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The momentum of the petition, paired with threats from conservatives to cause problems if the effort continues to move, prompted House leadership to summon both key moderate and conservative members to meet in Ryan's offices with the full GOP leadership team Wednesday evening. But the issue remained far from resolved.

The signatures of New York Rep. John Katko and Michigan Rep. David Trott on Wednesday brought the total to 20 Republicans supporting the move, five short of the number needed to force a vote if all Democrats sign on as well.

The pitch from Ryan to his party colleagues at a meeting that morning as well as the evening huddles, as recounted by multiple lawmakers leaving the meeting, came as he faces an uprising from moderate GOP members who say time is running out for him to come up with a solution on immigration, adding they are tired of waiting for action.

Texas Rep. Bill Flores paraphrased the speaker as telling Republicans in the morning to "quit messing around with the discharge petition" and that it's "not a path to success."

"He just said a discharge petition is not a path to success if you really want to do something on immigration," Flores told reporters.

Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy also weighed in. A source familiar with his remarks said McCarthy was quite serious in warning the conference about the effects the discharge petition could have on the midterms. Florida Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo said he didn't explicitly say the effort could threaten the House majority but did say "that it's important for us to work as a team."

Other members and Flores said Ryan told his colleagues that he met with President Donald Trump the day before and that leadership and the White House were working on a plan that could ultimately pass both chambers of Congress and get the President's signature. But he did not offer specifics, the lawmakers added.

Both moderates and conservatives leaving the speaker's offices in the evening said they had "productive" and good meetings, which included the top five House Republicans including Ryan, McCarthy and Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana.

But both also insisted that nothing in the meetings changed their efforts. Moderates are still pursuing the discharge petition and conservatives are still threatening an unrelated farm bill to push for their preferred immigration bill, a hardline measure that lacks the votes to pass the House.

Moderates included Reps. Denham; Curbelo; David Valdeo, R-California; Fred Upton, R-Michigan; and Will Hurd, R-Texas. Florida Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart stopped by but couldn't stay because he had committee obligations.

The conservatives meeting were Freedom Caucus Members Reps. Mark Meadows, R-North Carolina; Jim Jordan, R-Ohio; and Scott Perry, R-Pennsylvania.

"It was a conversation, I'm not going to divulge all the details ... but it was productive," Curbelo said. "Clearly we have had a positive impact on our leadership and this institution because now this issue is being taken seriously and people are thinking through how something can be achieved."

"The next step is figuring out what the next step is," Meadows said.

Leadership called the meetings, members said.

"The meeting was prompted when we got number 20 today and they know we're continuing to make upward progress," Upton said.

Ryan in his weekly news conference earlier similarly did not offer specifics on the alternative immigration plan he is developing with the White House, saying his team is "working on it."

"Obviously we do not agree with discharge petitions. We think they're a big mistake -- they dis-unify our majority," Ryan said. "We want to advance something that has a chance of going into law where the President would support it."

Inside his earlier meeting with the full conference, Ryan mostly spoke in broad strokes about the need to balance border security and other immigration policies, said Michigan Rep. John Moolenaar.

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DACA: Paul Ryan tells Republicans not to sign petition ...

In American politics, the Southern strategy was a Republican Party electoral strategy to increase political support among white voters in the South by appealing to racism against African Americans.[1][2][3] As the civil rights movement and dismantling of Jim Crow laws in the 1950s and 1960s visibly deepened existing racial tensions in much of the Southern United States, Republican politicians such as presidential candidate Richard Nixon and Senator Barry Goldwater developed strategies that successfully contributed to the political realignment of many white, conservative voters in the South that had traditionally supported the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.[4] It also helped push the Republican Party much more to the right.[4]

In academia, the "Southern strategy" refers primarily to "top down" narratives of the political realignment of the South which suggest that Republican leaders consciously appealed to many white Southerners' racial resentments in order to gain their support.[5] This top-down narrative of the southern strategy is generally believed to be the primary force that transformed southern politics following the civil rights era.[6][7] This view has been questioned by historians such as Matthew Lassiter, Kevin M. Kruse and Joseph Crespino, who have presented an alternative, "bottom up" narrative, which Lassiter has called the "suburban strategy". This narrative recognizes the centrality of racial backlash to the political realignment of the South,[8] but suggests that this backlash took the form of a defense of de facto segregation in the suburbs rather than overt resistance to racial integration and that the story of this backlash is a national rather than a strictly Southern one.[9][10][11][12]

The perception that the Republican Party had served as the "vehicle of white supremacy in the South", particularly during the Goldwater campaign and the presidential elections of 1968 and 1972, made it difficult for the Republican Party to win the support of black voters in the South in later years.[4] In 2005, Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman formally apologized to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a national civil rights organization, for exploiting racial polarization to win elections and ignoring the black vote.[13][14]

Although the phrase "Southern strategy" is often attributed to Nixon's political strategist Kevin Phillips, he did not originate it[15] but popularized it.[16] In an interview included in a 1970 New York Times article, Phillips stated his analysis based on studies of ethnic voting:

From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.[1]

While Phillips sought to increase Republican power by polarizing ethnic voting in general, and not just to win the white South, the South was by far the biggest prize yielded by his approach. Its success began at the presidential level. Gradually, Southern voters began to elect Republicans to Congress and finally to statewide and local offices, particularly as some legacy segregationist Democrats retired or switched to the GOP. In addition, the Republican Party worked for years to develop grassroots political organizations across the South, supporting candidates for local school boards and city and county offices as examples, but following the Watergate scandal Southern voters came out in support for the "favorite son" candidate, Southern Democrat Jimmy Carter,

From 1948 to 1984, the Southern states, for decades a stronghold for the Democrats, became key swing states, providing the popular vote margins in the 1960, 1968 and 1976 elections. During this era, several Republican candidates expressed support for states' rights, a reversal of the position held by southern states prior to the Civil War. Some political analysts said this term was used in the 20th century as a "code word" to represent opposition to federal enforcement of civil rights for blacks and to federal intervention on their behalf; many individual southerners had opposed passage of the Voting Rights Act.[3]

During the Reconstruction era (18631877), the Republican Party built up its base across the South and for a while had control in each state except Virginia, but from a national perspective the Republican Party always gave priority to its much better established Northern state operations. The Northern party distrusted the scalawags, found the avaricious carpetbaggers distasteful and lacked respect for the black component of their Republican Party in the South. Richard Abbott says that national Republicans always "stressed building their Northern base rather than extending their party into the South, and whenever the Northern and Southern needs conflicted the latter always lost".[17] In 1868, the GOP spent only 5% of its war chest in the South. Ulysses S. Grant was reelected and the New York Tribune advised it was now time for Southern Republicans to "root, hog, or die!" (that is, to take care of themselves).[18]

In a series of compromises, most famously in 1877, the Republican Party withdrew United States Army forces that had propped up its last three state governors and in return gained the White House for Rutherford B. Hayes.[19] All the Southern states were now under the control of Democrats, who decade by decade increased their control of virtually all aspects of politics in the ex Confederate states. There were occasional pockets of Republican control, usually in remote mountain districts.[20]

After 1890, the white Democrats used a variety of tactics to reduce voting by African Americans and poor whites.[21] In the 1880s, they began to pass legislation making election processes more complicated and in some cases requiring payment of poll taxes, which created a barrier for poor people of both races.

From 1890 to 1908, the white Democratic legislatures in every Southern state enacted new constitutions or amendments with provisions to disenfranchise most blacks[22] and tens of thousands of poor whites. Provisions required payment of poll taxes, complicated residency, literacy tests and other requirements which were subjectively applied against blacks. As blacks lost their vote, the Republican Party lost its ability to effectively compete in the South.[23] There was a dramatic drop in voter turnout as these measures took effect, a decline in African American participation that was enforced for decades in all Southern states.[24]

Blacks did have a voice in the Republican Party, especially in the choice of presidential candidates at the national convention. Boris Heersink and Jeffery A. Jenkins argue that in 18801928 Republican leaders at the presidential level adopted a "Southern strategy" by "investing heavily in maintaining a minor party organization in the South, as a way to create a reliable voting base at conventions". As a consequence, federal patronage did go to Southern blacks as long as there was a Republican in the White House. The issue exploded in 1912, when President William Howard Taft used control of the Southern delegations to defeat former President Theodore Roosevelt at the Republican National Convention.[25][26]

Because blacks were closed out of elected offices, the South's congressional delegations and state governments were dominated by white Democrats until the 1980s or later. Effectively, Southern white Democrats controlled all the votes of the expanded population by which Congressional apportionment was figured. Many of their representatives achieved powerful positions of seniority in Congress, giving them control of chairmanships of significant Congressional committees. Although the Fourteenth Amendment has a provision to reduce the Congressional representation of states that denied votes to their adult male citizens, this provision was never enforced. Because African Americans could not be voters, they were also prevented from being jurors and serving in local offices. Services and institutions for them in the segregated South were chronically underfunded by state and local governments, from which they were excluded.[27]

During this period, Republicans held only a few House seats from the South. Between 1880 and 1904, Republican presidential candidates in the South received 3540% of that section's vote (except in 1892, when the 16% for the Populists knocked Republicans down to 25%). From 1904 to 1948, Republicans received more than 30% of the section's votes only in the 1920 (35.2%, carrying Tennessee) and 1928 elections (47.7%, carrying five states) after disenfranchisement.

