Did the U.S. Political Parties Switch?

The Republican Party was founded in 1854, at meetings in Ripon, Wisconsin, and Jackson, Michigan, to oppose the extension of slavery into the Kansas and Nebraska territories. Its 1860 platform declared that “the normal condition of all the territory of the United States is that of freedom.” It called the doctrine that the Constitution carries slavery into the territories “a dangerous political heresy,” and it branded the reopening of the African slave trade “a crime against humanity.”

Reconstruction ran from 1865 to 1877. Republican majorities in Congress passed the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875, and the act that set up the Freedmen’s Bureau. Fourteen House Democrats voted for the 13th Amendment, but no Democrat in either house voted for the final text of the 14th or the 15th, or for the 1875 act.

Sixteen Black Americans served in Congress during Reconstruction, all of them Republicans, among them Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce in the Senate. Reconstruction ended with the Compromise of 1877: federal troops were withdrawn from the South, and white Democrats took back control.

From 1877 until the mid-20th century the former Confederate states voted as a Democratic bloc, the “Solid South.” In 1895 Republicans and Populists in North Carolina’s legislature sent Jeter Pritchard, a Republican, to the Senate. He was the last Republican the former Confederate states elected to the Senate until John Tower won a special election in Texas in 1961. The one Republican senator from those states in between, Newell Sanders of Tennessee, was appointed in 1912 to finish the term of a senator who had died.

The Solid South rested on white supremacy. Southern legislatures passed Jim Crow segregation laws, and every former Confederate state used reading requirements, property qualifications or poll taxes to keep Black citizens from voting.

Southern Democrats also held a large share of the power in Congress. In 1955 southerners chaired 63 percent of House committees and 53 percent of Senate committees. In the Senate, southern Democrats filibustered anti-lynching bills that the House had passed, in 1922 and again in 1937.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 split Congress more by region than by party. In these tables the South is the eleven former Confederate states, and the North is every other state. Each vote is the vote on passing the bill.

Counted by party alone, Republicans backed the bill more than Democrats did: 80 percent of House Republicans voted yes, against 61 percent of House Democrats. Counted by region, the divide was much sharper. Northern members of both parties mostly voted yes, and Southern members of both parties mostly voted no. Within each region, Democrats voted yes at a higher rate than Republicans.

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This card shows the House vote on passing the Civil Rights Act on 10 February 1964 counted two ways. By party, 80% of Republicans and 61% of Democrats voted yes. By region, 94% of Northern Democrats and 85% of Northern Republicans voted yes, against 8% of Southern Democrats and none of the Southern Republicans. Anyone may download it and post it.

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The one Northern Democrat who voted no in the Senate was Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who had led a Ku Klux Klan chapter in the early 1940s. Five Northern Republicans voted no, among them Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the party’s presidential candidate that November.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 split the same way.

Southern Democrats cast 60 of the 85 House votes against the act. In the Senate they cast 17 of the 19. The House count lists Albert Watson of South Carolina as a Republican. He had left the Democrats after backing Goldwater and won back his seat as a Republican in June 1965.

Black voters began moving to the Democrats in 1936, almost thirty years before the Civil Rights Act.

1936–2004: the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, which compiled the figures from Gallup and other surveys. 1932: an estimate for Chicago in An American Dilemma (1944), a study begun by the Carnegie Corporation and written by the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal. 2024: Pew Research Center’s survey of validated voters.

The move came in two steps, in 1936 and 1964. In 1936 Black voters gave Roosevelt 71 percent of their vote, but in the Joint Center’s figures most did not call themselves Democrats until 1948. In 1964 Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights Act and Goldwater opposed it.

The Joint Center ties the 1964 shift to the Democrats’ support for civil and voting rights and to the Republicans’ turn toward “states’ rights.” Since 1964 the Democratic share in these figures has stayed above 80 percent, and no Republican nominee has won more than 15 percent.

The 1948 Democratic convention adopted a civil rights plank, and the Mississippi delegation and more than a dozen of Alabama’s delegates walked out. Days later Southerners meeting in Birmingham, Alabama, formed the States’ Rights Democratic Party, the “Dixiecrats,” and nominated Strom Thurmond, governor of South Carolina, for president.

The Dixiecrats’ platform, adopted in August, declared: “We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race.” It condemned the national party’s civil rights program, and according to the South Carolina Encyclopedia the Dixiecrats also opposed federal anti-lynching and anti-poll-tax laws.

Thurmond carried Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina, where he was listed on the ballot as the Democratic nominee. He won 39 electoral votes, one of them from a Tennessee elector. He also won about 1.17 million popular votes.

The States’ Rights party did not outlast 1948. According to the South Carolina Encyclopedia, some Dixiecrats returned to the Democratic Party and others became independents, many of whom joined the Republicans in the 1960s. The encyclopedia’s entry holds that the revolt broke the Solid South’s allegiance to the national Democratic Party. Thurmond, the best-known convert, joined the Republican Party in 1964, backed Goldwater, and remained a Republican until his death in 2003.

Barry Goldwater voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act because of two of its titles: Title II, on public accommodations such as hotels and restaurants, and Title VII, on employment. “I find no constitutional basis for the exercise of Federal regulatory authority in either of these areas,” he told the Senate. He had voted for the 1957 Civil Rights Act and said he had supported the 1960 one.

In November 1964 Goldwater lost by 486 electoral votes to 52. But he carried six states: his home state of Arizona and five in the Deep South, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. Britannica puts his Southern wins down largely to his opposition to the civil rights bill and his support for states’ rights.

Georgia had not voted for a Republican presidential candidate since the Civil War. Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina had not done so since Reconstruction, and Louisiana had voted for Eisenhower in 1956. Four of the five, all but Georgia, were the states Thurmond had carried in 1948.

