Southern Democrats are members of the U.S. Democratic Party who reside in the Southern United States.
Before the American Civil War, Southern Democrats mostly believed in Jacksonian democracy. In the 19th century, they defended slavery in the United States and promoted its expansion into the Western United States against the Free Soil opposition in the Northern United States. The United States presidential election of 1860 formalized the split in the Democratic Party and brought about the American Civil War. After the Reconstruction Era ended in the late 1870s, so-called redeemers were Southern Democrats who controlled all the southern states and disenfranchised African Americans.
The monopoly that the Democratic Party held over most of the South showed signs of breaking apart in 1948, when many white Southern Democrats—upset by the policies of desegregation enacted during the administration of Democratic president Harry Truman—created the States' Rights Democratic Party. This new party, commonly referred to as the "Dixiecrats", nominated South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond for president. The new party collapsed after Truman unexpectedly won the 1948 United States presidential election.
Despite being a Southern Democrat himself, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These actions led to heavy opposition from Southern Democrats. 1964 Republican nominee Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act, which caused Goldwater to sweep the Deep South even though he lost badly outside the South. Many scholars have stated that southern whites shifted to the Republican Party after a civil rights culture change and due to social conservatism.
Republicans first dominated presidential elections in the South, then won a majority of Southern gubernatorial and congressional elections after the 1994 Republican Revolution. By the 21st century, and especially after the 2010 midterm elections, the Republican Party had gained a solid advantage over the Democratic Party in most southern states.
Southern Democrats of the 21st century, such as Jon Ossoff, Raphael Warnock, Josh Stein, and Abigail Spanberger are considerably more liberal than their predecessors. No Democrat has been elected president without winning at least two of the 11 former Confederate states, including winning either Georgia or Florida.
History 1828–1861
The title of "Democrat" has its beginnings in the South, going back to the founding of the Democratic-Republican Party in 1793 by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. It held to small government principles and distrusted the national government. Foreign policy was a major issue. After being the dominant party in U.S. politics from 1801 to 1829, the Democratic-Republicans split into two factions by 1828: the federalist National Republicans (who became the Whigs), and the Democrats. The Democrats and Whigs were evenly balanced in the 1830s and 1840s. However, by the 1850s, the Whigs disintegrated. Other opposition parties emerged but the Democrats were dominant. Northern Democrats were in serious opposition to Southern Democrats on the issue of slavery; Northern Democrats, led by Stephen Douglas, believed in Popular Sovereignty—letting the people of the territories vote on slavery. The Southern Democrats, reflecting the views of the late John C. Calhoun, insisted slavery was national.
The Democrats controlled the national government from 1853 until 1861, and presidents Pierce and Buchanan were friendly to Southern interests. In the North, the newly formed anti-slavery Republican Party came to power and dominated the electoral college. In the 1860 presidential election, the Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln, but the divide among Democrats led to the nomination of two candidates: John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky represented Southern Democrats, and Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois represented Northern Democrats. Nevertheless, the Republicans had a majority of the electoral vote regardless of how the opposition split or joined and Abraham Lincoln was elected.
1861–1933
After the election of Abraham Lincoln, Southern Democrats led the charge to secede from the Union and establish the Confederate States. The United States Congress was dominated by Republicans; a notable exception was Democrat Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, the only senator from a state in rebellion to reject secession. The Border States or Border South of Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri of the Upper South were torn by political turmoil. Kentucky and Missouri were both governed by pro-secessionist Southern Democratic governors who vehemently rejected Lincoln's call for 75,000 troops. Kentucky and Missouri both held secession conventions, but neither officially declared secession, leading to split Unionist and Confederate state governments in both states. Southern Democrats in Maryland faced a Unionist governor Thomas Holliday Hicks and the Union army. Armed with the suspension of habeas corpus and Union troops, Governor Hicks was able to stop Maryland's secession movement. Maryland was the only state south of the Mason–Dixon line whose governor affirmed Lincoln's call for 75,000 troops.