During this period, Republican administrations appointed blacks to political positions. Republicans regularly supported anti-lynching bills, but these were filibustered by Southern Democrats in the Senate. In the 1928 election, the Republican candidate Herbert Hoover rode the issues of prohibition and anti-Catholicism[28] to carry five former Confederate states, with 62 of the 126 electoral votes of the section. After his victory, Hoover attempted to build up the Republican Party of the South, transferring his limited patronage away from blacks and toward the same kind of white Protestant businessmen who made up the core of the Northern Republican Party. With the onset of the Great Depression, which severely affected the South, Hoover soon became extremely unpopular. The gains of the Republican Party in the South were lost. In the 1932 election, Hoover received only 18.1% of the Southern vote for re-election.

In the 1948 election, after Harry Truman signed an Executive Order to desegregate the Army, a group of conservative Southern Democrats known as Dixiecrats split from the Democratic Party in reaction to the inclusion of a civil rights plank in the party's platform. This followed a floor fight led by civil- ights activist, Minneapolis Mayor (and soon-to-be Senator) Hubert Humphrey. The disaffected conservative Democrats formed the States' Rights Democratic, or Dixiecrat Party and nominated Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for President. Thurmond carried four Deep South states in the general election: South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. The main plank of the States' Rights Democratic Party was maintaining segregation and Jim Crow in the South. The Dixiecrats, failing to deny the Democrats the presidency in 1948, soon dissolved, but the split lingered. In the fall of 1964, Thurmond was one of the first conservative Southern Democrats to switch to the Republican Party just a couple months after Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law.[29][30]

In addition to the splits in the Democratic Party, the population movements associated with World War II had a significant effect in changing the demographics of the South. More than 5 million African Americans migrated from the South to the North and West in the Second Great Migration, lasting from 1940 to 1970. Starting before WWII, many had moved to California for jobs in the defense industry as well as to major industrial cities of the Midwest.[31]

With control of powerful committees, Southern Democrats gained new federal military installations in the South and other federal investments during and after the war. Changes in industry and growth in universities and the military establishment in turn attracted Northern transplants to the South and bolstered the base of the Republican Party. In the post-war presidential campaigns, Republicans did best in those fastest-growing states of the South that had the most Northern transplants. In the 1952, 1956 and 1960 elections, Virginia, Tennessee and Florida went Republican while Louisiana went Republican in 1956 and Texas twice voted for Dwight D. Eisenhower and once for John F. Kennedy. In 1956, Eisenhower received 48.9% of the Southern vote, becoming only the second Republican in history (after Ulysses S. Grant) to get a plurality of Southern votes.[32]

The white conservative voters of the states of the Deep South remained loyal to the Democratic Party, which had not officially repudiated segregation. Because of declines in population or smaller rates of growth compared to other states, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and North Carolina lost congressional seats from the 1950s to the 1970s while South Carolina, Louisiana and Georgia remained static. Eisenhower was elected President in 1952, with strong support from the emerging middle class suburban element in the South. He appointed a number of Southern Republican supporters as federal judges in the South. They in turn ordered the desegregation of Southern schools in the 1950s and 1960s. They included Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judges John R. Brown, Elbert P. Tuttle and John Minor Wisdom as well as district judges Frank Johnson and J. Skelly Wright.[33] However, five of his 24 appointees supported segregation.[34]

The "Year of Birmingham" in 1963 highlighted racial issues in Alabama. Through the spring, there were marches and demonstrations to end legal segregation. The Movement's achievements in settlement with the local business class were overshadowed by bombings and murders by the Ku Klux Klan, most notoriously in the deaths of four girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.[35]

After the Democrat George Wallace was elected as Governor of Alabama, he emphasized the connection between states' rights and segregation, both in speeches and by creating crises to provoke federal intervention. He opposed integration at the University of Alabama and collaborated with the Ku Klux Klan in 1963 in disrupting court-ordered integration of public schools in Birmingham.[35]

Many of the states' rights Democrats were attracted to the 1964 presidential campaign of conservative Republican Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Goldwater was notably more conservative than previous Republican nominees, such as President Eisenhower. Goldwater's principal opponent in the primary election, Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, was widely seen as representing the more moderate, pro-Civil Rights Act, Northern wing of the party (see Rockefeller Republican and Goldwater Republican).[36]

In the 1964 presidential election, Goldwater ran a conservative campaign that broadly opposed strong action by the federal government. Although he had supported all previous federal civil rights legislation, Goldwater decided to oppose the Civil Rights Act.[37] He believed that this act was an intrusion of the federal government into the affairs of state; and second, that the Act interfered with the rights of private persons to do business, or not, with whomever they chose, even if the choice is based on racial discrimination.

Goldwater's position appealed to white Southern Democrats and Goldwater was the first Republican presidential candidate since Reconstruction to win the electoral votes of the Deep South states (Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina). Outside the South, Goldwater's negative vote on the Civil Rights Act proved devastating to his campaign. The only other state he won was his home one of Arizona and he suffered a landslide defeat. A Lyndon B. Johnson ad called "Confessions of a Republican", which ran in the North, associated Goldwater with the Ku Klux Klan. At the same time, Johnsons campaign in the Deep South publicized Goldwaters support for pre-1964 civil rights legislation. In the end, Johnson swept the election.[38]

At the time, Goldwater was at odds in his position with most of the prominent members of the Republican Party, dominated by so-called Eastern Establishment and Midwestern Progressives. A higher percentage of the Republican Party supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than did the Democratic Party as they had on all previous Civil Rights legislation.[citation needed] The Southern Democrats mostly opposed the Northern Party membersand their Presidents (Kennedy and Johnson)on civil rights issues. At the same time, passage of the Civil Rights Act caused many black voters to join the Democratic Party, which moved the party and its nominees in a progressive direction.[39]

Johnson was concerned that his endorsement of Civil Rights legislation would endanger his party in the South. In the 1968 election, Richard Nixon saw the cracks in the Solid South as an opportunity to tap into a group of voters who had historically been beyond the reach of the Republican Party. George Wallace had exhibited a strong candidacy in that election, where he garnered 46 electoral votes and nearly 10 million popular votes, attracting mostly Southern Democrats away from Hubert Humphrey.[40][41][42]

The notion of Black Power advocated by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leaders captured some of the frustrations of African Americans at the slow process of change in gaining civil rights and social justice. African Americans pushed for faster change, raising racial tensions.[43] Journalists reporting about the demonstrations against the Vietnam War often featured young people engaging in violence or burning draft cards and American flags.[44] Conservatives were also dismayed about the many young adults engaged in the drug culture and "free love" (sexual promiscuity), in what was called the "hippie" counter-culture. These actions scandalized many Americans and created a concern about law and order.

Nixon's advisers recognized that they could not appeal directly to voters on issues of white supremacy or racism. White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman noted that Nixon "emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognized this while not appearing to".[45] With the aid of Harry Dent and South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who had switched to the Republican Party in 1964, Nixon ran his 1968 campaign on states' rights and "law and order". Liberal Northern Democrats accused Nixon of pandering to Southern whites, especially with regard to his "states' rights" and "law and order" positions, which were widely understood by black leaders to symbolize Southern resistance to civil rights.[46] This tactic was described in 2007 by David Greenberg in Slate as "dog-whistle politics".[47] According to an article in The American Conservative, Nixon adviser and speechwriter Pat Buchanan disputed this characterization.[48]

The independent candidacy of George Wallace, former Democratic governor of Alabama, partially negated Nixon's Southern strategy.[49] With a much more explicit attack on integration and black civil rights, Wallace won all of Goldwater's states (except South Carolina) as well as Arkansas and one of North Carolina's electoral votes. Nixon picked up Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida while Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey won only Texas in the South. Writer Jeffrey Hart, who worked on the Nixon campaign as a speechwriter, said in 2006 that Nixon did not have a "Southern Strategy", but "Border State Strategy" as he said that the 1968 campaign ceded the Deep South to George Wallace. Hart suggested that the press called it a "Southern Strategy" as they are "very lazy".[50]

By contrast, in the 1972 election Nixon won every state in the Union except Massachusetts, winning more than 70% of the popular vote in most of the Deep South (Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina) and 61% of the national vote. He won more than 65% of the votes in the other states of the former Confederacy and 18% of the black vote nationwide. Despite his appeal to Southern whites, Nixon was widely perceived as a moderate outside the South and won African American votes on that basis.

