Class Conflict In Southern Politics

The other major change that has been well researched is the emergence of a sizable black electorate. After the passage of voting rights legislation in 1965, the Lyndon Johnson campaign reached out to the black community (Black and Black 1987). This led to increases in the registration of black voters and the shift from a southern electorate dominated by white elites to one where the Democratic Party sought a biracial coalition (Black and Black 2002). Because of the change in the racial composition of the Southern electorate, Democrats no longer needed a majority of white votes to win (Black 2004). They needed a smaller percentage of the white electorate in the Deep South where there was a higher concentration of blacks. One piece of information …show more content…
Decades ago, for example, Key described an informal agreement that the hill people had with the planter class in southern states to support candidates that would prevent black people from being a threat to white dominance (1984). Most of the time, people from areas without a large black population voted for the candidates supported by the “black belt” South, but at times a populist candidate emerged thanks to the support of poor whites in the less black hill areas. This agreement started to disappear as northern Democrats sought to promote a civil rights …show more content…
In addition, during the 1960s, most partisan change in the South was accounted for by people from outside of the South (Converse 1966). These Northern transplants tended to live in urban areas near the growing technological industries. Therefore, urban areas were the first areas to shift towards Republicans. In sum, during the 1960s, Northern transplants accounted for almost all change in aggregate partisanship in the South. The shift of northerners to the South was caused by economics (Shafer and Johnston 2006). People fled other areas of the nation looking for a better life in the South. The evidence that partisanship has become more Republican because of immigration from other more Republican parts of the nation has not been found to be the only driver of partisan change. There was also a class-based shift among natives of the South (Nadeau and Stanley 1993). Native whites would not be expected to show changes in partisanship if the results were only from immigration to the South. In fact, data suggest that migrants were more likely in the mid-2000s to vote for Democrats than were native southerners. Studies also show that migrants to North Carolina increasingly identify and register as unaffiliated voters rather than Republicans. This study also shows that unaffiliated voters were more likely to vote for Barack Obama in 2008 than natives of North Carolina (Hood and