Electoral Patterns in Alabama: Local Change and Continuity Amid National Trends (Palgrave Studies in US Elections) 303106769X, 9783031067693

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN US ELECTIONS SERIES EDITOR: LUKE PERRY

Electoral Patterns in Alabama Local Change and Continuity Amid National Trends Regina L. Wagner

Palgrave Studies in US Elections

Series Editor Luke Perry, Utica College, Utica, NY, USA

This Pivot series, established in collaboration with the Utica College Center of Public Affairs and Election Research, brings together cuttingedge work in US Politics focused on trends and issues surrounding local, state, and federal elections. Books in this series may cover but are not limited to topics such as voting behavior, campaign management, policy considerations, electoral social movements, and analysis of significant races. While welcoming all projects on US elections within and across all three levels of government, this series proceeds from the truism that all politics is fundamentally local. As such, we are especially interested in research on state and local elections such as mayoral races, gubernatorial races, and congressional elections, with particular focus on how state/local electoral trends influence national electoral politics, and vice versa. This series is open to any relevant scholar and all methodological approaches.

Regina L. Wagner

Electoral Patterns in Alabama Local Change and Continuity Amid National Trends

Regina L. Wagner Department of Political Science University of Alabama Tuscaloosa, AL, USA

ISSN 2731-6785 ISSN 2731-6793 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in US Elections ISBN 978-3-031-06769-3 ISBN 978-3-031-06770-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06770-9 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Dedicated to Alex

Acknowledgments

For valuable feedback on parts of the manuscript along the way, including at various conferences, I want to express special thanks to Byron Shafer, Josh McCrain, and Andrew Smith. Credit for the feedback I incorporated goes to them, blame for the advice I ignored belongs to me. For help with data collection, data clean-up, and visual representation, my gratitude goes to Justin Levy, a talented undergraduate student at the University of Alabama without whose tireless work this manuscript would have both taken much longer to complete and been much less visually appealing. Special thanks as well to UA undergraduate students Jacob Eastridge and Jessica Haney for additional election data collection help, as well as to Jake Pencek for his work cleaning up the census data. And as always I am deeply grateful to my family and friends for their unwavering support throughout the completion of this project.

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Contents

1

1

Introduction

2

The Alabama of the Dying Old South: 1945–1968

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3

Tidal Wave of Change: 1970–1994

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4

Change Meets Continuity: 1996–2020

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Epilogue: A Look Towards the Future

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References

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Index

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ix

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6

Fig. 2.7 Fig. 2.8 Fig. 2.9 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 3.5 Fig. 3.6 Fig. 3.7 Fig. 3.8

Party affiliation in the South over time, by income Democratic presidential vs gubernatorial vote share, 1945–2020 President: 1948–1956 President: 1956–1964 Senate 2: 1948–1960 Senate 2: 1948 and 1954 primary—winner vs runner-up Senate 2: 1960–1966 vs Senate 3: 1962–1968 Senate 2: shifts 1948–1954 vs 1966–1972, by percent white population Governor: 1946–1954 Governor: 1946 primary—winner vs runner-up Governor: 1950 and 1954 general elections, by percent white population President: 1972–1980 President: 1980–1992 President: shift 1980–1984, by percent white and percent male unemployed Senate 2: 1966–1984 Senate 2: 1984–1990 vs Senate 3: 1986–1992 Senate 3: shift 1986–1992, by percent white and percent male unemployed Governor: 1974–1986 Governor: shift 1982–1986, by percent white and percent male unemployed

6 8 26 27 30 31 33 34 36 38 39 60 61 62 64 65 66 69 70

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xii Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

LIST OF FIGURES

4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5

Fig. 4.6

Senate 3: 2004–2016 vs Senate 2: 2002–2020 Senate 2: 2008–2020 Governor: 1994–2002 Governor: 2006–2018 President: Shift 2000–2004 vs. 2016–2020, by percent household income below poverty line President vs Governor over time, by percent white

87 89 91 93 94 95

List of Tables

Table 2.1 Table 2.2 Table 3.1 Table 3.2 Table 4.1 Table 4.2

Winning Margins of Select Elections in Alabama, 1948–1968 Democratic vote share and electoral shifts, Governor and Senate (Class 2) Winning margins of select elections in Alabama, 1970–1994 Democratic vote share and electoral shifts, governor and senate (Class 3) Winning margins of select elections in Alabama, 1990–2020 Gubernatorial elections in the 2000s and 2010s

25 41 59 72 86 98

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract This chapter introduces the approach to studying Alabama’s electoral history post-WWII through the lens of county-level electoral shifts, and provides an overview and historical background of the three eras as well as an introduction to the data. Alabama’s deeply regional and long-running factionalism is introduced, and the ideological bases of the competing factions are presented. Keywords Post-WWII politics · Alabama politics · Electoral shifts · Factionalism

Few developments have upended and restructured American politics over the past century as much as southern realignment. Uncontested Democratic hegemony, for decades regarded as an unshakable feature of southern political life, gradually faded in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement, and then abruptly disappeared with the surprise midterm election of 1994. At the heart of this transformation lies Alabama: a deep South one-party state, longtime bedrock of the Democratic Party, and self-described “heart of Dixie.” I trace the history of Alabama’s realignment and political transformation from 1945 through 2020 by looking at electoral shifts on the county level, and highlight the stark regional © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. L. Wagner, Electoral Patterns in Alabama, Palgrave Studies in US Elections, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06770-9_1