Glen Moore argues that in 1970 Nixon and the Republican Party developed a "Southern Strategy" for the midterm elections. The strategy involved depicting Democratic candidates as permissive liberals. Republicans thereby managed to unseat Albert Gore, Sr. of Tennessee as well as Senator Joseph D. Tydings of Maryland. However, for the entire region the net result was a small loss of seats for the Republican Party in the South.[51]

Regional attention in 1970 focused on the Senate, when Nixon nominated Judge G. Harrold Carswell of Florida, a judge on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to the Supreme Court.[52] A lawyer from north Florida named G. Harrold Carswell had a mediocre record, but Nixon needed a Southerner and a "strict constructionist" to support his "southern strategy" of moving the region toward the GOP. Carswell was voted down by the liberal block in the Senate, causing a backlash that pushed many Southern Democrats into the Republican fold. The long-term result was a realization by both parties that nominations to the Supreme Court could have a major impact on political attitudes in the South.[53]

In a year-by-year analysis of how the transformation took place in the critical state of Virginia, James Sweeney shows that the slow collapse of the old statewide Byrd machine gave the Republicans the opportunity to build local organizations county by county and city by city. The Democratic Party factionalized, with each faction having the goal of taking over the entire statewide Byrd machine, but the Byrd leadership was basically conservative and more in line with the national Republican Party in economic and foreign policy issues. Republicans united behind A. Linwood Holton, Jr. in 1969 and swept the state. In the 1970 Senate elections, the Byrd machine made a comeback by electing Independent Harry Flood Byrd, Jr. over Republican Ray Lucian Garland and Democrat George Rawlings. The new Senator Byrd never joined the Republican Party and instead joined the Democratic caucus. Nevertheless, he had a mostly conservative voting record especially on the trademark Byrd issue of the national deficit. At the local level, the 1970s saw steady Republican growth with this emphasis on a middle-class suburban electorate that had little interest in the historic issues of rural agrarianism and racial segregation.[54]

As civil rights grew more accepted throughout the nation, basing a general election strategy on appeals to "states' rights", which some would have believed opposed civil rights laws, would have resulted in a national backlash. The concept of "states' rights" was considered by some to be subsumed within a broader meaning than simply a reference to civil rights laws.[2][3] States rights became seen as encompassing a type of New Federalism that would return local control of race relations.[55] Republican strategist Lee Atwater discussed the Southern strategy in a 1981 interview later published in Southern Politics in the 1990s by Alexander P. Lamis.[56][57][58]

Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [Reagan] doesn't have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964 [...] and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster...

Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?

Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

In 1980, Republican candidate Ronald Reagan made a much-noted appearance at the Neshoba County Fair.[59] His speech there contained the phrase "I believe in states' rights"[note 1] and was cited as evidence that the Republican Party was building upon the Southern strategy again.[60][61][62] Reagan's campaigns used racially coded rhetoric, making attacks on the "welfare state" and leveraging resentment towards affirmative action.[63][64] Dan Carter explains how "Reagan showed that he could use coded language with the best of them, lambasting welfare queens, busing, and affirmative action as the need arose".[65] During his 1976 and 1980 campaigns, Reagan employed stereotypes of welfare recipients, often invoking the case of a "welfare queen" with a large house and a Cadillac using multiple names to collect over $150,000 in tax-free income.[63][66] Aistrup described Reagan's campaign statements as "seemingly race neutral", but explained how whites interpret this in a racial manner, citing a Democratic National Committee funded study conducted by Communications Research Group.[63] Though Reagan did not overtly mention the race of the welfare recipient, the unstated impression in whites' minds were black people and Reagan's rhetoric resonated with Southern white perceptions of black people.[63]

Aistrup argued that one example of Reagan field-testing coded language in the South was a reference to an unscrupulous man using food stamps as a "strapping young buck".[63][67] When informed of the offensive connotations of the term, REagan defended his actions as a nonracial term that was common in his Illinois hometown. Ultimately, Reagan never used that particular phrasing again.[68] According to Ian Haney Lopez, the "young buck" term changed into "young fellow" which was less overtly racist: "'Some young fellow' was less overtly racist and so carried less risk of censure, and worked just as well to provoke a sense of white victimization".[69]

During the 1988 presidential election, the Willie Horton attack ads run against Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis built upon the Southern strategy in a campaign that reinforced the notion that Republicans best represent conservative whites with traditional values.[70] Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes worked on the campaign as George H. W. Bush's political strategists.[71] Upon seeing a favorable New Jersey focus group response to the Horton strategy, Atwater recognized that an implicit racial appeal could work outside of the Southern states.[72] The subsequent ads featured Horton's mugshot and played on fears of black criminals. Atwater said of the strategy: "By the time we're finished, they're going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis' running mate".[73] Al Gore was the first to use the Willie Horton prison furlough against Dukakis andlike the Bush campaignwould not mention race. The Bush campaign claimed they were initially made aware of the Horton issue via the Gore campaign's use of the subject. Bush initially hesitated to use the Horton campaign strategy, but the campaign saw it as a wedge issue to harm Dukakis who was struggling against Democratic rival Jesse Jackson.[74]

In addition to presidential campaigns, subsequent Republican campaigns for the House of Representatives and Senate in the South employed the Southern strategy. During his 1990 re-election campaign, Jesse Helms attacked his opponent's alleged support of "racial quotas", most notably through an ad in which a white person's hands are seen crumpling a letter indicating that he was denied a job because of the color of his skin.[75][76]

New York Times opinion columnist Bob Herbert wrote in 2005: "The truth is that there was very little that was subconscious about the G.O.P.'s relentless appeal to racist whites. Tired of losing elections, it saw an opportunity to renew itself by opening its arms wide to white voters who could never forgive the Democratic Party for its support of civil rights and voting rights for blacks".[77] Aistrup described the transition of the Southern strategy saying that it has "evolved from a states' rights, racially conservative message to one promoting in the Nixon years, vis--vis the courts, a racially conservative interpretation of civil rights lawsincluding opposition to busing. With the ascendancy of Reagan, the Southern Strategy became a national strategy that melded race, taxes, anticommunism, and religion".[78]

Some analysts viewed the 1990s as the apogee of Southernization or the Southern strategy, given that the Democratic President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore were from the South as were Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle.[79] During the end of Nixon's presidency, the Senators representing the former Confederate states in the 93rd Congress were primarily Democrats. During the beginning of Bill Clinton's twenty years later in the 103rd Congress, this was still the case.[80]

In the mid-1990s, the Republican Party made major attempts to court African American voters, believing that the strength of religious values within the African American community and the growing number of affluent and middle-class African Americans would lead this group increasingly to support Republican candidates.[4][81][81] In general, these efforts did not significantly increase African American support for the Republican Party.[4][81] Few African Americans voted for George W. Bush and other national Republican candidates in the 2004 elections, although he attracted a higher percentage of black voters than had any GOP candidate since Ronald Reagan.[citation needed] In his article "The Race Problematic, the Narrative of Martin Luther King Jr., and the Election of Barack Obama", Dr. Rickey Hill argued that Bush implemented his own Southern strategy by exploiting "the denigration of the liberal label to convince white conservatives to vote for him. Bush's appeal was to the same racist tropes that had been used since the Goldwater and Nixon days."[82]

Following Bush's re-election, Ken Mehlman, Bush's campaign manager and Chairman of the Republican National Committee, held several large meetings in 2005 with African American business, community and religious leaders. In his speeches, he apologized for his party's use of the Southern Strategy in the past. When asked about the strategy of using race as an issue to build GOP dominance in the once-Democratic South, Mehlman replied,

Republican candidates often have prospered by ignoring black voters and even by exploiting racial tensions [...] by the '70s and into the '80s and '90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African-American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out. Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.[83][84]

Thomas Edge argues that the election of President Barack Obama saw a new type of Southern strategy emerge among conservative voters. They used his election as evidence of a post-racial era to deny the need of continued civil rights legislation while simultaneously playing on racial tensions and marking him as a "racial bogeyman".[85] Edge described three parts to this phenomenon saying:

First, according to the arguments, a nation that has the ability to elect a Black president is completely free of racism. Second, attempts to continue the remedies enacted after the civil rights movement will only result in more racial discord, demagoguery, and racism against White Americans. Third, these tactics are used side-by-side with the veiled racism and coded language of the original Southern Strategy.[85]

Other observers have suggested that the election of President Obama in the 2008 presidential election and subsequent re-election in 2012 signaled the growing irrelevance of the Southern strategy-style tactics. Louisiana State University political scientists Wayne Parent, for example, suggested that Obama's ability to get elected without the support of Southern states demonstrate that the region was moving from "the center of the political universe to being an outside player in presidential politics"[79] while University of Maryland, Baltimore County political scientist Thomas Schaller argued that the Republican party had "marginalized" itself, becoming a "mostly regional party" through a process of Southernization.[79]

