Explanation:
Southern Democrats are members of the U.S. Democratic Party who reside in the Southern United States.
In the 19th century, Southern Democrats were whites in the South who believed in Jacksonian democracy. In the 1850s they defended slavery in the United States, and promoted its expansion into the West against northern Free Soil opposition. The United States presidential election of 1860 formalized the split in the Democratic Party and brought about the American Civil War. Stephen Douglas was the candidate for the Northern Democratic Party, and John C. Breckinridge represented the Southern Democratic Party, Abraham Lincoln, who opposed slavery was the Republican Party candidate. [1] After Reconstruction ended in the late 1870s so-called redeemers controlled all the Southern states and disenfranchised blacks (who were Republicans). The "Solid South" gave nearly all its electoral votes to Democrats in presidential elections. Republicans seldom were elected to office outside some Appalachian mountain districts and a few heavily German-American counties of Texas.
The monopoly that the Democratic Party held over most of the South first showed major 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, which nominated South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond for President. The "Dixiecrats" won most of the deep South (where Truman was not on the ballot). The new party collapsed after the election, while Thurmond became a Republican in the 1960s. Following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, which were signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, although a southern Democrat himself, led to heavy opposition from both Southern Democrats and Southern Republicans. Subsequent to the passage of civil rights legislation, many white southerners switched to the Republican Party at the national level. Many scholars argue that Southern whites shifted to the Republican Party due to racial conservatism.[2][3][4] Many continued to vote for Democrats at the state and local levels, especially before the Republican Revolution of 1994.
Between 2000 and 2010, Republicans gained a solid advantage over Democrats at all levels of politics in most Southern states, with the last few holdout counties and states switching over in the years leading up to and following Barack Obama's election in 2008.