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factionalism that characterized the state and its politics through these decades and well into the present day. To do this, I divide this time period into three eras: the Alabama of the Dying Old South (1945–1968), the period of upheaval and realignment (1970 through 1994), and the modern world of (possibly) renewed one-party dominance (1996–2020). In each era, I trace electoral change through county-level shifts from election to election and thereby show the regional roots of political conflicts in the state across time. As the old adage goes, all politics is local. Not only can Alabama teach us something about the South as a whole, it can also teach us about the local origins of national political trends and fundamental realignments. Even though the full impact would not be visible until much later, the postwar period, particularly the twenty years between 1948 and 1968, was the beginning of the end for Democratic one-party rule across the South, and in the state of Alabama. While Alabama still voted mostly for Democrats, especially in state-level elections, the presidential elections were early harbingers of things to come, starting with the Dixiecrat revolution against Harry Truman in 1948. While the story of Alabama’s long and slow breakup with the Democratic Party is usually told as one about race—and in the most visible, most violent, and most deeply unsettling ways it is about race—it also contains the seeds of other conflicts. To understand these other currents of contention running below the surface, one has to understand that, as Burnham (1964) put it, “in some respects Alabama has fitted itself into a one-party system only with difficulty and, it would seem, only so long as the critical racial issue could be confined for all intents and purposes to local determinations”. This condition is what very decidedly changed as early as 1948, and accelerated further after 1968. In other words, after 1968, race ceased being “confined to local determinations,” as Burnham put it, and not only rose to national prominence but simultaneously joined social welfare as a party-defining issue (Shafer & Wagner, 2019). This issue evolution (Carmines & Stimson, 1986) fundamentally changed the South because it changed the two national parties in fundamental ways. Whereas before, racial liberals and racial conservatives could be found in both parties, national Democrats now visibly and vocally supported the Civil Rights Movement, and Republicans responded with the “Southern Strategy”. A new partisan cleavage was born, and it would transform Alabama politics and with it the South and the nation.

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This does not mean, however, that political fault lines in Alabama politics were dormant until the advent of race as a party-defining issue. Even during the Alabama Democratic Party’s heyday in the postReconstruction years and then into the Progressive Era, the state was not free of political conflict and turmoil. In those years, race was not a dominant issue because race was the one thing most white Alabamians, including those running for office, agreed on. Segregation was so secure and voting restrictions so firmly established after the passage of the 1901 state constitution that the racial order both appeared permanent and was almost universally supported by the state’s white population, elites and masses alike. Racial fear-mongering was still used by politicians, and racial violence was widespread, but political and especially policy battles were primarily fought over issues of (white) participation, (white) representation, economic vision, and regional allegiances. White supremacy was not the defining cleavage of the political system precisely because it was so widely shared and accepted. Political conflict requires disagreement, and disagreement on issues of race was in short supply in (white) post-Reconstruction Alabama. The dominant political cleavage since the 1830s had been between the poor (white) farmers of North Alabama’s Hill Country and the rich (white) planter (and later the industrialist) elites of the Black Belt (Burnham, 1964). In the absence of race as a salient and party-defining cleavage, Alabama politics was defined by deeply regional factions, and those factions mainly disagreed about economics. Key (1949) describes Alabama as multi-factional, but the transitional and impermanent factions he describes could always be loosely categorized into two camps: the Hill Country in the North versus the Black Belt in the South. This division took many forms and the factions had many names—Jacksonians versus Whigs in the 1830s, unionists versus secessionists in the 1850s and 1860s, progressives/populists versus Bourbons/Big Mules in the 1890s and into the early 1900s and loyalists versus Dixiecrats in the 1940s. The regional element of the factional division is always present, and it is always founded primarily in economic concerns. This dominance of economics began to erode in the late 1940s with the advent of race as a party-defining cleavage. Not since Reconstruction had white Alabama’s racial hierarchy been so threatened. Returning

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Black war veterans demanded more rights,1 and President Truman’s proCivil Rights stance echoed their demands.2 The U.S. Supreme Court had declared the all-white primary unconstitutional,3 and Alabama’s political elite began to worry about interference by the federal government which might threaten segregation and the restrictive voting laws that effectively disenfranchised Black Alabamians. Truman, initially regarded with suspicion by progressive Rooseveltians inside and outside of Alabama, earned their albeit reluctant embrace with his support for Civil Rights, which consequently made him the enemy of the conservative Dixiecrat forces in the state and led them to mount the first full-scale revolt against the national Democratic Party. While Alabama progressives were not keen on making race the dominant issue, they were even less keen on letting their old factional enemy control the direction of the state party and with it the state. As Barnard (1974) writes, “U.B. Phillips may have been mistaken that the central theme of Southern history revolves around race. But it is true, nonetheless, that at certain crucial moments in Southern history race seems to be the one issue that can unite more white Southerners than any other” (p. 118). The postwar period leading up the Civil Rights Movement was full of these crucial moments. As Carmines and Stimson (1986) establish, the process of issue evolution is a slow and lengthy one, and the mass public’s response to elite partisan behavior is severely lagged. When the national party elites started treating civil rights as an actively polarized, partisan issue beginning in the late 1960s, it took the mass public in general, and previously loyal Democratic voters in the South in particular, several decades to fully catch up. As Aistrup (1996) further notes, initial Southern discontent over race was focused as much on Republicans as it was on Democrats: while Truman desegregated the military and Democrats included civil rights planks in their 1948 platform, 1 When Truman signed the executive order to desegregate the U.S. Armed Forces in July of 1948, it marked the first time a U.S. President had made use of an executive order for the implementation of a civil rights-related policy. 2 In 1936, Democrats had changed their nominating rules to no longer require the nominee to achieve a two-thirds majority of delegates. Instead, going forward a simple majority would be enough (Shafer & Sawyer, 2021). This simple change ended the South’s veto over Democratic presidential nominations, and the first post-reform presidential election without FDR and without World War II exemplified the consequences of this procedural change in policy terms. 3 Smith v. Allwright, 1944.