Scholars generally emphasize the role of racial backlash in the realignment of southern voters. The viewpoint that the electoral realignment of the Republican party due to a race-driven Southern Strategy is also known as the "top-down" viewpoint.[5][7] Most scholarship and analysts support this top-down viewpoint and claim that the political shift was due primarily to racial issues.[7][86][87] The Southern Strategy is generally believed to be the primary force that transformed the "Democratic South into a reliable GOP stronghold in presidential elections".[6] Some historians believe that racial issues took a back seat to a grassroots narrative known as the "suburban strategy". Matthew Lassiter, who along with Shafer and Johnston is a leading proponent of the "suburban strategy" viewpoint, recognizes that "[t]his analysis runs contrary to both the conventional wisdom and a popular strain in the scholarly literature".[88] When speaking of the "suburban strategy", Glen Feldman states it is "the dissenting yet rapidly growing narrative on the topic of southern partisan realignment".[10]

Matthew Lassiter says: "A suburban-centered vision reveals that demographic change played a more important role than racial demagoguery in the emergence of a two-party system in the American South".[89][90][91] Lassiter argues that race-based appeals cannot explain the GOP shift in the South while also noting that the real situation is far more complex.[92][93][94][95]

Kalk and Tindall separately argue that Nixon's Southern strategy was to find a compromise that on race would take the issue house of politics, allowing conservatives in the South to rally behind his grand plan to reorganize the national government. Kalk and Tindall emphasize the similarity between Nixon's operations and the series of compromises orchestrated by Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877 that ended the battles over Reconstruction and put Hayes in the White House. Kalk says Nixon did end the reform impulse and sowed the seeds for the political rise of white Southerners and the decline of the civil rights movement.[96][97]

Kotlowski argues that Nixon's overall civil rights record was on the whole responsible and that Nixon tended to seek the middle ground. He campaigned as a moderate in 1968, pitching his appeal to the widest range of voters. Furthermore, he continued this strategy as President. As a matter of principle, says Kotlowski, he supported integration of schools. However, Nixon chose not to antagonize Southerners who opposed it and left enforcement to the judiciary, which had originated the issue in the first place.[98][99] In particular, Kotlowski believes historians have been somewhat misled by Nixon's rhetorical Southern strategy that had limited influence on actual policies.[100] Valentino and Sears state that other scholars downplay the role of racial prejudice even in contemporary racial politics. They write that "[a] quarter century ago, what counted was who a policy would benefit, blacks or whites" (Sniderman and Piazza; 1993; 45) while "the contemporary debate over racial policy is driven primarily by conflict over what the government should try to do, and only secondarily over what it should try to do for blacks" [emphasis in original], so "prejudice is very far from a dominating factor in the contemporary politics of race". (Sniderman and Carmines; 1997; 4, 73)[101]

Valentino and Sears conducted their own study and reported that "the South's shift to the Republican party has been driven to a significant degree by racial conservatism" and also concluded that "racial conservatism seems to continue to be central to the realignment of Southern whites' partisanship since the Civil Rights era".[101]

According to Lassiter, political scientists and historians point out, that the timing does not fit the "Southern strategy" model. Nixon carried 49 states in 1972, so he operated a successful national rather than regional strategy. but the Republican Party remained quite weak at the local and state level across the entire South for decades. Lassiter argues that Nixon's appeal was not to the Wallacites or segregationists, but rather to the rapidly emerging suburban middle class. Many had Northern antecedents, wanted rapid economic growth and saw the need to put backlash politics to rest. Lassiter says the Southern strategy was a "failure" for the GOP and that the Southern base of the Republican Party "always depended more on the middle-class corporate economy and on the top-down politics of racial backlash". Furthermore, realignment in the South "came primarily from the suburban ethos of New South metropolises such as Atlanta and Charlotte, North Carolina, not to the exportation of the working-class racial politics of the Black Belt".[102]

Mayer argues that scholars have given too much emphasis on the civil rights issue as it was not the only deciding factor for Southern white voters. Goldwater took positions on such issues as privatizing the Tennessee Valley Authority, abolishing Social Security and ending farm price supports that outraged many white Southerners who strongly supported these programs. Mayer states:

Goldwater's staff also realized that his radical plan to sell the Tennessee Valley Authority was causing even racist whites to vote for Johnson. A Florida editorial urged Southern whites not to support Goldwater even if they agreed with his position on civil rights, because his other positions would have grave economic consequences for the region. Goldwater's opposition to most poverty programs, the TVA, aid to education, Social Security, the Rural Electrification Administration, and farm price supports surely cost him votes throughout the South and the nation.[103]

Political scientist Nelson W. Polsby argued that economic development was more central than racial desegregation in the evolution of the postwar South in Congress.[104] In The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South, the British political scientist Byron E. Shafer and the Canadian Richard Johnston developed Polsby's argument in greater depth. Using roll call analysis of voting patterns in the House of Representatives, they found that issues of desegregation and race were less important than issues of economics and social class when it came to the transformation of partisanship in the South.[105] This view is backed by Glenn Feldman who notes that the early narratives on the Southern realignment focused on the idea of appealing to racism. This argument was first and thus took hold as the accepted narrative. However, he notes that Lassiter's dissenting view on this subject, a view that the realignment was a "suburban strategy" rather than a "Southern strategy", was just one of the first of a rapidly growing list of scholars who see the civil rights "white backlash" as a secondary or minor factor. Authors such as Tim Boyd, George Lewis, Michael Bowen and John W. White follow the lead of Lassiter, Shafer and Johnston in viewing suburban voters and their self interests as the primary reason for the realignment. He does not discount race as part of the motivation of these suburban voters who were fleeing urban crime and school busing.[10]

Gareth Davies argues that "[t]he scholarship of those who emphasize the southern strategizing Nixon is not so much wrong it captures one side of the man as it is unsophisticated and incomplete. Nixon and his enemies needed one another in order to get the job done".[106][107] Lawrence McAndrews makes a similar argument, saying Nixon pursued a mixed strategy:

Some scholars claim that Nixon succeeded, by leading a principled assault on de jure school desegregation. Others claim that he failed, by orchestrating a politically expedient surrender to de facto school segregation. A close examination of the evidence, however, reveals that in the area of school desegregation, Nixon's record was a mixture of principle and politics, progress and paralysis, success and failure. In the end, he was neither simply the cowardly architect of a racially insensitive "Southern strategy" which condoned segregation, nor the courageous conductor of a politically risky "not-so-Southern strategy" which condemned it.[108]

In interviews with historians years later, Nixon denied that he ever practiced a Southern strategy. Harry Dent, one of Nixon's senior advisers on Southern politics, told Nixon privately in 1969 that the administration "has no Southern strategy, but rather a national strategy which, for the first time in modern times, includes the South".[109]

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Southern strategy - Wikipedia

Ted Ownby, director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, said that the politics of the South have become more intriguing recently. He pointed to the significant gains Democrats made in the Virginia legislature last year; the special House election in Georgia last year in which Democrat Jon Ossoff nearly won in a safe Republican district; the election of Jones in Alabama; and the March for Our Lives movement that brought out hundreds of thousands of people in Washington and other cities last month in support of gun control legislation.

Those movements are largely driven by the youth in the South and the larger demographic shift, Ownby said.

I have to equate a lot of this activism to what I experienced as a child of the Civil Rights Movement. Young people provided the real leadership and impetus for things to change in the South and theyre doing it once again.

I have to equate a lot of this activism to what I experienced as a child of the Civil Rights Movement. Young people provided the real leadership and impetus for things to change in the South and theyre doing it once again.

But not everyone sees drastic political change on the horizon.

Miguel Camacho, 48, who works as a business development manager for a construction company in Savannah, Georgia, where hes lived for 27 years, said he noticed more Democratic candidates running against incumbents in the midterms, but he does not believe that there will be a large change.

I think the demographic shift is not quite there for [a blue wave] to happen, said Camacho, who participated in the poll. At the end of the day, statewide the Republicans are always going to have an advantage. The gap isnt going to change that much, but in local elections a few things are going to slip.

Nevertheless, 69 percent of voters in the South said they disapprove of how Congress is handling its job, the poll found. Gregg Gulledge, a 56-year-old machinist who works at a nuclear power plant north of Chattanooga, Tennessee, believes that skepticism about Washington boosted Trump in 2016.

Most people I know feel like the only thing Congress and folks in Washington are interested in is helping themselves, he said. Thats one of the reasons Trump was elected.

Rebecca Nelson, 40, said she hasnt seen the ground shift much where she lives in Jacksonville, Florida. She said that the divisions are nearly as stark as when she was driven off the road in 2008 by a man who didnt like her Hillary Clinton bumper sticker.

