How the South was won

THE EROSION of the Democratic Party's hold on the South is one of the most important changes in postwar American politics. In 1950, only a handful of congressional districts in the region even featured Republican candidates on the ballot. Today, the GOP holds the majority of House seats below the Mason-Dixon, and in 2004 President Bush swept the South's electoral-college votes. The historic switch from blue to red over the past half century not only robbed Democrats of their assured congressional majorities, it shifted the center of Republican political power from the Northeast to the Sunbelt.

For all its importance, though, the story of how the Democrats lost the South is also one of the least examined-partly because so many people seem to agree on what caused it. For most, it boils down to one word: race.

After World War II, the story goes, the national Democratic Party began to embrace civil rights, alienating racist Southern whites. Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy had made initial forays into pro-civil rights politics, but it was Lyndon Johnson who supposedly forfeited the region to the Republicans by signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Legend has it that as he put down his pen Johnson told an aide, ''We have lost the South for a generation." According to the conventional wisdom, that's exactly what happened, as white voters were soon gobbled up by Nixon's racially coded ''Southern strategy."

But a new book by a pair of political scientists aims to stand that conventional wisdom on its head. ''The End of Southern Exceptionalism" (Harvard), by Richard Johnston of the University of British Columbia and Byron Shafer of Wisconsin, argues that it was economics, not race, that upended the Southern apple cart. As the South boomed and Sunbelt cities added millions of suburban residents, they argue, its burgeoning middle classes naturally tilted to the Republicans' fiscal conservatism, which promised tax cuts and smaller government programs.

''The engine of partisan change in the postwar South was, first and foremost, economic development and an associated politics of social class," they conclude after sifting through reams of electoral and polling data. ''The impact of legal desegregation and an associated politics of racial identity had to be understood through its interaction with economic development." In other words, the Southern realignment wasn't about white racial backlash. Rather, it was about a new, middle-class South that focused mostly on economic issues and only secondarily on race.

It's a bold conclusion-and one that few observers of the postwar South will agree with. But if Johnston and Shafer are right, it's also an argument that could have major implications for how the Democrats view their chances in the region-the country's fastest-growing-and how they shape their strategy nationwide.

''Sooner or later," the political scientist V.O. Key wrote in ''Southern Politics in State and Nation" (1949), still considered the cornerstone text on the region's politics, ''the trail of inquiry leads to the Negro." And Key was not mistaken. For almost 100 years, a coterie of white elites had controlled the South by leveraging racial antagonisms and legal discrimination to ensure white solidarity behind the Democratic Party.

But what Key could not have foreseen was how soon, and how rapidly, that would all change. During the 1950s, a combination of forces-the long-term impact of New Deal infrastructure investments, the growth of regional industry, and an influx of non-Southern migrants-revolutionized the region, creating massive suburban enclaves and transforming its economy, virtually overnight, from an agricultural to a manufacturing and services base.

''Everybody forgets that the South, in the immediate postwar period is the third world. Over 40 percent of the South is in subsistence agriculture," Johnston said in an interview. ''Not only is the country going to boom in the postwar years but the South is going to catch up. And the impact of that on its politics causes the South to finally give up the old Southern party system and join the nation."

In 1997, spurred by a conference on American politics at Oxford University, Johnston and Shafer decided to test the conventional wisdom by analyzing the hundreds of House elections that had occurred since the end of World War II. They then compared those results against Senate and presidential elections, as well as volumes of survey results on discrimination, welfare, and race relations.

What they found was startling: White voters who lived in predominantly white areas, who held moderate political views, and who exhibited no pronounced racial antagonism, were in fact more likely to vote Republican than lower-income whites in predominantly black areas who had at times bolted the Democratic Party to support segregationist demagogues like Strom Thurmond and George Wallace. It seemed clear that the shift was not about race, but class: The white middle class went right, while the white working class, for the most part, stayed left, regardless of racial views.