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segregation was struck down by a Republican Supreme Court, and it was Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower who sent federal troops to Little Rock. In other words, Republicans did not start to benefit from the South’s disillusionment with the Democratic Party until the Southern Strategy took form. But even though race rose to prominence and then became the defining political issue by the end of the 1960s, effectively restructuring the entire party system and turning longstanding Southern political allegiances on their head, it was not the only issue threatening the fabric of Democratic one-party hegemony in Alabama. As stated earlier, the Alabama Democratic Party had long since been split into a progressive/populist wing and a conservative “Bourbon Democrat” wing representing planters, industrialists, and the Black Belt political and economic elite, much like the pre-Civil War Democratic Party had been. But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Bourbons had remained successful in retaining control of the party apparatus. They controlled nominations, and so they controlled the state. Progressives and populists, concentrated mainly in Northern Alabama,4 might win local races and the odd legislative nomination, but for the most part, their rebellion was successfully repressed and reigned in. For this reason, it was the Hill Country in the north that most often defected from voting for Democrats out of protest, and it was here that one might find significant support for Republicans and third party candidates from the 1890s into the 1920s. With the advent of the New Deal, things had started to shift. Roosevelt empowered a liberal faction within Alabama politics that for the first time was able to threaten Bourbon economic interests and political power. As Hawkey (1982) observes, the New Deal “struck a responsive chord in the radical agrarian tradition of the South.” This resonance was of course not equally distributed across Alabama, and the populist Hill Country was by far more receptive to it than the Black Belt elites. Bourbon discontent with the national party therefore started to brew under Roosevelt, and the first foundations of the revolt of 1948 were laid before Truman took over. The conservative/anti-New Deal wing of

4 North Alabama was populated by poorer white subsistence farmers, and slavery in the region was comparatively rare in the pre-Civil War period. North Alabamians felt ignored or exploited by the economic interests of the Black Belt’s planter and industrialist elites. North Alabama had also been a region of comparative strength for Republicans and pro-Unionists in earlier decades, for similarly historical and economic reasons.

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Fig. 1.1 Party affiliation in the South over time, by income

the Alabama Democratic Party hoped for a resurgence after the end of the war and Roosevelt’s death, but the 1946 election resulted in the election of a second progressive/pro-New Deal senator, John Sparkman, as well as the election of populist outsider “Big Jim” Folsom to the governor’s mansion. This reshuffled political allegiances in the state and reshaped political power. It also heightened existing conflicts, while sharpening disputes between the Alabama Old Guard and the national Democratic Party. Enter the emergence of race and Civil Rights as a national issue with partisan dimensions. It towered over and overshadowed these older conflicts and fissures, but it did not erase or replace them. Instead, they were momentarily subsumed by the issues of race, but they remained active just below the surface. In fact, leaders of the Dixiecrat movement expressed as much resentment and bitterness towards Roosevelt as they did towards Truman, even though Roosevelt never pushed for racial equality the way Truman did.5 When electoral change came to Alabama, it did not come evenly. Those in the top income tercile left the Democratic Party faster than those in the bottom tercile (see Fig. 1.1, for patterns across the South).6 Party attachment lasted longer for state-level offices than for federal ones,7 partly because of the policy shifts embraced by the national 5 See for example Barnard (1974, pp. 100–101). 6 In part, this lingering economic split can be explained by the enfranchisement of Black

Alabamians, who disproportionately fell in the mid and bottom terciles. But Shafer and Johnston (2006) argue that it was in part economic development that pushed southern whites towards the Republican Party, which would support a more rapid shift for those who are better off economically and a delayed reaction for the bottom tercile of the income distribution, regardless of race. 7 Aistrup (1996) credits the Republican Party’s top-down approach to the Southern Strategy with this delay.

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Democratic Party and rejected by the state party in Alabama, partly because of incumbency effects. Alabama Democrats did all they could to distance themselves from the civil rights platform embraced by national Democrats, which slowed partisan realignment on the state level in two ways: it stemmed the tide of white defections to the Republican Party but at the same time also caused Alabama’s Black voters to remain more suspicious of state-level Democrats and therefore slower to embrace them. Figure 1.2 shows this stark discrepancy between state-level and national voting patterns for the half-century between 1950 and 2000. Presidential Democratic vote share dipped below 50% for the first time in 1964 and never recovered, with the exception of 1976 when Alabama voted for fellow Southerner Jimmy Carter, a Georgia peanut farmer. And while Alabama Democrats started to lose their firm grasp on the Governor’s mansion in 1986, they hovered in competitive territory for a few elections8 and even recaptured the office in 1998. In this book, I tell the story of these overlapping, interlocking political conflicts, from 1945 through the present day, through an analysis of county-level electoral shifts. As Maxwell and Shields (2019) note, the overwhelming majority of Southern realignment scholarship has been forced to rely on admittedly very limited ANES data. I intentionally take a very different approach here, focusing on these county-level shifts to trace Alabama’s electoral evolution. I argue both that one-party dominance does not imply the absence of often bitterly fought political conflicts and that county-level shifts in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s show how even the emerging issue of race, an issue where white Alabamians were in much broader agreement than on most other issues, still retains old regional conflicts, allegiances, and divisions. While the entire state shifts, first slowly and then more and more rapidly, until one-party Democratic rule is replaced by one-party Republican rule, Alabama’s regions shift at different points and in different patterns. Regional splits are retained throughout the transformation, and old conflicts linger and resurface in a state known for its strong ties to the past. I look at these changes and developments through the lens of three distinct periods: the period of the dying old

8 In 1990, Democratic candidate Paul Hubbert received 47.9% of the vote in the gubernatorial race compared to incumbent Republican Governor H. Guy Hunt’s 52.1%, and in 1994 Democrat Jim Folsom Jr. received 49.4% while Republican and former Governor Fob James, who had run for and won the office as a Democrat in 1979, received 50.3%.

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Fig. 1.2 Democratic presidential vs gubernatorial vote share, 1945–2020

South (1945–1968) (Chapter 2), the period of partisan upheaval and realignment (1970–1994) (Chapter 3), and finally the modern moment of Republican hegemony (1996–2020) (Chapter 4).9 I also show the progression of these shifts on different electoral levels, highlighting the amount of control the Bourbons (and later Dixiecrats) manage to retain over offices, nominations, and party structures. As a consequence, Alabama’s transformation on the presidential level is the swiftest, it takes several decades longer for party control of the state’s senate seats to change, and the partisan reversal of state-level offices is not completed until the early twenty-first century. I furthermore argue that in politics, even in the politics of a oneparty state, everything is in flux. Current Republican dominance of 9 These three eras roughly track the Old World, Reform Era, and Modern World classifications Byron E. Shafer and I used in “The Long War Over Party Structure” (Shafer & Wagner, 2019), but realignment did not conclude until a few years into what we labeled the “Modern World.”

