The United States is a very diverse country with its politics and has various parties representing many ideologies. While there are many different political parties in the US, the two dominant parties are the Democrats and the Republicans. The Democrats fight for more government power and often call for more national spending, while the Republicans advocate for smaller government and privatization of business.
Both the ideologies of the Democratic and Republican parties go beyond just economics, as both parties have strong beliefs about social issues. Democrats advocate for social progressivism, while Republicans tend to be more conservative by encouraging traditional family values. There are moderates on both sides of the aisle, notably with Blue Dog Democrats, who are fiscally conservative, and Rockefeller Republicans, who are socially liberal, but these wings of their respective parties have become less prevalent due to political polarization.
There has always been a divide between Americans in how they vote and think politically, but the wedge has grown, and that split can be seen in the way that different regions of the country vote. The north traditionally votes in favor of the Democrats, while the south usually favors the Republicans but it wasn't always this way. Before the 1960s, the south voted heavily for the Democrats, and the north voted heavily for the Republicans, and it wasn't until the mid-1960s that the national parties switched.
A driving factor for the party switch was the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which cemented the Democratic Party as the party that bases its platform on equal opportunity. While the Civil Rights Act of 1964 certainly helped cement this belief, it is not the only force, as the Democrats were improving their stances on social equality for several decades after being known as the party that supported slavery. So, if the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not cause the party switch, what did?
To understand how the Republicans and Democrats switched in voter base and ideology, one must understand the beginnings of the Republican Party. The Republican Party formed to oppose slavery, while the Democratic Party supported it, and this split between the Republican north and the Democratic south helped cause the outbreak of the American Civil War. When the war broke out, the Union had a strong advantage due to having control over the industry and military bases of the south and managed to defeat the Confederate States in a bloody war.
After the Civil War, the Democratic Party did everything in its power to disenfranchise African American voters. These tactics included anything from poll taxes, reading tests, and blatant intimidation from the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist terrorist organization that openly discriminates against non-white and non-US-born citizens. Because of the horrors experienced in the south, many African Americans fled to the north to escape the harsh discrimination and find better economic opportunities.
The Democrats were charged as the party that encouraged racial discrimination throughout the early 20th century, but this started to change during the Great Depression with Franklin Roosevelt. During his presidency, Roosevelt openly opposed poll taxes and favored workers’ rights by mandating wage increases with the NIRA as a part of the New Deal. This embrace of workers’ rights and unions during a period of economic struggle resulted in four blowout electoral college victories for Roosevelt and signaled the shift of African American voting trends in favor of the Democrats.
However, while Franklin Roosevelt managed to attract millions of new voters to the Democrat Party, the Democrats faced inner turmoil under the presidency of Henry Truman. Truman desegregated the armed forces in 1948, infuriating many southern Democrats that their national party started to embrace civil rights. These southern Democrats felt betrayed by Truman and formed a new wing of the Democratic Party known as the Dixiecrats, led by figures such as South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond and Alabama governor George Wallace.
Tensions reached a boiling point in the mid-1960s when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, infuriating the southern Democrats that a fellow southerner would turn against the party’s alignment of states rights. Feeling betrayed by Johnson, many Dixiecrats turned to the Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater, who voted against the Civil Rights Act not because he was a racist (in fact, Goldwater worked to fight segregation), but because he felt two parts of the act were an overreach by the government. Millions of Americans started to favor civil equality and were afraid of Goldwater’s foreign policy stances which led to a blowout electoral victory for Johnson in the 1964 election.
However, while many agreed with Johnson’s stances on Civil Rights, the country was divided in 1968 with racially motivated riots and violence occurring regularly and with the escalation of the Vietnam War. Johnson was largely unpopular with many Americans, and he chose not to seek reelection, which opened the doors for Richard Nixon. Nixon and Republican strategists started to appeal to white southerners by calling himself the law-and-order candidate, and it worked, as Nixon performed well in the south and won the election over Johnson's Vice President Hubert Humphrey.
From 1968 onwards, the north has voted mostly for the Democrats while the south mostly favored the Republicans. There have been notable exceptions, however, as Republicans Richard Nixon in 1972, Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984, and George H.W. Bush in 1988 were able to win multiple states in the north. As for the Democrats, Jimmy Carter was able to win several southern states in 1976, and Bill Clinton won several states in the deep south as well in 1992 and 1996.
While the party switch happened relatively quickly in federal elections, it took longer for state politics to switch in the South. Until the 1990s, the Democrats dominated many southern state offices, notably in Georgia and North Carolina, where both states elected Democratic congress members, governors, and senators. Although the south is dominated by Republicans, Democrats can still win statewide races, but they are usually moderate in many of their stances.
The party switch has its misconceptions, but there are plenty of truths to it as well. Saying that it never happened is inaccurate but saying that it happened because of the signing of a single piece of legislation is also incorrect. Today's political climate is arguably more polarized than ever, and the party switch has contributed to that.