Ive spent most of my adult life in the South, Nelson said. I do think its changing to some degree, but its slow. There are certain cities and areas of the country that are becoming more progressive in the South, but then you have tiny small towns that havent changed in 300 years who have been doing the same thing the whole time.

But Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said that civic engagement in his predominantly black district in the Mississippi Delta is at a level hes never seen before. His office has been inundated with internship applications and volunteer requests, and he said young people are even signing up to be poll workers.

That's noteworthy because his district could be a decisive voting block in a state that has two Senate seats up for grabs in the 2018 election.

I have to equate a lot of this activism to what I experienced as a child of the civil rights movement, Thompson said. Young people provided the real leadership and impetus for things to change in the South and theyre doing it once again.

The NBC News|SurveyMonkey South Poll was conducted March 12-25, 2018, among a national sample of 15,238 adults (+/- 1.1); a regional sample of 4,132 adults who live in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia (+/- 2.4); a sample of 1,486 adults who live in Mississippi (+/-4.6); a sample of 1,498 adults who live in Alabama (+/- 4.5); a sample of 2,209 adults who live in Georgia (+/- 3.4); and a sample of 1,710 adults who live in Tennessee (+/- 4.1). For full results and methodology, click here.

More here:
The South is changing. That should worry Republicans in 2018.

Did the Democrats and Republicans Switch Parties?

The American political parties, now called Democrats and Republicans, switched platform planks, ideologies, and members many timesin American history. These switches weretypically spurred on by major legislative changes and events, such as the Civil War in the 1860s, and Civil Rights in the 1960s. The changes then unfolded over the course of decades to create what historians calltheParty Systems.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]

Bottomline: The parties changed over time as platform planks, party leaders, factions, and voter bases essentially switched between parties. Third parties aside, the Democratic Party used to be favored in the rural south and had a small government platform (which southern social conservatives embraced), and the Republican party used to be favored in the citied north and had a big government platform (which northern progressive liberals embraced). Today it is the opposite in many respects. Although what happened is complex and some voter bases and factions never switched, you can see evidence of the big switches by looking atthe electoral map over time(where voter bases essentially flipped between1896and2000). Or, you can see it by comparing which congressional seats were controlled by which parties over time (try comparingthe 115th United States Congress under Trumptothe 71st United States Congress under Hooverfor example). Or, you can see the solid conservative south switch specifically by looking at the electoral map of the solid south over time. Or, you can dig throughthe historic party platforms. Any of those links will give you a look at the basics of what did and didnt change, but the details are as complex as U.S. party history. Below we cover the details of what changes occurred and what they mean in context and explain the history of the Democratic and Republican party in the process. To do that, well start with an overview of the party systems.

The party systems, AKA eras of the United Statespolitical parties, can be describedas follows (where the main things that switch in each party system are key factions, party leaders, geographical voter bases, and specific planks of party platforms):[13]

In other words, as the Democratic Party became more progressive in the progressive era, it attracted progressives from the Republican party and alienated the small government socially conservative south. Meanwhile, as the Republican party conserved toward Gilded Age politics in the 20th century, and embraced socially conservative single-issue voter groups and individualism, it attracted the solid south (their leadership and voter base) and alienated progressives. These two factors, and many more explained in detail below, substantially changed the party platforms, seats held in congress, and the voting maps over the course of the 20th century (AKA the 20th century reversal, or the 20th century political realignment, or the switch).

TIP: If you want to see some quick visual proof of party switching, see the images on our Summary of How the Major Parties Switched page. This page leads with explanations (which require reading), that pageleads with images and videos (which dont).Belowis an essay that explains American history in depth, so bookmark it for further study.

It isnot a myth that the parties switched,just look at the voting map over timeor at the historic party platforms(or check out Lincolns1860 election, Democrat-Populist Bryans 1896 election, LBJs1964 election, Nixons1968 election, and the corresponding platforms of all parties in those races and compare them to the 2016 election).

The problem isnt proving specificchanges (for example showing thatthesouthern bloc used to vote Democratic Party and now they vote Republican), the problem is that so much changed that it is difficult to summarize (especially from a centered standpoint that tries to to justice to all of Americas diverse factions; here ill apologize for any bias below, feel free to comment with questions orchallenge anything).

The truth is the Solid South switch(the Southern realignment) is one of the easiest to spot (as one can see it on the map), and debunking its related mythsdetracts from the equally important stories ofProgressive Dixies like LBJ and Gore Sr. and their refusal to signthe Strom led Southern Manifesto,Teddy and his Progressives, Bryan and how he changed the Democratic Party, the tension between Federalists like Hamilton and Anti-Federalists like Jefferson,the one-party Democratic-Republicans in the era of Good Feelings (andthe tension between Jackson, Clay, Calhoun, Van Buren, Adams that ended the era), and thecountless other stories of Expansion and Compromise in themid-1800s, Third Parties like the Peoples Party, Free Soilers, and Libertarians,the Difference between Southern Democrats and Know-Nothings (and their relation to the modern Tea Party),Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, the World Wars, the Great Migrations, the evolution of the Monroe Doctrine, the strategy that helped createFox News, and the rise of Progressivism.

This is to say, I want to jump right in and explain that in Lincolns day there were fourparties (not two),and that Lincoln was no Know-Nothing AND no Southern Democrat

Still, I get that this is about first and foremost debunking the Big Switch, so lets split the difference.

Firstwell offer a quick summary in the form of an introduction (in order to quickly go over key points as a service to the reader who doesnt want to read the whole thing; that will be about different factions and their relation to the groups at the heart of the Big Switch).

Then well explain the generalstory, which showsthat the main theme here is one of factions switching parties in a two-party system as America progressesand modernizes (with voter bases and key members typically switchingfirst, usually over single voter issues or specific legislation, and then everything elsechangingslowly over time as new members are elected).

Then we move on to the details of the Big Switch(where the Southern blocSouthern Democrat Dixiecrats switched from favoring the increasingly progressive Democratic party to the increasingly conservative Republican party following1964, slowly, over time, from 1964 to the 1990s and beyond, thus causing the big switch (flipping the map) as one can see in the congressionalvoting records of the contemporary era; see the Southern strategy).

Then well tell the full history of both major parties, noting each switch, each President, and major events.

First, a bit more on the Solid South (which is explained by the following image in many ways).

Visual Proof the parties switched(source).Remember, we are discussing majority wins in a two-party system here. On an individual level,America is less red-state vs. blue-state or city vs. rural, and more purple, meanwhile on a state and national level it seems polarized due to party politics and majorities being needed to win. Here we can note that America is today and has always been comprised of diverse individualswith different tastes who support single-voter issue factions, who thenform coalitions as two big tents still, a city is not a farm,the media can be loud, Citizens United and Gerrymandering are loud too, the two-party system is an epic feedback loop, and majorities do win the day.Very real factors divide us in very real ways in any era, but electoral-based maps and even county-maps can be misleading (as they only show majorities). The Solid South is a force when it acts as a one-party voting bloc in any era, but it isnt like everyone in the south has the same politics. Seethe ways in whichAmerica is purple, the nitty grittytruth is very telling.

LOOKING FOR PROOF IN 2017: Keeping in mind we today are new generation. If one is still confused, today we can see some recent and major proof, that isCharlottesville 2017. In Charlottesville we saw the Dixie battle flag of the Southern Democrats being waved by Republican Trump voters who were standing up to protect the statue of the Southern Democrat rebel army leader General Lee. Meanwhile, the progressive American liberal-ish antifascists marched against these groups with the progressive social justice movement Black Lives Matter in abolitionist spirit. In ye old terms, the socially conservative right-wing populist America First Know-Nothing nativists and Solid South radicals marched against the populist Reformers, Progressives, and left-wing anarchists. In the old days all those factions were in the Democratic party except the old Progressives of Republican party who would have marched with MLK, voted for Teddy, or stood with Hamilton or Lincoln, and the Know-Nothings who have always been Republican, Whig, Federalist, or Third Party. Today the socially conservative factions generally vote Republican and the progressive factions generally vote for the Democratic party. That is the main switch spurred on by shifts toward big government welfare state social justice and free-enterprise states rights small government. Here we cant act like decedents of the Confederates are Confederates any more than a descendent of a progressive is progressive, but spiritually some of these factions switched parties and the alliances of the other factions subsequently changed (and regional voter bases and platform planks changed with them as the parties evolved). So yes, Thurmond and Goldwater are fine places to look, but 2017 is as fine as any other place. History is complex enough without twisting the story of the South and the progressive factions into a modern pretzel. Some factions have always been for small government, some for big government, the parties and times changed and the factions changed along with them, all of this is interconnected. Also party loyalty is a factor.

I cant stress this enough, amajor thing that changes in history is the SouthernSocial Conservative one-party voting bloc (because in an electoral system, 11 states who often votelock-step always matter and oftenpaint the map clear as day, for example when they vote for Breckenridge in 1860,Goldwater in 1964, or George C. Wallace in 1968).