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Alabama politics is not nearly as exhaustive as Democratic dominance was a hundred years ago, partly because of the greatly expanded electorate. But even during seemingly unbroken Democratic hegemony, Alabama politics remained conflictual and unstable, and the same remains true today. As Hood III et al. (2012) argue, “a compelling explanation” of the partisan transformation of the South “must not only tell us why the South became more Republican, it must also explain why some states (and areas within states) became more Republican at varying rates” (p. 4). This book does exactly that for Alabama.

Data I utilize an original data set consisting of all general election results in Alabama10 from 1948 through 2020 for presidential, senatorial, and gubernatorial elections. The raw election outcomes are transformed into margins, ranging from 100 (Democrats receive 100% of the vote) to − 100 (Republicans receive 100% of the vote) by calculating the Democratic and Republican vote share in percent and then subtracting the Republican vote share from the Democratic one. Shifts are then calculated by subtracting the margin in county x in election y from the margin in county x in election y + 1. For example, in the gubernatorial election of 1990 Paul Hubbert (D) received 4521 votes to H. Guy Hunt’s 6833 in Autauga county. Hubbert received 39.8% of the two-party vote share, and Hunt received 60.2%. Consequently, the margin for Autauga county in the 1990 gubernatorial election is − 20.4 (Democratic vote share minus Republican vote share). In the 1994 gubernatorial election, Jim Folsom Jr. (D) received 3686 (30.4%) votes in Autauga county to Fob James’ 8422 (69.6%). The margin in 1994 thus was −39.2. The shift for Autauga county between the 1990 and 1994 gubernatorial elections is −18.8 (margin in 1994 minus margin in 1990). Negative shifts are therefore shifts towards the Republican Party whereas positive shifts are shifts towards the Democratic Party. Additionally, I collected census data from the 1950, 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010 U.S. censuses. This includes county-level data on racial make-up of the population, median income, unemployment rates, 10 Primary election results were collected for the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s (Democratic dominance) and for the years of increasing Republican hegemony after 1996, and are used to underline points about factional divisions throughout.

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percent living below the poverty line, female participation in the labor force, and male–female ratio. Not every census included all the economic data listed above, but each of them provides some indicators, so that a comparison across time is possible. These census indicators allow for the tracking of economic and regional divisions over time, as the racial composition of the counties captures the regional splits almost perfectly. Electoral and census data together make it possible to uncover the local roots of realignment in Alabama, and trace these roots from the immediate post-World War II years into the modern day. I show that regional divisions persist even today, though their alignments and allegiances have changed and in some cases even reversed. Even as racial divisions have almost entirely replaced economic cleavages in the present day, these new divisions map onto the old regional splits. The precise factional division may be in constant flux, as Key observed, but the deep-rooted regional conflict is enduring and it exists below the surface even in periods of one-party-rule.

References Aistrup, J. A. (1996). The southern strategy revisited: Republican top-down advancement in the South. University of Kentucky Press. Barnard, W. D. (1974). Dixiecrats and Democrats: Alabama politics, 1942-1950. University of Alabama Press. Burnham, W. D. (1964). The Alabama senatorial election of 1962: Return of inter-party competition. Journal of Politics, 26(4), 798–829. Carmines, E. G., & Stimson, J. A. (1986). On the structure and sequence of issue evolution. American Political Science Review, 80(3), 901–920. Hawkey, E. W. (1982). Southern conservatism 1956–1976. In L. W. Moreland, T. A. Baker, & R. P. Steed (Eds.), Contemporary Southern political attitudes and behavior: Studies and essays, Chapter 3. Praeger. Hood III, M., Kidd, Q., & Morris, I. L. (2012). The rational southerner: Black mobilization, republican growth, and the partisan transformation of the American south. Oxford University Press. Key, V. O. (1949). Southern politics in state and nation. Alfred A. Knopf. Maxwell, A., & Shields, T. G. (2019). The long southern strategy: How chasing white voters in the South changed American politics. Oxford University Press. Shafer, B. E., & Johnston, R. G. C. (2006). The end of Southern exceptionalism. Harvard University Press. Shafer, B. E., & Sawyer, E. M. (2021). Eternal bandwagon: The politics of presidential selection. Palgrave Macmillan.

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Shafer, B. E., & Wagner, R. L. (2019). The long war over party structure: Democratic representation and policy responsiveness in American politics. Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 2

The Alabama of the Dying Old South: 1945–1968

Abstract In this chapter, I provide an analysis of Alabama’s electoral evolution from 1945 until 1968 on the presidential, senatorial, and gubernatorial levels. The factionalism of the Old Alabama runs into a changed and changing national Democratic Party ready to embrace racial liberalism and the Civil Rights Movement. The result is a fracturing of the old political order upholding the Democratic one-party state along predictable regional lines. Alabama’s political factions, the Loyalists and the Dixiecrats, and their respective regional bases set up the struggle over control of the Alabama Democratic Party. Keywords Factionalism · Dixiecrats · Electoral shifts · Alabama politics · Political parties · Issue evolution · Regionalism

The Alabama of V.O. Key’s South As Knuckey (2017) notes, scholars of Southern politics are often content to divide the region into the Deep South and the Rim South, and leave it at that. This division is traced back to Key (1949)’s seminal work on Southern politics, but, as Knuckey (2017) further notes, Key’s

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. L. Wagner, Electoral Patterns in Alabama, Palgrave Studies in US Elections, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06770-9_2

