WHITE AND RED: White politicians kept switching parties...

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 10, 2026

...as the South moved from D to R: During the era in question, the so-called "solid South" was solidly changing sides.  

We mainly refer to the "solid" white South, which was fitfully switching from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican. 

Senator Strom Thurmond (S.C.) switched from Democrat to Republican in 1964. In 1948, he had included a stop along the way the Dixiecrat presidential candidate. 

(Briefly it was a third party. Formally, the party was the States' Right Democratic Party.) 

Briefly, he sought the White House as a Dixiecrat. Here's the famously surprising way that famous campaign turned out: 

1948 presidential election  
Harry Truman (D): 24.2 million
Thomas Dewey (R): 22.0 million
Strom Thurmond: 1.2 million   

He won four states across the South (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina). Georgia took a major pass on his candidacy. We've never seen that explained.   

Thurmond switched to the Republican Party in 1964. In a fitful succession of changes, most white southern pols eventually followed suit. 

The South was moving from D to R. As an example of that progression, let us riddle you this:

In 1966, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana had xx seats in the House. Every member was a Democrat, but

One year after Thurmond switched, the original version of The Voting Rights Act passed both houses of the Congress by overwhelming margins. 

It passed the Senate, 79-18. "No" votes came from both senators in eight Southern states, even including Virginia. 

At that time, Thurmond was the only Republican among that group of 16. Eventually, though, across the white South, the deluge finally came.  The white South was moving from D to R, adopting the political profile which exists today.

In short, this was the era in which the solid South was becoming a solidly Republican region. Except, of course, for the bulk of the region's Black citizens, who were now much more able to register to vote and who were emerging as an increasingly solid Democratic voting bloc.   

There were some amusing party switches as the region moved from overwhelmingly Blue to overwhelmingly Red. Consider, for example, the evolution of Senator John Kennedy (R-La.), a familiar presence today on the Fox News Channel. 

Today, he's as folksy a white southern Republican as a fellow can possibly get. But it wasn't ever thus. We proceed with the rest of the tale:

John Kennedy (Louisiana politician)

John Neely Kennedy (born November 21, 1951) is an American politician and attorney who has served as the junior United States senator from Louisiana since 2017. ,,,[H]e served as the Louisiana State Treasurer from 2000 to 2017, as Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Revenue from 1996 to 1999, and as special counsel and then cabinet member to Governor Buddy Roemer from 1988 to 1992.

Born in Centreville, Mississippi, Kennedy graduated from Vanderbilt University and the University of Virginia School of Law before attending Oxford for an additional degree in law. In 1988, Governor Buddy Roemer selected Kennedy to serve as special legal counsel and later appointed him Secretary of the Cabinet. He left Roemer's staff in 1991 to run for state attorney general as a Democrat. In 1999, he was elected state treasurer; he was reelected in 2003, 2007, 2011, and 2015. Kennedy ran for U.S. Senate in 2004 and 2008. In August 2007, he became a Republican.

Decades after Thurmond's switch, the Oxford-educated Virginia Law grad was serving Governor Roemer as a Democrat. In 2004, he even ran for the Senate as a Democrat, failing to emerge from Louisiana's "jungle primary." 

In 2008, he ran for the Senate again—but this time, he ran as a Republican, after a party switch. He had endorsed Candidate Kerry for president in 2004. Three years later, he switched his party affiliation, as was his perfect right. 

As for Governor Roemer, Kennedy's mentor, the story (in part) goes like this:

Buddy Roemer   

Charles Elson "Buddy" Roemer III (1943 – 2021) was an American politician, investor, and banker who served as the 52nd governor of Louisiana from 1988 to 1992, and as a member of the United States House of Representatives from 1981 to 1988. In March 1991, while serving as governor, Roemer switched affiliation from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.

Roemer was a candidate for the presidential nominations of the Republican Party and the Reform Party in 2012...

The Harvard-educated Roemer switched from D to R too! To show you how bad this claim-jumping became, here's what happened to (the plainly talented) Roemer, now a Republican, in 1995:

In 1995, Roemer attempted a political comeback when he again ran for governor. ...Roemer held a wide lead for much of the campaign, but faded in the days before the primary election as State Senator Mike Foster, who switched affiliation from Democratic to Republican during the campaign, took conservative votes away from him. As a result, Roemer finished fourth with 18 percent of the vote, two percentage points from making the runoff, called the general election in Louisiana.

Roemer was bumped aside by a more recent party-switcher! This general history unfolded over the course of decades as the solid South moved it on over from D to R. 

Eventually, almost every ambitious white politician in the South was sporting an R after his or her name. In the America of today, they even start out that way!

This was a long, drawn-out political process in which the Republican Party, slowly but surely, came to control the bulk of the American South. Indeed, it still does maintain that hold in the states which have been in the news in the past few years, at the center of protracted legal disputes concerning the rules which govern the creation of congressional districts. 

During this era—in 1982, to be exact—an important addition was made to the original Voting Rights Act. In the congressional redistricting which followed the 1990 census, that somewhat murky addition to Section 2 of the VRA led to the creation of majority Black congressional districts in various Southern states.   

As in 1965, so too in 1982! The addition to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act passed overwhelmingly in both houses of Congress. The new addition to Section 2 was heavily supported by the GOP, as was the creation of those majority Black congressional districts after the 1990 census.  

This starts to bring us up to the legal dispute which now involves those districts. Recent decisions by the Supreme Court make it seem that state legislatures will now be able to eliminate those majority Black congressional districts.

In the wake of the Republican conquest of the South, they're the only districts which have been sending Democrats to the House of Representatives from such states as Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina. With one brief exception, they're also the only districts which have been electing Black congressional reps from those states.

A historical question is lingering here. Why did the GOP support the creation of those (Democratic) districts back in the 1990s? (Also, why is the GOP hoping to eliminate those majority Black districts now?)

Back on May 10, in an overview which generated no discussion, Carl Hulse recently presented the standard historical explanation of that first question.  (Headline: "How Minority Districts Fueled the G.O.P.’s Southern Ascendancy in Congress.")

As far as we know, the explanation Hulse offers in that Congressional Memo is basically accurate. If memory serves, it was fully discussed in real time.

Tomorrow, we may finally get to Hulse's historical overview. That leaves Blue America, and Black America, trying to determine what to do in the face of those recent Supreme Court decisions.

How should Black America, but also Blue America, respond to those recent decisions? Last Wednesday, on Deadline: White House, the highly capable Rep. Sewell—she's a Democrat from Alabama!—was shown making several statements about those decisions.

Sewell is a highly capable House member from Alabama—and long after the GOP took control of the South, Rep. Terri Sewell is a stone-cold Democrat!  Her district isn't being dismantled this year, but other such districts are—at a time when the Democratic Party is hoping to find a way to regain control of the House.

This is the conundrum our struggling nation has chosen. We strongly agree with one of the statements Rep. Sewell made. With respect to another one of her statements, possibly not quite so much.

Tomorrow: Hulse claims to explain