Bill Moyers, then an aide to Johnson, later recalled what Johnson told him after signing the Civil Rights Act. According to Moyers, Johnson said he thought they had just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come. The account is Moyers’s, as History.com reports it.

Two Republican strategists described the Southern strategy in interviews. In 1970 Kevin Phillips explained the reasoning behind Nixon’s Southern strategy to the New York Times. He counted on white Southerners leaving the Democrats as Black voters joined them.

Rick Perlstein’s account of the recording in The Nation notes two other arguments Atwater made in the same interview. He argued that his generation of Southerners would be the first without racial prejudice, and that economic issues would decide how the South voted.

Nixon’s own civil rights record pointed both ways. In June 1969 his administration revived the Philadelphia Plan, which set minimum targets for hiring Black workers in the building trades, and extended it to other cities. That year his Justice Department also backed Mississippi school districts’ request to delay their desegregation plans; the Supreme Court refused, ordering segregated school systems ended “at once.” In 1972 he asked Congress to halt new court-ordered busing, telling the nation: “I am opposed to busing for the purpose of achieving racial balance in our schools.”

Researchers have tested whether race or money drove white Southerners out of the Democratic Party. One long-standing explanation was economic: as the South grew richer, its white voters left the party of redistribution.

Ilyana Kuziemko and Ebonya Washington tested both explanations with Gallup polls taken before and after the civil rights laws. The polls asked whether people would vote for a qualified Black presidential candidate from their own party. In their 2018 study, the defection of racially conservative whites explains the entire decline in white Southern Democratic identification from 1958 to 1980, with essentially no role for income growth.

The South’s House seats moved from the Democrats to the Republicans over about thirty years, and Republicans first held a majority of them after the 1994 election.

Brookings Institution, Vital Statistics on Congress, Table 1-3. The Republican share is of the seats the two parties held.

In 1960 Democrats held 94 percent of the South’s House seats that either party held; after the 2024 election Republicans held 70 percent. The 1994 midterm elections, when Republicans led by Newt Gingrich won control of Congress, gave them a majority of Southern House seats for the first time since Reconstruction.

Few Southern members of Congress made the change themselves. The Voteview database of congressional roll-call votes lists 16 members from the eleven states who served first as Democrats and later as Republicans between 1947 and 2010. Two were senators, Strom Thurmond in 1964 and Richard Shelby in 1994; Phil Gramm of Texas, who switched in 1983, was among the 14 House members. Jesse Helms left the Democrats in 1970, two years before he was first elected to the Senate as a Republican.

Over the same years Republican House seats in the South rose from 2 in 1949 to 94 in 2011. So switchers account for at most 14 of that rise; Republicans won the rest in elections.

The presidential map changed sooner. Nixon carried all eleven former Confederate states in 1972. Reagan carried ten of them in 1980, losing only Georgia to Carter, and all eleven in 1984. In 2000 George W. Bush carried all eleven, including Al Gore’s home state of Tennessee.

Since 2000 seven of the eleven former Confederate states have voted Republican in every presidential election: Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas. Florida and North Carolina voted Democratic in 2008, Florida again in 2012, and Georgia in 2020. Virginia has voted Democratic in every presidential election since 2008. The four states Thurmond carried in 1948 have not voted Democratic for president in this century.

Most Southern Democrats who fought the civil rights laws never changed party. Of the 20 Southern Democratic senators who voted against the 1964 Act, only Strom Thurmond later sat in Congress as a Republican. Counted by party, Republicans backed the 1964 Act more than Democrats did in the House. The Southern House delegation did not gain a Republican majority until 1994, thirty years later. And some researchers explained the white South’s move by money rather than race: as the region grew richer, its white voters left the party of redistribution.

These points are accurate, but they describe how the change happened, not whether it did. The switch was in the parties’ voters and regional bases, and it came through elections rather than through politicians changing sides. The income explanation does not fit the polling: Kuziemko and Washington’s study, in the Southern strategy section above, found essentially no role for income growth.

The former Confederate states went from electing Democrats almost exclusively to electing mostly Republicans, and Black voters moved the opposite way. Kevin Phillips counted on white voters leaving the Democrats as Black voters joined them. Lee Atwater described how racial appeals came to be made in abstract terms such as busing and states’ rights. Seven of the eleven states have voted Republican in every presidential election since 2000.

This case is weakest where “switch” suggests a single moment or a trade between politicians. The change took about thirty years in the House, and it came seat by seat in elections. A comparison of the 1860 and 2020 Republican platforms does not show a simple reversal either. The 1860 platform pledged to keep “inviolate” each state’s right to control “its own domestic institutions,” and in 2020 the Republicans adopted no new platform.

Yes. On race and region, the parties’ bases changed places over about thirty years. Black voters moved to the Democrats from 1936, and decisively in 1964. The former Confederate states, which sent almost only Democrats to the House in 1960, have sent mostly Republicans since the 1994 election.

The change came through voters, not through politicians changing sides: only 16 Southern members of Congress went from Democrat to Republican between 1947 and 2010. And the evidence points to race as the reason white Southerners left the Democrats. In 1970 the strategist Kevin Phillips counted on white voters leaving the Democrats as Black voters joined them. A 2018 study of Gallup polls found that racially conservative whites’ defection explains the entire decline in white Southern Democratic identification from 1958 to 1980.

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The verdict above as one image. Its bars show the Republican share of the former Confederate states’ House seats held by the two parties: 6% after the 1960 election, 51% after 1994 and 70% after 2024. The image is 1,200 by 630 pixels, the size social networks use for link previews, and anyone may download it and post it.

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