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classification itself should be understood as more about persistent factionalism in the one party South than about broad regional classifications. Springer (2019) highlights that defining “the South” has continuously posed challenges to researchers and analysts due to inherent varying connotations of any geographic definitions used as shortcuts to describe electoral and political trends. As Hadley (1981) points out, it matters a great deal which states are included or excluded in any study of the South, especially during the 1950s when differences between the “Solid South” and the “Expanded South” were still considerable with respect to both voting behavior and voter turnout. McKee and Springer (2015) even demonstrate that meaningful political “Deep South - Peripheral South” distinctions persist to this day. Regardless of which definition one chooses, however, it would be difficult to impossible to imagine a situation where Alabama was not considered at the heart of “the South”—it is the state after all that named itself “heart of Dixie” and passed a law to add the slogan to all its license plates in 1951 (Tullos, 2011).1 The Alabama of the 1940s and 1950s was one of (class-based) bifactionalism.2 While bi-factionalism itself makes the state similar to Louisiana and Georgia, the class-based element differentiates it from the personality-driven bi-factionalism of these two states.3 Looked at this way, the uniformly one-party South quickly becomes more varied, and Alabama’s version of bi-factionalism puts it in a category of its own. As Grantham (1983) observes: “Each of the region’s states had its own political arrangements and traditions, but they were all one-party systems sharing a basic political culture.” As Perkins (1982) notes, a large part of that shared basic political culture was “the twin themes of racism and 1 The slogan’s prominence on Alabama license plates has decreased over time, but it can still be found inside a heart-shaped logo in the lower righthand corner. 2 Key (1949) classifies Alabama as multi-factional because of transitory followings organized around individual politicians, but I argue that these politicians can be broadly grouped together to form two enduring and regionally based factions, the Jacksonians/Progressives/Populists/Loyalists of the poor whites in the Hill Country of North Alabama and the Planters/Big Mules/Bourbon Democrats/Dixiecrats of the state’s Black Belt. 3 Though Barnard (1974) rightly notes that Alabama politics itself was personalitydriven to the extent that it lacked machine politics of any kind. It just so happens that personalities emerged and competed along rigid class-based divisions instead of personal loyalties.

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the defense of agrarian society” (p. 7). Alabama of course was no exception, and its long-running (class-based) factionalism was geographically represented4 by the populists of North Alabama’s Hill Country on the one side and the Bourbon Democrats, heirs to the antebellum political and economic elites,5 of the state’s Black Belt on the other. These divisions arose for geographic reasons—the Hill Country was oriented along the Tennessee and Mississippi rivers to the east and west, the Black Belt looked to Mobile and the gulf coast to the South, the Hill Country with its rocky soil and hilly terrain was unsuited for large plantations and cotton, the Black Belt was not—as well as historic and demographic reasons—the Hill Country was settled from Tennessee and North Carolina while the Black Belt was settled from Georgia and Virginia. These divisions created a stable and lasting factionalism that endured well into the 1940s and 1950s (Barnard, 1974).6 In fact, repeated iterations of this same factional division are clearly visible throughout Alabama history, from the 1830s (Jacksonians in north Alabama versus Whigs in south Alabama) through the 1850s and 1860s (unionists in north Alabama versus secessionists in south Alabama) and 1890s and early 1900s (Populists in north Alabama versus Bourbons in south Alabama) into the 1940s (“Big Jim” Folsom in north Alabama versus Handy Ellis in south Alabama) (Burnham, 1964). Of course what united the two factions was opposition to anything seen as a threat to the Southern way of life and the supremacy of whites in Southern politics and society. The fact that the Dixiecrat ticket of

4 One of the measures for successful durable factions used by Black and Black (1982) is statewide support, for example, which will create measurement difficulties in a state with strong regional factionalism such as Alabama. 5 As Wiener (1978) notes, Reconstruction did not lead to the destruction of Alabama’s planter elite but merely to their metamorphosis. 6 Black (1983) argues that multi-factionalism is the norm for the one-party South,

including Alabama, but I contend that the strong regional and class-based bifurcation of Alabama politics that runs from the 1830s well into the 1950s suggests that in the case of Alabama, many of his short-lived and personalized factions can and should be grouped together into two enduring and broader factions representing competing wings of the Democratic Party in the state.

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1948, in its way a warning shot to national Democrats7 caused by the proCivil Rights stance and platform of Harry Truman and the threat of more federal involvement in Alabama’s internal affairs8 (Feldman, 1999; Key, 1949), replaced the official Democratic ticket in Alabama and carried the state by almost 60 points is a vivid example of this fundamental organizing principle of Southern politics in what I call the “dying” Old South—the period between the end of World War II and the fundamental sea change culminating in the Civil Rights Movement, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But as in 1928, the revolt of 1948 was not unanimous. Despite a shared belief in the “Southern Way of Life” and the centrality of white supremacy, the liberal (Loyalist) and conservative (Dixiecrat) factions disagreed about whether to leave the party or attempt to rework it from within.9 As this chapter will show, the postwar period was already highly unsettled in electoral terms (the 1948 election being a sign of things to come), even though on the surface, one-party Alabama appeared as unchanged and stable as it had in the pre-war period. The Solid South remained intact throughout the early postwar years (Grantham, 1983), but by 1948 the first cracks were already beginning to show. In other words, changes started to come to the South after World War II, even if it took another twenty years for them to fully rise to national attention (Hadley, 1994). Alabama of course was no exception. 7 Alabama’s loyalty to the national Democratic Party had been tested once before, in 1928, when North Alabama, stronghold of the KKK and the prohibition movement, had rebelled against Democratic presidential nominee Al Smith—a Catholic, anti-prohibition New Yorker seen as “too friendly” with Black voters. Alabama’s Bourbon Democrats, in the midst of staving off their own KKK- and Anti-Saloon-League-fueled internal revolt in the Northern part of the state, valued party loyalty above all else and those openly supporting Hoover—and thus legitimizing the Republican Party as a valid alternative in the state—were expelled from participating in statewide races by the Alabama Democratic Party in 1930. This included sitting senator J. Thomas Heflin, who was not renominated for his seat in 1930, ran as an independent, and subsequently lost the election to Democratic nominee John H. Bankhead II (Thornton III, 1968). 8 Truman in part reacted to demands from black World War II veterans who, after fighting for the cause of freedom abroad, increasingly demanded more equal treatment for themselves at home (McKee, 2012). 9 Coincidentally this also evolved into a proxy war over which faction held the most power in Alabama state politics. In fact, the Dixiecrats’ triumph over the Loyalists in 1948, and the bitter battle over delegates and control of the State Democratic Executive Committee preceding it, hardened the factions that would define Alabama state politics for the following two decades (Barnard, 1974).

