoral votes but still triumphed with just one electoral vote to spare.

So, unless the political landscape changes dramatically over the next year, the South should continue to be a Republican bailiwick. But it also appears that neither party will have a route to the White House in 2004 that allows much room for error.