This is the easy thing to explain given the conservative Souths historically documented support of figures like Calhoun,John Breckenridgeand his Socially Conservative Confederates of theSouthern Democratic Party,Byrd (the who didnt switch), the other Byrd who ran for President,Thurmond, C. Wallace,Goldwater (the Libertarian States Rights Republican), and later conservative figures like Reagan, Bush, and Trump (rather than progressive southerners like Carter and Bill Clinton).

The problem isnt showing thechanges related to this, or showing the progressive southerners like LBJ, the Gores, and Bill Clinton arent of the same exact breed as the socially conservative south, the problem is that the party loyalty of the conservative southis hardly theonly thing that changes, nor is it the only thing going on in American history (to say the least).

Not only that, but here we have to note thatthe north and south haveits own factions, Democrats and Republicans have their own factions, and each region and state has its own factions and that gives us many different types of Democrats and Republicans.

Consider,Lindsey Graham essentially inheritedStrom Thurmonds seat, becoming the next generation of solid south South Carolina conservative, now solidly in the Republican party.

When we note that Grahams stance on key issues tends to be rather liberal for a right-wing conservative Republican[14] (and is generallydifferent than his northern Republican counterpartslike Trump; who is also rather liberal for a Republican) we can see some real evidence of what I am saying. Both Trump and Graham are liberal Republicans, but they are from two different parts of the country and dont exactly share all the same interests.

A southern conservativefrom South Carolina used to vote Democrat, supportingfigures like Bryan and Wilson, now they generally vote Republican, supporting figures like Trump. However, that doesnt make them exactly the same as their counterparts in other parts of the country, that just makes them part of the same coalition in this era (they support the same platform and oppose the other party together).

In other words, itisntjust party interests that define a politician, there are state interests, regional interests, monied interests, single voter issue interests, and more to grapple with here. Add to that the fact that some of those interests change, and we have a rather complex situation.

Consider also, Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK). Although MLKwasnot directly affiliated with a party, he supported Southern Democrats [among other factions], just like Thurmond would have been before he switched However,he didnt just support any Southern Democrats, he supported the progressive ones like theMississippi Freedom Democratswho stood against Goldwater and for Civil Rights.We are talking about different factions duking it out district-by-district, not cartoon characters.

Birmingham was [speaking loosely] all about a Democrat spraying a firehose at a Democrats, while the Democrats sent in the national guard to stop the protestors, whilea Democrat told the guard to stand down.

Civil Rights 1964 and Voting Rights 1965 had strong Republican support (remember the change happens over time; this being the point of our story here), but in respect to MLK, Civil Rightswasnt a story ofRepublicans (like it had beenin Lincolnsday or prior to 1877). It was a story of different factions of Democrats from anti-war Hippies, to Northern liberals like Kennedy, to Progressive Southern Freedom Democrats, to Socially Conservative ones(who areno longer with the Party today, which again you can see on any voter map and seereflected in the party platforms and States Rights third party splits).

In other words, the Republican party was still supporting Civil Rights under Eisenhower and Nixon, that is very clear.

However,the struggle in the Democratic Party that happened under Kennedy and then would flip the map under LBJ and Goldwater in 1964 andHumphrey, C. Wallace, and Nixon in 1968 was amain theme of the 1960s.

As the Democrats shifted to the progressive left, with figures like MLK supporting Kennedy and LBJ (to some extent), the Republicans shifted to the socially conservative right supporting figures like Goldwater, and this hada profound effect on the parties over the years from Reagan, to Clinton, to Bush, to theObama era.

A socially liberal progressive Democrat certainly voted for FDR and Kennedy, and they might support LBJ, but they werentgoing for Goldwater or George C. Wallace, they weregoing for liberals like Humphrey from this point forward.

Still, I dont want to demonize Northern or Southern conservatives in any party system (it isnt my stance at all if you read carefully), or discount important figures like Eisenhower, Reagan, Nixon, or Bush, or downplay the role of left-wing orsocially progressive Republicans, or the impact of America First Know-Nothingsin the North, or the role ofthird parties (States Rights, Free Soil, orProgressive), or the role of other Democratic party figures and factions (like Bourbons and CarpetbaggersandTammany Hall), or those Republican factions like Civil Service Republicans and Stalwarts, or the countless single-issue voter factions I havent noted yet (like the Religious Right) and what about the originalsingle-issue party, the nativist Anti-Masons,or the originalcronySpoils system?! How about the Alien and Sedition Acts that show the different types of Federalists? There is truly a lot to cover here!

Thus, not only will we debunk the myths of the Solid South below,well also explore other specifics changes in each Party System from 1789 to 2017 (like the start and end of the one-party era of Good Feelings, the split over States Rights in the 1850s,the changes of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age,Bryans effect on the Democrats, Theodore Teddy Roosevelts exit from the Republican Party in 1912, the changes under Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover that turned the GOP to a small government party in the 1920s, landslide wins by FDR, LBJ, Nixon, and Reagan which changed the nation, and finally the polarizingeffects of the eras of mass media and Bush and Clinton) to show the many changes that define the Party Systems.

With all the above pointsin mind, we can say:the Democrats used to bethe party of the Rural South, but that changed from FDR in 1932, to LBJ in 1964, to Clinton and Obama with their second rights safetynet legislation.

The effect has been aSouthernizationof the Republican Party and an Urbanization of the Democratic Party.

TIP: With all of that said, for the reader who doesnt want to read a long essay (that explains things like the difference between a progressive Dixiecrat liberal ally like LBJ who didnt switch and a staunchsouthern Conservative Democrat like Strom who did), consider watching the following videos.

TIP: Today onlyone party displays the Confederate Battle Flag.The flag of the Southern Democrats is now flown by the southern Republican. That is a big hint when all else fails to sway someone. From there one only needs to understand that the old conservative Southern Democrat and the old Know-Nothing America First Northern Tea-Party-like Republicanare not the same thing. Both are right-wing populists, but one is a southern populist and used to be Democrat, the other is a northern anti-immigrant populist who allies with elitist pro-business conservatives and was always of the Republican line. One is more like a Bill the Butcher nativist, and the other is more like aDeep South agrarian. They are very different types of Americans, only united on some social issues, and they actually used to be on different teams, even though today we may think of both as Republican Tea Party voters. The progressive direction of America really changed things.

Today the Republican party doesnt have a notable progressive left-wing and the Democratic Party doesnt have a notable socially conservative right-wing.

Instead both parties have establishment and populist wings and the parties are divided by stances on social issues.

In other words, regional interests and the basic political identities of liberal and conservative didnt change as much as factions changed parties as party platforms changed along with America.

The modern split is expressed well bythe left-right paradigm Big Government Progressivism vs. Small Government Social Conservatism, wheresocially conservative and pro business conservative factions banded together against socially liberal and pro business liberal factions, to push back against an increasingly progressive Democratic Party and America (and programs like the New Deal).

This tension largely created the modern parties of our two-party system, resulting in two Big Tentswho disagree on the purposes of governmentand social issues. This tension is then magnified by thecurrent influence of media and lobbyists, and can be understood by examiningwhat I callthe Sixth Party Strategy and by a tactic called Dog Whistle Politics).

The result is that today the Democratic Party is dominated by liberal Democrats and Progressives.

Meanwhile, most of those who would have been the oldsocially conservative Democrats (Dixiecrats) now have a R next to their name.

Just look atthe 115th United States Congress under Trump(without naming names, look at Trumps administrationand the current Houseand Senate, pick out modern conservatives from the south, then compare those seats tosay,the 71st United States Congress under Hoover).

Dont try to oversimplify this to what Strom did, most of the changes happened over time, and the proof is in the platforms and voting records.

Today things are still changing, Berniecrats are new, and so are Trumpians, even the Tea Party has been changing. The two parties are constantly changing Big Tents of factions, they arent static things.

With the above covered,there is a reason the Northern Coasts and Cities are in one party and the Rural South and Mid-West arein the other party in almost any era (taking into account winner-take-all at least), with this beingtrue even when the parties switch.

Thisis because amajor divide is between the political, economic, and social interests of rural regionsand citied regions (and between theirrelatedinequalitiesand cultural differences, and between the interests of the Bosses, Cronies, and Corporations who sway the vote in given regions).

Learn more about How the Tension Between City Interests and Rural Interests Affects Politics, not just on a national level, but on a state and regional leveltoo (and make sure to read up on VO Key).

The better you understand this tension, the better youll understand that age-old Federalists / Anti-Federalist, Republican / Democrat, or North / South split in any era (which is really a North and Coast vs. South and Mid-west split where notably the North and Coasts have more cities).

We are all Democrats, we are all Republicans, we are all Federalists, and we all love liberty.

We are all Americans.