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As Shafer and Johnston (2001) note, Republicans began to contest more and more open congressional seats in the South by the mid-1950s,10 suggesting that significant partisan change was already happening below the surface. But as Webb (1997) has shown, Alabamian uniformity on the state level, which was clearly starting to crack by the 1950s, was never as uncontested on the local level as it seemed to the casual outside observer. Despite Alabama being a one-party state when it came to statewide and (most) national elections essentially from 1872 to about 1980, intrastate politics were a lot more nuanced and complex, especially before Brown v Board of Education. As Webb (1997) notes, significant Republican presence remained in the northern Alabama Hill Country counties even after the end of Reconstruction,11 with the descendants of antiConfederacy and pro-Union Whites remaining loyal to the party of the Union even as Bourbon and Redeemer Democrats regained total control over Alabama state politics after the late 1870s. While Republicanism in north Alabama declined in the 1880s, it actually rose again between 1896 and 1920, and this time among Hill Country whites who did not necessarily have a pro-Union or anti-Confederacy history (Webb, 1997). The movement towards the GOP after 1900 for example was especially strong in Chilton and Shelby counties, both counties that had not been particularly pro-Republican or pro-Union during earlier decades. But even when Republican support was scant in Northern Alabama, Alabamian politics after Reconstruction and well into the twentieth century remained more multifaceted and less uniform than the state’s status as “solidly Democratic” would lead one to believe. Webb (1997) describes heated factional battles within the Democratic party, animated by regional and class divisions, which pitted Jacksonians and later Populists against “Redeemers” and “Bourbon Democrats”, Hill Country small farmers against urban merchants and factory owners as well as wealthy Black Belt planters. The Loyalists and Dixiecrats of the 1940s and 1950s were only another iteration of these earlier battles. Dissidents tried to take over the party, form third parties, or become Republicans to 10 But note also that Republicans did not fully benefit from Southern discontent with the Democratic Party until the implementation of the Southern Strategy in the 1960s (Aistrup, 1996). 11 In a way, the Hill Country has more in common with Sutton (1982)’s Appalachia than with the southern part of the state.

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varying degrees, but Democratic hegemony, especially in statewide elections conceals the active, vibrant, and often bitter political disagreements that simmered below the surface. A lot of these disagreements played out quite visibly on the county level, with third party candidates often carrying several Hill Country counties and with Republican strength on the county level similarly waxing and waning. So even during times when Alabama’s status as a “one-party state” could hardly be denied, countylevel electoral patterns revealed great differences in political attitudes and expressed rifts along regional and class lines that were covered up in statewide races by a shared belief in white supremacy that superseded these other, nonetheless bitterly contested divisions. The Hill Country, thorn in the side of affluent, Black Beltbased “Bourbon Democrat” planters12 and industrialists throughout the early twentieth century, was also the KKK’s stronghold in the state (Thornton III, 1968).13 The fusion between populism, anti-elitism, prohibitionism, and support for the KKK,14 which fueled the region’s opposition to established Black Belt “Bourbon Democratic” rule, shows that Alabama politics was far from uniform even during the first half

12 In fact, Alabama’s Black Belt, together with Mississippi, constituted the heart of Southern pre-Civil War planter culture (Wiener, 1978). 13 However, as Feldman (1999) points out, Black Belt planters were not always opposed to the Klan. In fact, prior to 1925, many of them supported it, believing it to be a reincarnation of the Reconstruction-era Klan of their fathers. The Klan’s strength among populist reformers and its threat to Black Belt planter/Bourbon rule, proven during its success in the 1926 election, however led to stringent opposition from the Bourbons in the second half of the decade. 14 Thornton III (1968) has shown that there was exceptionally close cooperation between the Klan and the Anti-Saloon League throughout Northern Alabama in the late 1920s, an echo of the often strange alliances formed in the region during earlier decades, whose participants were united only in their opposition to the ruling Democratic elite in the state and their desire to dethrone and replace them. This is apparent, for example, in the Anti-Saloon League’s role in implementing the so-called “double-choice primary law” in 1915, which was crucial for the success of Klan-supported candidates in the 1920s: The Anti-Saloon League was instrumental in creating this law, which replaced the prior runoff system. Under the new law, “the second-choice votes of the two leading candidates were to be added directly to the first-choice, and the candidate with the larger total was to be declared nominated” (p. 16) without a second round of voting, and the second-choice votes for all but the top two candidates immediately discarded (Thornton III, 1968). This was an open attempt to defy and undermine the Bourbon Democrats’ stranglehold on Alabama Democratic Party leadership.

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of the century. With race not rising to the surface as a political division—racism united both the KKK-friendly populists in the North15 as well as the affluent “Redeemer” planters of the Black Belt16 —regional and economic divisions created a multifaceted political environment with factional divisions within the Democratic party existing side by side with multi-party competition on the local level. While the Klan lost much of its political influence and clout after 1929, a smaller but determined “hidden Klan” remained active throughout the New Deal Era and World War II, only to emerge again more forcefully in 1954 in response to desegregation efforts (Feldman, 1999). In the immediate postwar years for example, “sundown towns” (Loewen, 2005) still existed across Alabama. Though very little literature and scholarship exists on the topic, Loewen (2005) chronicled and documented these exclusionary white communities across America. According to his research, in Alabama they were mainly (though not exclusively) concentrated in two counties: Cullman and Marshall, both located in the Hill Country. North Alabama’s opposition to Bourbon rule thus did not imply that it was any less racist than their white counterparts in Black Belt counties, and the Bourbons’ attempts to weaken the Klan were not motivated by opposition to its racist violence. 98% of southern whites approved of racial segregation at the beginning of the 1940s (Black & Black, 2002) and Alabama was far from an exception. In 1948 and especially in 1949, a wave of Klan violence, particularly in Walker, Jefferson, and Clay counties in the Hill Country, rocked the state and attracted national attention (Feldman, 1999). Despite the open racism uniting the different political factions in the state in those early decades of the twentieth century, some local opportunities for political change arose in the pre-Civil Rights Era. In the 1930s some unions in Alabama, specifically the United Mine Workers (UMW) in Walker County in 1937, undertook considerable efforts to increase the voter registration of both their black and white members, which could have altered the political realities if it had spread to other unions across the state (Norrell, 1991). 15 Northern Alabama farmers were often sharecroppers, rarely big planters. Alabama Extension Services after World War II (Walter, 2019) helped many northern Alabama towns transition from sharecropper cotton farming to reliance on the poultry industry, which perpetuated the existing regional economic divisions. 16 See for example Feldman (1999, pp. 8–9).