After secession, the Democratic vote in the North split between the War Democrats and the Peace Democrats or Copperheads. The War Democrats voted for Lincoln in the 1864 election, and Lincoln had a War Democrat — Andrew Johnson — on his ticket. In the South, during Reconstruction the white Republican element, called Scalawags became smaller and smaller as more and more joined the Democrats. In the North, most War Democrats returned to the Democrats, and when the Panic of 1873 hit, the Republican Party was blamed and the Democrats gained control of the House of Representatives in 1875. The Democrats emphasized that since Jefferson and Jackson they had been the party of states' rights, which added to their appeal in the white South.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Democrats, led by the dominant Southern wing, had a strong representation in Congress. They won both houses in 1912 and elected Woodrow Wilson, a New Jersey academic with deep Southern roots and a strong base among the Southern middle class. The Republican Party regained Congress in 1919. Southern Democrats held powerful positions in Congress during the Wilson administration, with one study noting: "Though comprising only about half of the Democratic senators and slightly over two-fifths of the Democratic representatives, the southerners made up a large majority of the party's senior members in the two houses. They exerted great weight in the two Democratic caucuses and headed almost all of the important congressional committees."The South in Modern America A Region at Odds By Dewey W. Grantham, 2001, P.66 During the 1920s, according to one observer, the majority of Southern Democrats were supportive of progressive initiatives such as those aimed at assisting farmers.
From 1896 to 1912 and 1921 to 1931, the Democrats were relegated to second place status in national politics and didn't control a single branch of the federal government despite universal dominance in most of the Solid South. In 1928 several Southern states dallied with voting Republican in supporting Herbert Hoover over the Roman Catholic Al Smith, but the behavior was short lived as the stock market crash of 1929 returned Republicans to disfavor throughout the South. Nationally, Republicans lost Congress in January 1931 and the White House in March 1933 by huge margins. By this time, too, the Democratic Party leadership began to change its tone somewhat on racial politics. With the Great Depression gripping the nation, and with the lives of most Americans disrupted, the assisting of African Americans in American society was seen as necessary by the new government.
In 1932, southern Democrats held 38% of the party’s Congressional seats in the House, and 44% in the Senate.The Workfare State Public Assistance Politics from the New Deal to the New Democrats By Eva Bertram, Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Incorporated, 2015, P.15
1933–1981 During the 1930s, as the New Deal began to move Democrats as a whole to the left in economic policy, Southern Democrats were mostly supportive, although by the late 1930s there was a growing conservative faction. Both factions supported Roosevelt's foreign policies. By 1948 the protection of segregation led Democrats in the Deep South to reject Truman and run a third party ticket of Dixiecrats in the 1948 United States presidential election. After 1964, Southern Democrats lost major battles during the Civil Rights Movement. Federal laws ended segregation and restrictions on black voters.
During the civil rights movement era, Democrats in the South initially still voted loyally with their party. After the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the old argument that all whites had to stick together to prevent civil rights legislation lost its force because the legislation had now been passed. More and more whites began to vote Republican, especially in the suburbs and growing cities. Newcomers from the North were mostly Republican; they were now joined by conservatives and wealthy Southern whites, while liberal whites and poor whites, especially in rural areas, remained with the Democratic Party.Byron E. Shafer and Richard Johnston, The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South (2009) pp. 173–74
The New Deal program of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) generally united the party factions for over three decades, since Southerners, like Northern urban populations, were hit particularly hard and generally benefited from the massive governmental relief program. FDR was adept at holding white Southerners in the coalitionAs in declining to invite African-American Jesse Owens, hero of the 1936 Olympics, to the White House. while simultaneously beginning the erosion of Black voters away from their then-characteristic Republican preferences. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s catalyzed the end of this Democratic Party coalition of interests by magnetizing Black voters to the Democratic label and simultaneously ending white supremacist control of the Democratic Party apparatus.Until the 1960s the Democratic Party primaries were tantamount to election in most of the South and, being restricted largely to caucasians, were openly called White primaries. A series of court decisions, rendering primary elections as public instead of private events administered by the parties, essentially freed the Southern region to change more toward the two-party behavior of most of the rest of the nation.
In the presidential elections of 1952 and 1956 Republican nominee Dwight D. Eisenhower, a popular World War II general, won several Southern states, thus breaking some white Southerners away from their Democratic Party pattern. The senior position of Southern congressmen and senators, and the discipline of many groups such as the Southern Caucus meant that Civil Rights initiatives tended to be blunted despite popular support.