We simplydisagree on specifics (sometimes only split regionally by a slim gerrymandered margin or a single debate over a single voter issue), and thus we form factions and voting blocs around those differences (in Democratic spirit).

The changing factions responding to newly arising voter issues isthe main thing that changed the parties.

Still, not everything changed (for example the Republican stance on trade and the Democratic Party stance on immigration). That is explained in excessive detail below.

Now that you know about the rural vs. city split, and the big changes like those of Lincolns time, those of Teddys time, and the shifting Solid South (and how that is different from a Bryan or FDR or Kennedy),take a look at thetime-lapse video below which shows the U.S. Presidential election results map, both by state and by county, from 1789 to 2016.

Here you can see the solid voting blocs that switch, oddities like the Black Belt, and proof that the country is more diverse and complicated than party politics orthe electoral map elude.

TIP: Seea Summary of How the Major Parties Switched, the New Deal Coalition and Conservative Coalition(the two factions that help tell the story of the big switch), andour otherworks on the subject of party switching(which include the story of Lincoln,the history the Democratic party and slavery, a Fact-Check of Hillarys America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party,the anti-Federalists and Federalists, and the Republicans of Reconstruction) for additional perspectives.

NOTE: This page is more like a long essayand less like a blog post, you can get away with just reading the first part, but consider skipping around to different partsor book-marking it and coming back.Each section tells a different part of the story.Wewill answer any and all questions posted below. Feel free to comment (even if you didnt read the whole thing).

FACT: If the above didnt make it clear, thetension between the States Rights Conservatives of the Southern Bloc and the Rest of the Democratic party essentially starts 1789 with tension in the anti-Federalist party, continues to Jackson, splits the party in Civil War, doesnt exactly help Bryan, results in Wilson, and is partof the story of FDR, but it really picked up steam after WWII over Brown v. the Board. From there we start getting the States Rights third parties.Then Civil Rights 1964 and Voting Rights 1965 is the tipping point. Yes, many Republicans voted for Civil Rights and Voting Rights. Indeed. The parties really did change from 1964 to the 1990s to today, that is kind of the point of this whole thing. Explaining that slow transition and what it meansis one of many reasons this page is long and not short. Still, if you get that we are talking about factions first, and Big Tents second, you get thegist of what the specific details below will explain.

If you can convince the lowest white man hes better than the best colored man, he wont notice youre picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and hell empty his pockets for you. LBJ had a mouth on him, but all his faults aside, the Progressive Southern Democrat ended up on the right side of history in terms of his Great Society programs. Todaymanyplanks of the Republican Party seek to undoLBJs work (and Lincolns, and Wilsons, and FDRs, and Obamas etc).

In the 1850s, inequality in the Northern big government cities, northern immigration in the big cities (and the related racism and classism), and African slavery in the small government south (and the related racism and classism) all existed side-by-side. and in ways, so it is today (minus the slavery). Northern cities still favor bigger government, and they still have problems of racism and inequality, Rural South still favors small government (and they still have issues of racism and inequality). This does not make the North of today equatable to the slave economy of the South of yesterday however.

There is this idea that welfare is equatable to slavery in this respect, as in both cases a societal structure is providing basic essentials for a class of people (who some would claim are oppressed by the situation to the benefit of some elite). This argument, often presented in tandem with the claim the parties didnt switch/change is essentially a red herring that misses the nuances we describe on this page (I hear it enough that I want to address it here before moving on).

The southern conservatives who held slaves and fought for the Confederacy essentially switched out of the Democratic party starting in the 1960s, and even continuing to the modern day (although the changes had most occurred by 2000), in response to LBJs welfare programs (after forming a coalition with Republicans in response to Wilson and FDRs welfare programs prior). In other words, if the southern conservative had wanted to oppress a class of people with welfare, one would logically assume they wouldnt have switched out of the Democratic party over time in response to welfare programs.

What we see in the cities of the north is instead more like what we have seen since before the Civil War, it is the inequality capitalism breeds, and the related state-based solutions generally favored by cities (like welfare). When African Americans migrated to northern cities in the Great migrations, they (much like the European and other immigrants) were subject not only to the inequalities of a capitalist melting pot, but to the general racism and classism that exists outside of party lines. Thus, it should be little surprise that the modern Democratic party is a coalition of those who immigrated in those times, urbanites, and party leaders who remained after the switch.

It is important to understand that bourbon liberals (pro-business factions who came to the South after the Civil War to become Democrats), neoliberals, neocons, progressives, conservative pro-business Republicans, liberal Democrats (like Kennedy), classical liberals (like the Free-Soilers or Jeffersonians), social conservative Know-Nothings, social conservative southerners (like the old Confederates), etc are all different ideological factions that have existed in history and have been in one of the two major parties or a third party at different times. The social conservative south were the ones who dragged slavery with them up to the Civil War and then combated Civil Rights from the Democratic party up until they were pushed out of the party by the progressive movement which had gained traction since the Gilded Age.

Thus, although it is complex to explain (and vastly under-explained right here), equating chattel slavery and wage slavery, and then tying it back to the 1850s-1860s, really misses the nuances of history (again it is red herring as it sounds like it applies to the argument, but doesnt). Think of all the nations on earth with welfare states, in all cases are they not generally spurred on by the progressive factions to strive for social equality? Are the small government and conservative factions not the ones who oppose this?

Today it is a Southern Republican who flies to Confederate flag, today it is a Republican who champions small government in America. Yesterday, it was a Southern Democrat.

TIP: Remember, this does not speak to the many other factions and why they did or didnt ally with this faction in any era. Nor does this truism or the claim we are addressing speak directly to people alive today (as we are tracing parties and ideologies over time, no person alive today was alive in 1850, and very few were adults in 1950 plus, people like parties change).

TIP: There is more on this subject below, I dont want to offer too much space to any one aspect of this long discussion at any point, so keep reading for more proofs.

Above we did an introduction, this next section takes a very general look at how the major parties changed and how factions changed parties.

To sum things up before we get started discussing specific switches, both major U.S. parties used to have notableprogressive socially liberal left-wingand socially conservative right-wingfactions, and now they dont.

Originally, like today, one party was for big government (originally the Federalists, Whigs, and Republicans) and one party was for small government (Anti-Federalists, Democratic-Republicans, and then Democrats).

However, unlike today, party lines were originally [very roughly speaking] drawn overelitism and populism(by class / by rural vs. citied interests) and preferredgovernment type more than by theleft-right socialissuesthat define the parties today, as the namesake of the parties themselves imply(where Democrats favored a moreliberal democracy, and the Republicans favored a more aristocratic liberal republic).

In those days both parties had progressive and conservative wings, but the Southern Anti-Federalist, Democratic-Republican, and then Democratic Party was populist and favored small government, and the Northern Federalist, Whig, and then Republican Party was elite and favored bigger central government.

However,from the lines drawn during the Civil War, to Bryan in the Gilded Age, to Teddy Roosevelt leaving the Republican Party to form the Progressive Party in 1912, to FDRs New Deal, to LBJs Civil Rights, to the Clinton and Bush era, the abovebecame less and less true.

Today, the Republican Party doesnt have a notable Progressive Socially Liberal Federalist Elitist Hamilton, Lincoln, Roosevelt wing, and the Democratic Party doesnt have a notable Socially Conservative Anti-Federalist Populist Jackson, Calhoun, George C. Wallace wing. TIP: Each party still has a left and right, and certainly both have classically liberal and classically conservative values, but the Democrats lack a prominentsocially conservative wing and the Republicans lack a prominent socially liberal wing (and this is a thing that has notably changed).

Instead, today the parties are polarizedby left-right social issues, andeach party (each Big tent Coalition of single voter issue factions) has a notable populist and elitist wing.

TIP: There are more factors to consider, such as the fact that party members and factions generally come inconservative, moderate, liberal, progressive, and radical formsand stances can change per issue. For example a progressive left-wing social liberal populistwill generally be to the left of even a moderately liberal right-wing pro-business conservative on most social issues, and thus they will likely be in the Big Tent Democrat.

Although nothing that happened is simple or singular, generally, what happened is the aforementioned elite northern socially liberal progressive and southern socially conservative populist factions effectively switched parties (along with their voter base and fellow politicians) over party stances on key voter issues (like Civil Rights and Globalization; the history of switches is all about single-voter-issue factions), as can be seen in the New Deal Coalition and Conservative Coalition,and that was enough to flip the party platforms and the voter map geographically (as can be seen by comparing1896to2000, and generally here).

Essentially, one can explain this by saying the progressivism and modernization of the 20th century under figures like FDR, LBJ, Clinton, and Obama resulted in conservative factions in both parties banding together and pushing back under Hoover, Nixon, Regan, Bush, and Trump.