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As Norrell (1991) notes there might have been a window for fundamental political change in Alabama in the 1930s, but “by the early war years a reaction against change had set in, and a variety of forces - among them, the white working class - conspired to preserve the old order. In the mid- and late 1940s, politics in Birmingham hardened into an antilabor, antiblack mold that would shape the city until the civil rights movement in the 1960s precipitated a cathartic conflict ” (p. 202). With the Supreme Court’s landmark decision Brown v Board of Education (1954), race started to rise from a lingering to the salient issue for white Alabamians, a process that only accelerated and intensified with the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement. Alabama of course played a crucial role not only in the Civil Rights Movement overall through events of anti-Black violence such as the 16th Street Church Bombing in Birmingham in September of 1963 or “Bloody Sunday” at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in 1965, but also in the development of some of the more radical theories of racial liberation, such as the “Black Power”-movement embraced by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the second half of the 1960s (Jeffries, 2006). Organizing experiences in Lowndes county with the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) in 1966 in an effort to build an all-black third party to field candidates for political office inspired the SNCC’s vision which culminated in the “Black Power”movement. Jeffries (2006) describes the experiences in Lowndes County, located in the Black Belt, as “a laboratory for testing the feasibility of mobilizing local black residents into truly independent political organizations” (p. 182), and its success motivated them to adopt the creation of third parties as one of the organization’s central aims. This was a significant departure from the Black community’s approach to political engagement in earlier decades, especially during the Reconstruction and the following so-called “Redemption” period, where Black leaders mostly believed, despite all setbacks and disappointments with their chosen political home, the Republican Party, that progress could only be achieved by working within the existing political system, however imperfect it may be (Robinson, 2013). Pro-Civil Rights activism in Alabama in the early 1960s was again regionally lopsided, centered in the Black Belt where the majority of the state’s Black population resided. These demands for more equality and protests against racist violence and harassment of Black citizens in a way were exactly what Bourbon Democrats had hoped to permanently suppress more than half a century earlier.

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The Alabama Constitution of 1901, designed and pushed through by “Bourbon Democrats” in an effort to solidify their control of the Alabama Democratic Party and to both fully disenfranchise Black Alabamians and stave off the revolt of Hill Country populists, created literacy requirements as well as a cumulative poll tax that remained in effect well into the 1960s. Alabama’s literacy test was especially punitive and demanding, with registrars assessing whether an applicant was able to read “and understand” the constitution, and the 65 questions, 58 of which had to be answered correctly in order for an applicant to be registered, required advanced knowledge of constitutional and other legal provisions as well as history.17 While intended to suppress the Black vote, the poll tax also worked to suppress the votes of white women throughout the South, especially when, as was the case in Alabama, it was cumulative (WilkersonFreeman, 2002). However, the political role and positions of Alabama’s women were also not as clear-cut as they would seem at first glance. While the Alabama of the 1950s and 1960s was very much a place of traditional Southern culture and gender roles and while women in the Alabama state legislature remained scarce—not until 2003 did they make up even 10% of the state legislature—Alabama’s executive branch was much less hostile to women (Merrfield Wilson, 2018). In fact, women consecutively held the office of Alabama Secretary of State from 1944 until 1979, that of Alabama State Auditor from 1955 through 2015, and that of Alabama State Treasurer from 1951 until1955 and then again from 1959 until 1987. Women held positions of power in Alabama for an extended period at a time when this was rare both in many other states as well as on the national level. However, as exemplified particularly by Bettye Frink’s tenure as Alabama’s fortieth Secretary of State (1959–1963), serving under Governor John Malcolm Patterson, and her central role in the state’s resistance to racial desegregation and federally mandated integration (Merrfield Wilson, 2018), this period of female dominance in several sectors of the executive branch also underlines that gender-based representational progress does not necessarily imply progress in racial matters.

17 One question Alabama voters had to answer for example asked “When the Constitution was approved by the original colonies, how many states had to ratify it in order for it to be in effect?” and another “How many votes must a person receive in order to become President if the election is decided by the U.S. House of Representatives?” (“1965 Alabama Literacy Test”, Ferris State University, accessed 09/15/2021).

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Frink “demonstrated that the systemic racism that pervaded the state was not simply the construct of white patriarchy, and that white women, despite facing their own sex-based prejudices, could mercilessly uphold oppressive structure and behaviors targeted to keep African Americans as powerless as possible” (Merrfield Wilson, 2018, p. 245). As Merrfield Wilson (2018) notes, Frink—and women in similar positions across the South—upheld existing racial inequities and discrimination to their own advantage and benefit, suggesting that at least during those decades, the interests and ambitions of white women and those of Black men and women were perceived as in direct conflict, at least in the eyes of many white female politicians across the South. As Frink shows, Alabama was the opposite of an exception to that rule. Relatedly, as Jeffries (2006) notes, the SNCC of the late 1960s was wary of the involvement of even sympathetic whites, especially white women, and these perceived tensions, exemplified by women like Frink, might in part explain that growing wariness. Merrfield Wilson (2018) notes that Frink’s “fight demonstrates the oft-ignored role that white southern women played in perpetuating racial inequalities for their own benefit” (p. 238). Even though there was significant overlap between the anti-poll tax activism of white women and early Civil Rights movement (WilkersonFreeman, 2002), white women also played a significant role in upholding white supremacy because it created advantages for them. Much like it doomed the cooperation between Black and white working class Alabamians in the 1930s and 1940s, racism likewise made cooperation between women’s rights and civil rights activists in the state if not impossible then at least a lot more difficult, slowing down progress across the board and once again illustrating the internal divisions even among those who share some broad common goals. Grantham (1983) divides the era of the Solid South into three periods, roughly coinciding with the rise of the solidly Democratic South (postReconstruction until around 1900),18 the stable one-party South (1900– 1948), and the disruption of the Solid South (starting in 1948). This 18 Baggett (2018) notes that the Alabama Constitution of 1901 was written with the express intent of disenfranchising black (and certain white) voters and cementing both white supremacy and the dominance of the Alabama Democratic Party—and it was successful in achieving both goals for over half a century. Between 1900 and 1903, the number of registered black voters in the state dropped from over 180,000 to less than 3000 (p. 230). By 1906, only 46 Black voters were registered in the entire state (Walton, 1975).