''What you see is a movement in the class divide first," Johnston said. ''The critical point is that well-off Southerners who were not particularly one way or the other on race questions recognized correctly that the Republican Party was simply the more conservative party on economic questions."

In fact, Johnston and Shafer posit, it was not until the 1990s, when other social issues-particularly religion and the culture wars-began to become significant political factors that the region's lower-income white voters turned to the GOP as well.

But while Johnston and Shafer rally some impressive numbers, not everyone is convinced. Younger, better-educated whites may have found the GOP's economic conservatism attractive, but many Southern historians argue that the initial shift to the right was led by older whites in a backlash against Johnson's civil rights efforts.

''The initial exodus of white Southerners from the Demos was, for all intents and purposes, all about race," said James Cobb, a historian at the University of Georgia and the author of ''Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity" (2005). Plus, he added, a focus on data makes it seem easy to separate race and economics, when in fact they are inextricably bound. If middle-class whites were less concerned about race-something Cobb and others find doubtful-it may be because they had segregated themselves in whites-only suburbs.

And it's hard to ignore the decades of subtle and not-so-subtle efforts by Republican presidential tickets to court white racism-Barry Goldwater's anti-Civil Rights Act stumping in 1964, for example, or Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign kickoff in Philadelphia, Miss., site of the ''Mississippi Burning" murders.

Nevertheless, Johnston and Shafer, though they readily concede the political importance of the civil rights movement and the backlash against it, argue that numbers don't lie: For all the drama of the civil rights era, they maintain, when it came to the ballot box Southern whites voted with their wallets.

They find, for example, that while the overtly segregationist campaigns of Thurmond in 1948, Goldwater in 1964, and Wallace in 1968 made impressive showings among Southern voters, in retrospect they stand out more as aberrations than ''bridges" to a new race-based GOP voting bloc-they may have brought out crowds of racist whites but they also turned off the burgeoning middle class.

Most of the lower-income voters who went with Thurmond in 1948, Johnston and Shafer find, voted for Democrat Adlai Stevenson in 1952, while many of the middle-class Democrats who crossed party lines for Eisenhower had rejected Thurmond four years earlier. And when Nixon tried to capture Goldwater voters in the 1970 midterm elections by openly supporting anti-civil rights candidates, he lost much of the white middle class, who instead elected such moderate Democrats as Georgia's Jimmy Carter, Florida's Reubin Askew, and Arkansas' Dale Bumpers. The Southern middle class, they argue, preferred the GOP's fiscal conservatism, but not its racial demagoguery.

Johnston and Shafer are hardly the first political scientists to notice the impact that economic development has had on Southern voting patterns. Twin brothers Earl and Merle Black, professors at, respectively, Rice and Emory universities and perhaps the deans of Southern political science, note in their 2002 book ''The Rise of Southern Republicans" that after the war, the burgeoning Southern middle class, ''wanting to keep the lion's share of their earnings, view[ed] the Republicans as far more sympathetic than the Democrats to their economic interests and aspirations."

And yet, say Johnston and Shafer, the vast majority of American political science and history professors-not to mention political pundits-still assume that race has always been the key organizing principle in Southern politics. ''We take race and class and try to give them systematic measures and try to be able to talk about the comparative influence," Shafer said. ''Most of the rest of the [political science] literature doesn't do that. It just waves one at you and talks about the other."

If Johnston and Shafer are right, their work should raise a debate far beyond the country's political science departments. If economics had more to do with the realignment than race, then Democrats lost the South for the same reasons they have had a hard time breaking into the suburban middle class around the country-namely, a failure to win consistent majorities of white middle-class voters.

''The strategic implication [of the existing literature] is, 'Oh dear, you should have never done the civil rights revolution, because it cost you the South,"' Shafer said. ''We're clearly not saying that. We're saying that when Democrats lost the white middle class, they lost the South."

In other words, the South may not be that much different from the rest of the country.

Clay Risen is an assistant editor at The New Republic.