Solid South
The term Solid South (German Solider (fixed) south ) is a buzzword of American politics. What is meant is the political, social and cultural unity of the American southern states . This usage dates back to the time of Reconstruction , the reintegration of the fallen southern states after the Civil War (1861–1865). Later it became a term for the great electoral successes of the Democratic Party in these states from 1876 to 1964 in both presidential and other elections.
wedding
The Republican Party first won the presidential election in 1860, with Abraham Lincoln . As a result, most of the slave-holding southern states split off because they were afraid that they would not be able to defend their economy in the long run. After the Civil War, the north reintegrated the southern states after they had been occupied for years and (partially) reformed by northern governors. The end of this reconstruction is located in the year 1877. Despite the liberation of slaves, the Afro-Americans in the south remained oppressed, as rights such as the right to vote were indirectly denied them through the legislation of segregation (racial separation). As a result, the whites remained leading in the south. They were very suspicious of the north because of the reconstruction, which they had experienced as a humiliation.
Even before the war of civil secession, it had become apparent for a long time that the Democratic Party represented the interests of the slave owners in the south , while in the north it was also favored by the poor and immigrants. The Republicans acted more as a party of the locals, the successful ones. After the war, the Democrats continued to dominate the South, with the Southern Democrats considered to be far more conservative than the Northern Democrats.
In every presidential election from 1876 to 1948 , the Democratic candidates in the south won by a large margin. Even in 1928 , when the Irish-Americans Al Smith of New York ran the first Catholic for the party and lost the country far behind, he received nearly three quarters of the electoral votes from those southern states that in the Civil War to the (southern) Confederate States of America had heard . However, Smith struggled with resentment against Catholics, which was as widespread in the South as hatred of blacks; the racist Ku Klux Klan fought Catholics, Jews and blacks alike and threatened Smith personally during the election campaign. The 1928 presidential election thus represented a test case for the coalition of (mostly Catholic and Jewish) workers and immigrants in the major cities of the north with the whites in the southern states, which was characteristic of the Democratic Party until after the Second World War. Smith won the majority in most of the Solid South states , but many southerners also exceptionally voted for the Republican candidate.
Softening, 1948–1964
Presidential elections 1948 to 1956
Solid South began to crumble when Democratic President Harry S. Truman turned to the civil rights movement , the movement to enforce the political rights of African Americans. His political line, combined with the inclusion of civil rights as a point in the party program of the Democrats of 1948, induced numerous southerners to leave the Democratic National Convention in July 1948 and join the strictly segregationist "States' Rights Democratic Party" (colloquially " Dixiecrats ") ) to found. This splinter party played some role in the 1948 presidential election . The Dixiecrats candidate won the traditionally Democratic states of Alabama , Louisiana , Mississippi and South Carolina . The Republicans could not, however, post any profits in the south in 1948; the majority of the southern electoral vote still went to the Democrats, in this case President Truman.
In the elections of 1952 and 1956 , the popular Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower won several states in the Upper South and Florida , with good results, especially in the new suburbs. 1956 Eisenhower also won Louisiana; thus he was the first Republican since Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 who could win a majority in this state. However, the rest of the Deep South remained a safe bet for Eisenhower's Democratic rival Adlai Stevenson in the 1952 and 1956 elections .
1960 presidential election
In the 1960 election , Democratic nominee John F. Kennedy continued his party's tradition of nominating a Southerner (in this case Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas ) as a candidate for vice presidency . Kennedy and Johnson, however, supported the civil rights movement. When Martin Luther King was arrested during a peaceful sit-in in Atlanta in October 1960 , Kennedy had a compassionate phone call with King's wife Coretta Scott King, and Robert Kennedy also campaigned for King's release. King expressed his appreciation for these actions. Although King himself did not publicly support a presidential candidate, his father, who had previously spoken out in favor of Republican Richard Nixon , announced his move to Kennedy.
As a result of this and other incidents, the Democrats lost significant ground among white voters in the south. The 1960 election was the first in which a Republican presidential candidate won electoral votes in the South and lost across the United States. Nixon won Virginia , Tennessee, and Florida. Independent electoral lists made up of segregationist Democrats won in Mississippi and Alabama. At the electors' meeting in December 1960, they gave their vote to the Democratic Senator Harry F. Byrd from Virginia, who himself had not tried to run.
