As our revived national conversation on race has made clear, the legacies of slavery and white supremacy run wide and deep in American society and political life. One such legacy — which is particularly noteworthy in a presidential election season — has been the survival and preservation of the Electoral […] Read more »
The South Is Still Very Republican—But Southern Democrats Aren’t “Southern Democrats” Anymore
… In general, the change so far in the southern Democratic Party’s electoral strength has received too much attention and the change in its internal complexion has received too little. Old-style southern Democrats—the kind with rural constituencies, good-ol’-boy personas, and philosophical discomfort with the northern wing of the party on […] Read more »
Democrats, Biden look to accelerate Southern political shift
From Mississippi retiring its state flag to local governments removing Confederate statues from public spaces, a bipartisan push across the South is chipping away at reminders of the Civil War and Jim Crow segregation. Now, during a national reckoning on racism, Democratic Party leaders want those symbolic changes to become […] Read more »
Biden’s Super Tuesday Test: Defending the South
Key Points • Joe Biden’s victory in South Carolina re-established him as the main challenger to Bernie Sanders. • There is some indication their battle could break on regional lines, with Sanders fighting for inroads in the South and Biden for access to the North. Biden’s task on Tuesday is […] Read more »
What Makes Southern Democrats Unique
… The states of the former Confederacy will elect a little over one quarter of Democrats’ pledged delegates in 2020 — six of them on Super Tuesday (Alabama, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia). And so as the 2020 Democratic primary contests move to the South, I figured it […] Read more »
The Republican Party is white and Southern. How did that happen?
… With the exception of the short period of Reconstruction after the Civil War, the GOP was notoriously ineffective in the ex-Confederacy. The region was dominated by the Democratic Party from the late 1870s through the second half of the 20th century. Why the shift? Historians and political scientists traditionally […] Read more »