How the Republican Party Won the Dixiecrats and Lost Their Soul

In 1968, Republican Richard Nixon beat Democrat Hubert Humphrey by half a million votes. They each got more than 31 million votes. George Wallace - a third party candidate - got 9.9 million and won the electoral votes from Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas. Wallace won what we call the "deep south," or what one might whimsically call "the deep states," the last third-party candidate to win any state.

In 1952, the Republican Eisenhower had won every state except for nine - including these five.
The deep south was solidly Democratic, then went to Wallace and then - in 1968 - went to Nixon and has been solidly Republican since. Trump won by his widest margins in the deep south.

In 1952, the deep south was the only region still Democratic (blue states above).

After Civil Rights, the Deep South went for Wallace and his desegregation policy.

In 1972, the deep south went to Nixon and has been Republican (red state) ever since.

The states in the deep south that were among the only Democratic states when Eisenhower ran are now the most Republican in the nation, giving Trump his largest margins of victory.

It is not too much of a simplification to think of the Civil War of 1860 as a war between the brand new Republican Party (Lincoln was their first president) and the Democratic Party that had dominated American politics from 1800 to 1860. The Confederates were Democrats and the Union were Republicans. After they lost, the former confederates remained Democrats who were no longer slaveholders but were still racists. Blacks were freed from slavery and quickly plunged into a second class, segregated status that left them largely without rights or economic opportunity. The Republican Party dominated politics for a couple of generations after.

When the Democratic party began its reinvention with FDR, it maintained its coalition with the Dixiecrats from the Deep South. The Democratic Party was an odd coalition of progressives from the north and good old boys in the south. Out of this odd coalition came some weird legislation. The GI Bill - which funded college for veterans and did so much to help move the US from an industrial to information economy - largely excluded blacks, for instance, a form of affirmative action for whites.
The Civil War had divided the country. Civil Rights divided the Democratic party. When the Texan Johnson signed the Civil Rights legislation that had been originated by Kennedy from Massachusetts, he said, "We are going to lose the south for a generation." It turns out that Democrats lost it for longer than that.

After Kennedy and Johnson's Civil Rights legislation, the Dixiecrats broke away from the Democratic Party. They did not immediately join the Republicans who had destroyed their way of life a century earlier, though. In 1968, the deep south voted for George Wallace and the Republican Nixon won the presidency with only 43% of the vote. In 1972, those southern states - and segregationists and racists throughout the country - voted for Nixon, who won 61% of the votes and 49 states.

With their new coalition, Republicans held the presidency for all but four of the next 24 years. Carter (D) in 1976 interrupted this run. Clinton (D) in 1992 ended it. Both were from the deep south, states that had supported Wallace. If you were going to win the presidency, you had to at least show some connection to the culture of the deep south.

Segregation and racism is immoral. That gets a lot of attention and rightfully so. What I think gets too little attention is how much misogyny and racism depresses economic development. The four states that voted for Wallace that overwhelmingly went for Trump in 2020 - Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi - between them have pathetically low average per capita GDPs.

Average per capita GDP
Wallace's Five states (the deep south): $45k
The United States: $57k
Five States that Voted Most Democratic in 2020: $73k.

The misogyny and racism of the deep south costs about $12,000 to $27,000 per person. For a host of reasons. (The most obvious simply being that you're excluding half your population (the women folk) and about 5 to 25% of your menfolk from opportunities to fully develop and contribute economically.)
After the Civil War, northerners went to the conquered south to dismantle slavery and the various things southerners tried to put in its place. Rather than accept that they and their ugly institution of slavery had lost, southerners hollered about states' rights and an intrusive federal government, something they've been whining about ever since.

Why mention all of this? Because the price Republicans paid to win back the presidency in 1972 was the absorption of the deep south.

Republicans used to be the capitalists and small business people and Democrats represented labor. The problem for the Republicans is that labor became a huge and prosperous group. In 1800 - when the country was founded - only 20 percent of the work force worked for someone else. By 2000, 90 percent did. For most Americans, working meant working for someone else - you were an employee. The Democrats had done the best job of winning and representing that group and in the years from FDR to LBJ, being the representative of labor meant that Democrats were the dominant party.

How did the Republicans win back voters? It's complicated but a big part of it was simply to win over the segregationists angry at the Democratic Party for forcing them to let the blacks sit in their classrooms and at their diner counters. The virus of the deep south's weird beliefs and culture has now infected the whole of the GOP, though.

This week included talk of secession from Texas' attorney general, Rush Limbaugh's claim that conservatives cannot peacefully coexist with liberals and the madness of Trump's insistence that he won an election he lost by 7 million votes. The Republicans who defeated the south in the Civil War have been taken over by the losers of that war.

A virus has infected the Republican Party that once stood for capitalism and small business owners. The party that - at the time of Lincoln - was defining a world that would take generations to unfold now clings to a world that was already obsolete in 1968. It is a sad end to a once grand old party.