The American voting public has shifted substantially since the mid-1970's toward the Republican
Party. The leading indicator of this change has been the presidential vote. The once-majority Democrats
have captured only a minority of the white vote in each of the last six presidential elections and their only
victories, in 1992 and 1996, seem to have been partially contingent on the strong third-party candidacies
of Ross Perot. The Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 1994 for the first time in
nearly half a century, and they have controlled the Senate for much of the past two decades. In state
politics, the once healthy Democratic majority of the governorships has switched to a strong Republican
majority. Republicans have come to parity in the state legislatures as well. And in terms of whites’
underlying party identifications, Republicans have nearly erased the stable majority once held by
Democrats.
When we examine trends over time, it is apparent that major shift to the Republican Party has
occurred among white Southerners.
This is quite apparent for presidential voting. The “Solid South”
voted reliably more for Democratic presidential candidates than for Republicans from the “Compromise
of 1877" to the Dixiecrat rebellion of 1948, but it began slipping away from the Democrats in the early
1960's, and has been eroding ever since (Black & Black, 2002; Petrocik, 1987; Sundquist, 1983). The
decline of the Democrats’ hegemony in the white South has been equally precipitous in other indicators.
When President Eisenhower took office, in 1953, Democrats held every Southern Senate seat and 94% of
the Southern seats in the House of Representatives. When George W. Bush took office, in 2001, they
held just over 40% of the Southern seats in each chamber (Abramson et al., 2002, p. 203). The
Democrats’ huge advantage in white Southerners’ party identifications in the 1960's has dropped sharply
as well (e.g., Miller & Shanks, 1996; Converse, 1966). In succession, the Democrats have also lost their
once-commanding lead in gubernatorial and state legislative seats (for the details of these changes, see the
excellent accounts by Black and Black, 1987; 1992; 2002; also Bullock and Rozell, 1998; Jewett, 1999).
And it appears from some early soundings that the 2000 elections marked yet a further sharp rise in the
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