Of course the sixth party system was when the republicans drew all the southern racists to them.
Democrats And Republicans Platform Switch Throughout US History
Ash C June 24, 2019
The two major political parties in the United States, now called Democrats and Republicans, have went through many changes throughout history. Their ideologies, stances, and even platforms have switched in numerous instances. Typically, these big changes usually happen around the time of major legislative changes and political events, such as the Civil War in the 1860’s, and Civil Rights in the 1960’s. Historians have put these changes into perspective by writing out a timeline, coining the “Party Systems”, also known as the different eras of the United States political parties.
The First Party System
The first party system emerged way back in the days when Democrats and Republicans were coexisting under the umbrella of Anti-Federalism. The Federalists stood for a strong national government with a national bank and a strong economic and industry system, which were the ideals of an aristocratic “big government“ party more popular in the North. The Democratic-Republicans had a “small government” platform in support for a limited government with an emphasis on farmers’ and states’ rights, mainly favoured in the South. The smaller government was more “for the people” and achieved dominance after the 1800 Presidential election, and went on to become the Democratic Party in the next party system.
The Second Party System
The second party system occurred as the Federalists slowly died out and the Democratic-Republicans were in power. The two-in-one party had internal disagreements surrounding major political issues. They broke down into several factions mainly over the issue of slavery, and these tensions eventually led to the Civil War which separated the one party into two.
The Third Party System
The third party system was a time of extreme industrial and economic expansion. The Democrats were supported by southern social conservatives in rural areas who did not want slavery to end, while the Northern Republicans were embraced by northern progressive liberals who strived to end slavery once and for all. This era is defined by bitter conflict and striking party differences.
The Fourth Party System
The fourth party system is defined by the rise of “the Progressive Era“ and immigration. After Reconstruction came the Gilded Age where both parties embraced progressivism. But then Teddy Roosevelt left the Republican Party, leading the way for many progressive Republicans. The Democratic Party became increasingly progressive as the Republican platform started to become more conservative and pro-business. With the rise of media, the events of World Wars, the Fed, the income tax, voting rights, and the rise of the modern state, more switches happened as a result of the major changes in social climate.
The Fifth Party System
The fifth party system was kickstarted by the Great Depression. Franklin D. Roosevelt made up the New Deal Coalition which consisted of new social welfare programmes bringing together under-privileged, working class, and minority groups. Many African-Americans made the switch here: they had previously been supporters of the Republican Party due to the freeing of slaves, but they were in support of the Democrats now.
The Sixth Party System
The sixth party system appears to have begun with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when the Democrats officially lost their long-term dominance with the voters in the South as the Republican Party became popular in rural and suburb areas. The Democratic Party started to attract people of colour and white urban progressives. It was increasingly seen as the aristocratic party favoured in the North and in big cities. A complete 180 from how it was back in the 1800s.
Some historians and political commentators have argued that we are actually in our seventh party system now in 2019. This theory however has been one of controversy and not been fully confirmed or agreed upon. But the other “platform switches” stated above are not myths — as evidenced in the voting map over time, or from the historic party platforms. These party switches are definitely complex, but they are all a part of American history, and these major changes should be taken under consideration especially in the debate of party loyalty.
The Myth of the Republican-Democrat 'Switch'
By Dan O'DonnellMay 1, 2018
When faced with the sobering reality that Democrats supported slavery, started the Civil War when the abolitionist Republican Party won the Presidency, established the Ku Klux Klan to brutalize newly freed slaves and keep them from voting, opposed the Civil Rights Movement, modern-day liberals reflexively perpetuate rather pernicious myth--that the racist southern Democrats of the 1950s and 1960s became Republicans, leading to the so-called "switch" of the parties.
This is as ridiculous as it is easily debunked.
The Republican Party, of course, was founded in 1848 with the abolition of slavery as its core mission. Almost immediately after its second presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, won the 1860 election, Democrat-controlled southern states seceded on the assumption that Lincoln would destroy their slave-based economies.