Today, withthe effects symbolized by the New Deal and Conservative Coalition having already taken place, we can say the Republican Party is generally a coalition of socially conservative and pro-business right-wing movements previously found in both parties, and the Democratic party is generally a coalition of socially liberal and pro-business left-wing movements previously found in both parties. In reality, their stance on the state changes voter issue to voter issue, but generally it is this left-right split over social issues that results in the parties being Big Government andSmall Government respectively.

What didnt changeis the left-wing Democratic PartyAnti-Federalist populists (like Jefferson, Bryan, or Bernie) and conservative right-wing Republican Federalists (both know-nothing and pro-business) never changed parties (they justgot new allies and new platforms). Likewise Bourbon liberals have essentially been with the Democrats since Reconstruction (although one can argue some went to the Republicans over time). Also, the big city Democratic Party machines have long been a part of the Democratic Partys story. Also, the parties have been in their current big-government / small-government (rhetorically at least) forms since the 1920s with Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. Furthermore, Republicans have always been strict on immigration and protectionist, and the Democrats always pro-immigrant (and had historically been for free-trade before becoming neoliberal; which adds complexity). FACT: Lincoln dislikedFree-Trade, implemented the first income tax, created the first free colleges in the U.S., and used the Federal Power of the State to restore the Southern rebels to the Union; Lincoln is a good place to look for what did and didnt change (as isHamilton who inspired both Lincoln and Clay and Theodore Roosevelt). On the other side Jackson, Van Buren, Jefferson, and Calhoun are good Democrats to look at for similar reasons (each representing a different type of Democrat).

Thus, although many things change over time, in modern times one of the main things that switches is the socially conservative Democrats (notably including many Dixiecrats) switched from the 1960s to the Bushera (very slowly; Thurmond aside, not in a clear all-at-once switch; partly due to the SixthParty Strategy, partly due to changing times and self interest).

One last note before moving on, it is important to understand that we are discussing intergenerational switches, so there is a complexity to consider which is: general ideological factions switch over the course of generations more than all-at-once (in most cases, not in the 1850s and 1860s as much, that happened quickly). When we pair this with the fact that the times and parties have generally themselves changed, we can understand how oversimplifying this to all the racists became Republicans is an underwhelming simplification given the fact thatso many different things changed (we have barely scratched the surface here yet).

Thus, to summarize the basics: some [not all] thingschange, but regardless, entire party platforms and much else changed as the key voter issues the factions were ralliedaround ebbed and flowed in importance in state and national politics (consider not only does the nation as a whole have political factions which form the basis of the nationaltwo-party systemand third parties, but each state has its own internal political factions that form around key voter issues, identity, and general ideology).

If you got this far, do yourself a favor and watch the two next videos from VOX. VOXexplains large parts of the story, including the connection between progressivism, conservatism, the minority vote, and the historicmajor parties and their policies.

NOTE: While I have your attention third parties like Know-Nothings, States Rights, Populist, Progressive, American Independent, Southern Democrat, and Constitutional Union tell the story of switching platforms well. Each denotes a major faction who is emblematic of a single voter issue (or two) and otherwise major changes. You can see major third partyplatforms here. It is no mistake that we see third parties in years like 1856,1860,1892,1912, 1948, and 1968, they are symbolicof major changes.

Now that we have the basics down, letsrestate this all before moving on to notable specific switches.

Originally,the Populist Anti-Federalists, Democratic-Republicans, and then Democratic Party Platforms were about Small Government (as their names imply), Free Trade, and States Rights and were favored in the rural-South, and the more elite aristocratic Federalists, Whigs, and then Republican Party Platforms were about Big Government (as their names imply), protectionism, taxes, and CollectiveRightsand were favored in the citied-North. However, today this has mostly switched (NOTE: some key stances on some key issues havent changed, for example the Republican party has almost always been stricter on immigration and have generallyfavored trade protectionism; we cover nuances like this below).

In simple terms, whathappened was both parties became pro-business in the Gilded Age after Reconstruction following the divisive Civil War which forced all factions to take sides, and then both parties became progressive in the Progressive era, and this and a series of events led to the Republican party becoming the party of small government over time (despite the partysaristocratic roots) and the Democrats becoming the party of big government (despite their populist roots).

Today business-minded NeoConservatives (establishment conservatives) ally with Tea Party Social Conservatives (populist conservatives) in the Right-Wing Republican Party, both agreeing that less Government is best, and business-minded NeoLiberals(establishment liberals) and Progressive Social Liberals (populist liberals) ally in the Left-Wing Democratic Party, both agreeing on the use of the State.

Each party essentially still has the Gilded Age business factions they have had since Reconstruction, but since the States rights faction joined the Republican party, and since the modern Right political machine pushed conservative Populism, they have gained a more prominent populist wing.

The basic types of people still exist, they just exist withmodern stances on key voter issuesand in different coalitions.

The real storyhere, to distill it to one line, is that of a tug of war betweenbig-state social justice liberals progressing toward a modern future and conservatives pushingto returning to a past age when things were great (that age is 1900 for modern conservatives, roughly 1775 for the Confederate era, and the 1820s for the old Young America movement).

The underlying basic ideology of people didnt change, it is just that the factions, tactics, and party stances have changed, and whichparty and factions wanted the above have changed.

This is to say, some things are consistent in our history, butthe platforms (collections of official and unofficial stances on key voter issues AKA planks) and the partys socially minded factions have essentially switched to create the modern populist and neo-business wings of the parties (the major, but not only national wings we havent even got to the importance of state factions, other factions, and third parties yet).

Go here to see the original:
Democrats and Republicans Switched Platforms - Fact / Myth

Senate Republicans fed up with the Democrats' refusal to allow confirmation votes on a slew of critical appointments - including the high-profile case of the Trump administration's first openly gay ambassadorial nominee may move more aggressively to finally break the logjam.

"It's time to end this partisan spectacle. We have 78 more nominees for various jobs whove made it through their committee hearings and are waiting for a vote on this floor," Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said on the floor of the Senate last week. "Most of these people have bipartisan support, they can be confirmed easily."

Barrasso wants to change a rule that allows for 30 hours of Senate discussion for each nominee, which Republicans say effectively allows Democrats to jam up the appointment process to a ridiculously slow crawl. Barrasso wants to limit the number of hours of discussion down to eight - a standard Democrats themselves supported under the Obama administration.

TRUMP ACCUSES DEMS OF SLOW-WALKING 'HUNDREDS' OF NOMINATIONS

"Its time to return to the rules for debating nominations that the Senate used four years ago Democrats controlled the Senate at the time and a Democrat was making the nominations, that was President Obama," Barrasso said.

Richard Grenell was nominated by Trump to be ambassador to Germany last year, but remains among those held up in the process.

The logjam holding up one particular nomination has attracted more attention in recent weeks, and may be contributing to the effort to change the rules. Richard Grenell, a conservative and experienced foreign policy expert who is openly gay, was nominated by Trump to be ambassador to Germany last year, but remains among those held up in the process.

Grenell's nomination, which has been championed by a broad range of Republican and conservative officials and commentators, recently picked up the support of a liberal gay rights group, the Harvey Milk Foundation.

I understand those who are frustrated with the Trump administration and the actions the Trump administration has taken who have also opposed Grenell, Stuart Milk, the co-founder of the group, told the New York Times. And I think thats misguided."

In response to the growing calls to approve Grenell, Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., last week went to the floor of the Senate and called for a unanimous voice consent to push the nomination through. But Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., objected, citing his objections to some comments Grenell, a former Fox News contributor, posted on his Twitter feed. According to Merkley, some of Grenell's tweets showed "a complete disregard for the Senate confirmation process."

Grenells supporters have pushed back strongly on Merkleys objections, and say Grenells tweets since he was nominated last fall have focused on foreign policy issues. His supporters have taken their case to twitter, through #confirmgrenell and other online efforts.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has also stepped up its effort to push through Grenell's nomination. Speaking at a White House press briefing last month, spokesperson Sarah Sanders cited the Democrats' "historic obstruction" in blocking that and the growing number of other nominations.

"Mr. Grenell, a Harvard-educated experienced diplomat, was the longest-serving U.S. spokesperson at the United Nations. He was nominated in September of last year. He was reported out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with bipartisan support. He is waiting to represent America's interest and be our country's top voice in a G-7 country," Sanders said.

The hyper-political delay on Mr. Grenell puts our national security and America's foreign policy interests in jeopardy," Sanders said. "The Senate should move to confirm him immediately."

A range of foreign policy experts have also expressed their concern over the lack of a U.S. ambassador to Germany. The U.S.-Germany relationship is a critical one, particularly with the Berlin government's involvement in issues like the Iran nuclear deal, trade, and NATO security.

The holdup of Grenells nomination has also irritated German politicians and the media.

"America needs a voice in Germany!" read the headline of a commentary piece by Florian von Heintze, the Deputy Editor-in-Chief of BILD. "When the German-America relationship suffers, that damages Germany. We have no more an important ally in the world.

Read more:
Republicans push to end Dems' stranglehold on key ...