1964 presidential election
The party's stance on civil rights continued to develop until the 1964 election . Democratic candidate Johnson, who became president after Kennedy's assassination, campaigned heavily for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 . After signing this milestone in civil rights legislation in the summer of 1964, Johnson said to associate Bill Moyers , "I believe we have just ceded the South to the Republican Party for a long time."
Unlike Johnson his Republican challenger, senator had Barry Goldwater of Arizona , the Civil Rights Act of 1964 rejected on the grounds that the law confers on the federal government too much power. Basically, however, Goldwater supported civil rights, for example, he voted for the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 as well as for the 24th amendment to the constitution , which banned the voting tax, which discriminated against African Americans.
In November 1964, Johnson won a landslide victory and the Republicans suffered significant losses in the Congress elections . Goldwater, on the other hand, won five Deep South states in addition to his home state of Arizona. For the first time, at least the deep south had reversed its party preference, supporting a Republican challenger against a popular Democratic incumbent. However, the majority of the southern electoral votes still went to the Democratic candidate - for the last time until 1976.
End with Nixon's "Southern strategy"
1968 presidential election
In the 1968 presidential election , Republican candidate Richard Nixon took advantage of the 1964 trend with his “Southern strategy”. This novel campaign was intended to make the Republican Party attractive to those southern white people who were more conservative and segregationist than the US-wide official line of the Democratic Party.
Nixon's adviser Pat Buchanan later wrote that the Republicans' "Southern strategy" was not about subliminally appealing to racism in the southern states. Rather, Nixon aimed to expose the "hypocrisy" of the Democrats, who appeared in the north with candidates like Robert F. Kennedy and Hubert H. Humphrey as the party of civil rights, while in the south Democrats like George Wallace or Lester Maddox open to the continuation of the Racial segregation advocated. Richard Nixon himself wrote in a newspaper article in May 1966: “The Republicans must not go looking for the fool's gold of the racist voices. Republicans in the south must not climb onto the sinking ship of racial injustice. You should let the Southern Democrats go down with this ship, who also sailed with it. "
As a result of this strategy, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, for the first time in history, failed a Democratic candidate in the South almost completely; only Texas could he win.
The rest of the states in the region split their majorities between Nixon and George Wallace , governor of Alabama. Former Democrat Wallace was the openly racist nominee for the American Independent Party and won electoral votes from Alabama, Arkansas , Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi. Nixon had a large majority in the electoral college, although he was only 0.7% ahead of Democrat Humphrey in the (population) vote.
Developments since 1972
After Nixon's landslide re-election in 1972 , in which he also won in all southern states, the Democrats experienced a brief comeback in the south in 1976 with the election victory of Jimmy Carter from Georgia. 1976 was the last year a Democratic presidential candidate won a majority in the southern electoral vote. However, according to by-election polls, only the African-American votes ensured Carter victory in the south; the majority of white southerners had voted for Ford. When he failed to run for re-election in 1980 , Carter was the only southern state to win his home state of Georgia as well as West Virginia and Maryland , which as "border states" are only partially attributable to the south.
In 1984 Republicans won all electoral votes in the South, and in 1988 all but West Virginia. In 1992 and 1996 , when two southerners ( Bill Clinton as presidential candidate and Al Gore as candidate for vice presidency) ran for the Democratic Party, the region was divided into Republican and Democratic majority states.
In 2000 , however, Al Gore could not win any electoral votes from the south, not even from his southern home state of Tennessee. However, in Florida, where George W. Bush was declared the winner, the number of votes in the popular election was extremely close. The pattern of 2000 continued in the 2004 election : Candidates John Kerry (President) and John Edwards (Vice President) received no electoral votes from the South, even though Edwards is from North Carolina .
Current situation
Today, the southern states are considered the stronghold of the Republican Party, at least in presidential elections. Florida is an exception, with numerous immigrants and retirees from all over the USA making it a swing state ; traditionally, the state did not always vote in the same way as the other southern states.
Virginia has also been considered a swing state since the beginning of the 2010s, which can be attributed to demographic changes: The proportion of highly educated and politically more left-wing liberal residents of the capital Washington, DC, especially employees of the federal authorities, is growing, as is that of ethnic minorities. In the 2008 election , the Afro-American candidate Barack Obama , who was politically from Illinois , was again a Democrat for the first time since 1964 and for the second time since 1948. Obama also prevailed in Florida and North Carolina. Of the eleven southern states of North and South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia and Florida, eight went to the Republican applicant John McCain , so that in 2008 the current situation did not change fundamentally. In the 2012 presidential election Obama won in Virginia and Florida, 2016 Hillary Clinton only in Virginia.