Once the Civil War ended, the newly freed slaves as expected flocked to the Republican Party, but Democrat control of the South from Reconstruction until the Civil Rights Era was near total. In 1960, Democrats held every Senate seat south of the Mason-Dixon line. In the 13 states that made up the Confederacy a century earlier, Democrats held a staggering 117-8 advantage in the House of Representatives. The Democratic Party was so strong in the south that those 117 House members made up a full 41% of Democrats' 283-153 advantage in the Chamber.
Likewise, throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, Democratic governors and overwhelmingly Democratic State Legislatures controlled the South, which steadfastly opposed the push for civil rights. In contrast, Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, openly praised school desegregation in the Brown v. Board of Education decision and sent federalized Arkansas National Guard troops to Little Rock to protect nine black students after Democratic Governor Orval Faubus threatened to keep them out of a previously all-white high school.
Eisenhower was a phenomenally popular war hero when he was elected in 1952, and even though only one Republican had ever before won any southern states in the Electoral College (Herbert Hoover in 1928), Eisenhower began to make inroads for the Republican Party; winning Florida, Texas, Virginia, and Tennessee. In his landslide victory four years later, Eisenhower picked up Louisiana and Kentucky.
His personal appeal, though, didn't transcend the Democratic Party's hold on the South, and when he left office in 1961, that hold was arguably stronger than it had been in decades. As Southern Democrats clung to traditional segregation, though, the rest of the country was changing, and the push for civil rights had begun.
After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy--a strong proponent of civil rights--in late 1963, Southern Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson saw it as his mission to pass the Civil Rights Act as a tribute to Kennedy, who had first proposed the bill five months before he was killed. Democrats in the Senate, however, filibustered it.
In June of 1964, though, the bill came up again, and it passed...over the strenuous objections of Southern Democrats. 80% of House Republicans voted for the measure, compared with just 61% of Democrats, while 82% of Republicans in the Senate supported it, compared with 69% of Democrats.
Nearly all of the opposition was, naturally, in the South, which was still nearly unanimously Democratic and nearly unanimously resistant to the changing country. One thing that most assuredly didn't change, though, was party affiliation. A total of 21 Democrats in the Senate opposed the Civil Rights Act. Only one of them, "Dixiecrat" Strom Thurmond, ever became a Republican. The rest, including Al Gore, Sr. and Robert Byrd--a former Exalted Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan--remained Democrats until the day they died.
Moreover, as those 20 lifelong Democrats retired, their Senate seats remained in Democrat hands for several decades afterwards. So too did the overwhelming majority of the House seats in the South until 1994, when a Republican wave election swept the GOP into control of the House for the first time since 1952. 1994 was also the first time Republicans ever held a majority of House seats in the South--a full 30 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
From there, Republicans gradually built their support in the South until two more wave elections in 2010 and 2014 gave them the overwhelming majorities they enjoy today.
If this was a sudden "switch" to the Republican Party for the old Democrat segregationists, it sure took a long time to happen.
The reality is that it didn't. After the 1964 election--the first after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the opportune time for racist Democrat voters to abandon the party in favor of Republicans--Democrats still held a 102-20 House majority in states that had once been part of the Confederacy. In 1960, remember, that advantage was 117-8. A pickup of 12 seats (half of them in Alabama) is hardly the massive shift one would expect if racist voters suddenly abandoned the Democratic Party in favor of the GOP.
In fact, voting patterns in the South didn't really change all that much after the Civil Rights era. Democrats still dominated Senate, House, and gubernatorial elections for decades afterward. Alabama, for example, didn't elect a Republican governor until 1986. Mississippi didn't elect one until 1991. Georgia didn't elect one until 2002.
In the Senate, Republicans picked up four southern Senate seats in the 1960s and 1970s, while Democrats also picked up four. Democratic incumbents won routinely. If anything, those racist southern voters kept voting Democrat.
So how did this myth of a sudden "switch" get started?
