Steve Kornacki: The "Southern Strategy," Fulfilled
[Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor]
Democrats thought they had solved their Southern problem in 1976, when a peanut farmer-turned-Georgia governor named Jimmy Carter swept through the old Confederacy, winning every state except Virginia en route to a narrow electoral college victory over President Gerald Ford. For the first time in 12 years, the Democrats had won a national election -- and Dixie was the reason why.
This resurgence, though, was little more than a mirage -- a brief interruption in the South's steady march away from the Democratic Party, which in many ways culminated in Carter's defeat four years later at the hands of Ronald Reagan.
The story of why Reagan was in position to run against Carter in 1980 -- and how he managed to turn Carter's prideful home region against its native son -- really begins in 1964, when regional tensions within the Democratic Party finally reached a breaking point. Since Reconstruction, when white Southerners developed a bitter hostility to Reconstruction and its northern Republican liberal architects, Dixie had been the most staunchly Democratic region in the country -- so loyal that FDR actually won over 95 percent of the vote in several Southern states. For decades, the South elected Democrats at every level of the ballot; practically speaking, there was no two-party system in the region.
But as blacks migrated away from Jim Crow and into northern cities, Democratic leaders outside of the South came to see the enactment of civil rights laws as a political imperative. The Republican Party, then the default home of anti-segregation northern liberals, was well-positioned to win the loyalty of the blacks who moved North (where they were suddenly eligible to vote). Thus, the alliance between Northern machine Democrats and Southern conservatives frayed -- until finally Lyndon Johnson put his pen to the Civil Rights Act of 1964....
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Democrats thought they had solved their Southern problem in 1976, when a peanut farmer-turned-Georgia governor named Jimmy Carter swept through the old Confederacy, winning every state except Virginia en route to a narrow electoral college victory over President Gerald Ford. For the first time in 12 years, the Democrats had won a national election -- and Dixie was the reason why.
This resurgence, though, was little more than a mirage -- a brief interruption in the South's steady march away from the Democratic Party, which in many ways culminated in Carter's defeat four years later at the hands of Ronald Reagan.
The story of why Reagan was in position to run against Carter in 1980 -- and how he managed to turn Carter's prideful home region against its native son -- really begins in 1964, when regional tensions within the Democratic Party finally reached a breaking point. Since Reconstruction, when white Southerners developed a bitter hostility to Reconstruction and its northern Republican liberal architects, Dixie had been the most staunchly Democratic region in the country -- so loyal that FDR actually won over 95 percent of the vote in several Southern states. For decades, the South elected Democrats at every level of the ballot; practically speaking, there was no two-party system in the region.
But as blacks migrated away from Jim Crow and into northern cities, Democratic leaders outside of the South came to see the enactment of civil rights laws as a political imperative. The Republican Party, then the default home of anti-segregation northern liberals, was well-positioned to win the loyalty of the blacks who moved North (where they were suddenly eligible to vote). Thus, the alliance between Northern machine Democrats and Southern conservatives frayed -- until finally Lyndon Johnson put his pen to the Civil Rights Act of 1964....