The Solid Republican South
 

It all started when Congress passed and President Lyndon Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Senator Barry Goldwater voted against it. When Goldwater ran against Johnson for president, Goldwater became the first Republican candidate for president to win Georgia. It was simply a matter of race.

Up until that time Georgia was a one-party state, part of the “solid South,” because up until that time the Southern wing of the Democratic Party was the party of white supremacy, enforced by Jim Crow laws.

Not only did the state go for Goldwater, the 3rd Congressional District elected Howard “Bo” Callaway, who had switched parties and became the first Republican Congressman from the state since reconstruction. The Goldwater coattails were also strong enough elect 16 Republicans to the state legislature. Georgia politics were never the same after that.

Republicans made steady gains from that point on, but could not elect a governor or majorities in the state legislature until four years ago. Now, the state is one of the most solidly Republican states in the country.

Getting control of the state legislature has a lot of benefits; one of the largest ones is the ability to gerrymander Congressional districts when reapportioning the state to ostensibly reflect changes in population. All one has to do is look at the lopsided wins in predominantly Republican, white, suburban, and rural districts, and predominantly Democratic black, urban districts. In other words, when gerrymandering, go ahead and concede some districts to the other side in order to win the majority of districts for your side. There were only two districts where the vote was close in this election, the 8th and 12th.

From the end of the Civil War to 1964, Republicans represented the party of civil rights for African-Americans. Though conservative on other issues, it was the party of Lincoln, the party for equal rights for all, and, therefore, it was the party that was despised by the white South. That changed when a Democratic Southerner, Lyndon Johnson of Texas, became President of the United States when John F. Kennedy was assassinated and pushed through the strongest civil rights legislation since Congress adopted the 13th Amendment in 1865.

The Democrats who controlled the South until 1964 were conservatives who voted with Northern Republicans on economic issues, but not on civil rights. That has also changed with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. There are now some liberal Democrats in the South, the vast majority of those elected to office being black. Add to all of that the popularity of right-wing broadcasters Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Neal Boortz, and the influence of the Christian Right, which is Republican, and you can understand why Georgia and the South are now solidly Republican.