It's rooted in an equally pernicious myth of the supposedly racist "Southern Strategy" of Richard Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign, which was accused of surreptitiously exploiting the innate racism of white southern voters.
Even before that, though, modern-day Democrats point to the 1964 presidential campaign of Republican Barry Goldwater, who refused to back the 1964 Civil Rights Act as proof that the GOP was actively courting racist southern voters. After all, they argue, Goldwater only won six states--his home state of Arizona and five states in the deep south. His "States' Rights" platform had to be code for a racist return to a segregated society, right?
Hardly. Goldwater was actually very supportive of civil rights for black Americans, voting for the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts and even helping to found Arizona's chapter of the NAACP. His opposition to the 1964 Act was not at all rooted in racism, but rather in a belief that it allowed the federal government to infringe on state sovereignty.
The Lyndon B. Johnson campaign pounced on Goldwater's position and, during the height of the 1964 campaign, ran an ad titled "Confessions of a Republican," which rather nonsensically tied Goldwater to the Ku Klux Klan (which, remember, was a Democratic organization).
The ad helped Johnson win the biggest landslide since 1920 and for the first time showed Democrats that accusing Republicans of being racist (even with absolutely no evidence to back this up) was a potent political weapon.
It would not be the last time they used it.
Four years later, facing declining popularity ratings and strong primary challenges from Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, Johnson decided not to run for re-election. As protests over the Vietnam War and race riots following the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. raged in America's streets, Republican Richard Nixon, the former Vice President, launched a campaign based on promises of "restoring law and order."
With the southerner Johnson out of the race and Minnesota native Hubert Humphrey as his opponent, Nixon saw an opportunity to win southern states that Goldwater had, not through racism, but through aggressive campaigning in an area of the country Republicans had previously written off.
Yet it didn't work. For all of Nixon's supposed appeals to southern racists (who still voted for Democrats in Senate and House races that same year), he lost almost all of the south to a Democrat--George Wallace, who ran on the American Independent ticket and won five states and 46 electoral votes.
It shouldn't have been surprising that Nixon ran competitively in the South, though. He carried 32 states and won 301 electoral votes. Four years later, he won every state except Massachusetts. Was it because of his racism? Had he laid the groundwork for racist appeals by Republicans for generations to come?
Of course not. The supposedly racist southern Republicans who voted for Nixon in 1972 also voted to re-elect Democrat Senators in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Republicans gained only eight southern seats in the House even though their presidential candidate won a record 520 electoral votes.
After Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974, Democrat Jimmy Carter swept the South en route to the presidency in 1976. Did Carter similarly run on racist themes? Or was he simply a stronger candidate? After Ronald Reagan carried the south in two landslides (including the biggest in U.S. history in 1984) and George H.W. Bush ran similarly strongly in 1988 while promising to be a "third Reagan term," Democrat Bill Clinton split the southern states with Bush in 1992 and with Bob Dole in 1996.
All the while, Democrats kept winning House, Senate, and gubernatorial elections. Only in 2000 did southern voters return to unanimous Electoral College support for a Republican presidential candidate.
Since then, the south has voted reliably Republican (with the exception of Florida and North Carolina) in every presidential election as it has consistently voted for Republicans in Senate, House, and Governor's races.
Yet this shift was a gradual, decades-long transition and not a sudden "shift" in response to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Racism didn't turn the South Republican--if it did, then why did it take 30 years for those racist voters to finally give the GOP a majority of southern House seats? Why did it take racist voters in Georgia 38 years to finally vote for a Republican governor? And why did only one southern Democrat ever switch to the Republican Party?
The myth of the great Republican-Democrat "switch" summarily falters under the weight of actual historical analysis, and it becomes clear that prolonged electoral shifts combined with the phenomenal nationwide popularity of Republicans Richard Nixon in 1972 and Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984 were the real reason for the Republican strength in the south.
Reagan in particular introduced the entire nation to conservative policies that it found that it loved, sparking a new generation of Republican voters and politicians who still have tremendous influence today.
Racism had nothing to do with it. That is simply a Democratic myth.