For reasons other than presidential elections ( Senate , House of Representatives , Governor , parliaments of states ) go to the south part Republicans, some Democrats emerged as the winner. Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee in particular tend to vote Democrats more than other southern states. Numerous large corporations are opening or relocating branches because of favorable corporate laws in the south, particularly in North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas. Supporters of the Democratic Party hope that the resulting demographic changes could benefit their party there.
The north-east of the United States , which was a republican stronghold well into the 20th century, developed in the opposite direction to the south . The Democratic Party gradually made gains here, from 1992 onwards in eleven northeastern states from Maryland to Maine the Democratic presidential candidate (with the exception of the 2000 election in New Hampshire ) always received a majority. In connection with the good results of the Democratic Party in the congressional elections in these states, the term "Solid Northeast" was formed in the US press. The situation is similar with the states on the west coast. These tended strongly towards the Republicans until the 1980s. Later, in Oregon and Washington (since 1988) and California (since 1992), the Democratic Party's presidential candidates won uninterruptedly.
African Americans preferred the Republicans as a party for the liberation of slaves until the 1930s. With Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal , they increasingly began to opt for the Democratic Party. This trend was reinforced in the 1960s by the civil rights movement. In the 2004 presidential election, 89% of all Afro-American voters voted for John Kerry, and in 2008, 96% of Afro-Americans voted for Barack Obama. The counties in the southern states in which Obama received a majority were significantly often the focus areas of cotton growing around 1860, which explains the current high proportion of African Americans in the total population of these regions. These counties largely coincide with the so-called Black Belt .
Southern majority candidates since 1876
| Republican candidate |
| Democratic candidate |
| Non-nominee for the Democrats |
| Candidate of the Dixiecrats |
| Candidate of the American Independent Party |
(*) Of the eleven Democratic Party electors in Alabama, five voted for John F. Kennedy and six for Harry F. Byrd, who had not run.
(**) All eight Democratic Party electors in Mississippi voted for Harry F. Byrd.
See also
literature
- George Brown Tindall: The Disruption of the Solid South. University of Georgia Press, Athens 1972, ISBN 0-8203-0280-5
- Monroe Lee Billington: The Rise and Decline of the Solid South. Forum Press, St. Charles 1975, ISBN 0-88273-062-2
- Dewey Wesley Grantham: The Life and Death of the Solid South. A Political History. University Press of Kentucky, Lexington 1988, ISBN 0-8131-0308-8
- Kari A. Frederickson: The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932-1968. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 2001, ISBN 0-8078-2594-8
Individual evidence
- ^ Hilary Abner Herbert: Why the Solid South? Or, Reconstruction and its Results. Woodward, Baltimore 1890. Reprinted by Negroe Universities Press, New York 1969, ISBN 0-8371-1535-3 .
- ↑ http://www.digitalnpq.org/archive/1987_winter/second.html Accessed October 5, 2008
- ↑ Original: Republicans must not go prospecting for the fool's gold of racist votes. Southern Republicans must not climb aboard the sinking ship of racial injustice. They should let Southern Democrats sink with it as they have sailed with it . quoted n. Patrick J. Buchanan: The greatest comeback. How Richard Nixon rose from Defeat to Create the New Majority . Crown Forum, New York 2014 ISBN 978-0-553-41863-7 pp. 70ff., Quotation p. 72
- ^ The Washington Post, November 8, 2006, accessed February 3, 2010
- ↑ The Washington Monthly, November 10, 2006, accessed February 3, 2010
- ↑ http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4172453 Accessed October 5, 2008
- ↑ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1108/15297.html Accessed March 2, 2009
- ↑ For 2012, Jonathan Leib: Southeast. In: J. Clark Archer, Fiona Davidson, Erin H. Fouberg, Kenneth C. Martis, Richard L. Morrill, Fred M. Shelley, Robert H. Watrel, Gerald R. Webster (Eds.): Atlas of the 2012 Elections. Rowan & Littlefield, Lanham MD 2014, p. 136 .