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book builds on this framework, but characterizes the post-World War II period until upto 1968 as the late “old” or “solid” South, with full partisan realignment kicking off after the Civil Rights Era. The first era examined here, stretching from the end of World War II until the Civil Rights movement, captures part of Grantham’s period of disruption. However, the seeds and cracks of disruption, albeit a different kind of disruption, were already apparent earlier. What changes in the 1950s and 1960s—and what actually delays the fracturing of the appearance of a Solid Alabama—is the appearance of race as a dominant political issue. With the national Democratic Party’s decision to align itself fully with the Civil Rights Movement, regional fractures within Alabama along economic and ideological lines are replaced with a last bout of statewide uniformity. Opposition to desegregation and deeply held white supremacist beliefs actually united the state politically in the 1950s and 1960s more than it had been in previous decades, at least below the state level. It also created the impetus for a partisan sea change away from Democrats and towards Republicans—this change too started at the national level and slowly trickled down through state and local offices, until it permeated Alabama politics on every level. As I show in this chapter, earlier county-level regional divisions, rooted in the factional and economic splits mentioned above, persisted throughout the postwar period, but in the years leading up to the Civil Rights Movement they were often covered up by uniform shifts, especially on the national level. Alabama’s incipient move towards the Republican Party was still regionally uneven until the early 1960s when, on the presidential level, the state uniformly shifted Republican, a sign of what was to come across political offices and levels of government.

County-Level Shifts 1945–1968: Hill Country Progressives Versus Black Belt Dixiecrats Despite its long-running status as a one-party state, regional divisions have long been playing a significant role in Alabama politics, especially on the local level. In fact, Key (1949) notes how little factional divisions in the state in the 1940s had changed since the 1890s, with basic regional divisions as well as basic ideological fault lines essentially the same as they had been for half a century, if not since the founding of the state. As Webb (1997) lays out, the Alabama Hill Country was especially

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resistant to Bourbon rule and at times, from the end of Reconstruction through the early twentieth century, willing to either defect from the Democratic Party altogether or intent on fomenting internal revolt. By the late 1940s however, with the prospect of federal intervention and the possibility of desegregation looming over Alabama politics, the state’s politics appeared on the surface as unified and uniform as imaginable. However, even at this time of seemingly unified Southern Democratic dominance in both state and local elections,19 regional differences in vote choice and vote preference remained significant and apparent. The Hill Country still chafed against Black Belt dominance, against a constitutional system that enshrined unequal geographic representation and advantaged the planter and industrial elites in the southern part of the state. Jacksonian populism lived on in the Hill Country, and electoral results as well as county-level shifts during this period speak to the strength of enduring factionalism and regional division, even as Alabama politics was about to be engulfed by the issues of race and desegregation (Table 2.1). Alabama saw a significant shift towards the Republican Party between the 1948 and the 1952 presidential elections (see Fig. 2.1), but Black Belt counties shifted much more strongly than Hill Country counties.20 In the following election, the state shifted additionally towards Republicans—the Democratic margin of victory decreased from 29.6 to 17.1%—but this time, the Black Belt counties reversed course and, unlike the rest of the state, became more Democratic than in 1952. In other words, while the presidential elections of 1948, 1952, and 1956 paint a fairly unified statewide picture, it is in the county-level shifts from election to election that regional conflict becomes apparent. Adlai Stevenson did worse across the state in 1952 than Strom Thurmond had 19 Senator John Sparkman won his seat with a margin of over 60 points in both 1948 and 1954, for example. Senator J. Lister Hill, who held his seat from 1938 until his retirement in 1968, ran unopposed in the 1956 general election and without a Republican opponent in 1950: his 1950 opponent, Independent candidate John G. Crommelin, ran in the 1956 Democratic primary instead—and lost. 20 In fact, some Hill Country counties even went against the trend in 1952 and became more Democratic than previously—and that despite the fact that the Hill Country was generally the most Republican or at least most internally rebellious region in the state. Winston County, for example, which only went Democratic once in presidential elections between 1948 and 2020 (in 1976) and was the only Republican county in the state in the 1948 presidential election, shifted away from Republicans in 1952, despite—or maybe because of—it being a relatively pro-Republican presidential election, at least by Alabama standards.

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Table 2.1 Winning Margins of Select Elections in Alabama, 1948–1968 Year

Office

Winning party

Candidate

Percent

Margin

Voter turnout

1948

President

1952 1956 1960

President President President

1964 1948

President Senate 2

Democrat (Dixiecrat) Democrat Democrat Southern Democrat Republican Democrat

Strom Thurmond Adlai Stevenson Adlai Stevenson Harry Byrd

79.8

60.7

12.5

64.6 56.5 56.8

29.6 17.1 1.0

24.1 27.6 31.0

Barry Goldwater John Sparkman (I) John Sparkman (I) John Sparkman (I) John Sparkman (I) J. Lister Hill (I) James B. Allen Jim Folsom Gordon Persons Jim Folsom

69.5 84.0

39.0 68.0

35.9 12.8

1954

Senate 2

Democrat

82.5

64.9

17.6

1960

Senate 2

Democrat

70.2

40.5

30.1

1966

Senate 2

Democrat

60.1

22.1

41.0

1962 1968 1946 1950 1954

Senate 3 Senate 3 Governor Governor Governor

Democrat Democrat Democrat Democrat Democrat

50.9 70.0 88.7 91.1 73.4

1.7 47.9 77.3 82.2 46.8

21.1 45.7 11.7 9.8 18.7

in 1948, but Republican support grew especially in the Black Belt and much less so in the historically much more rebellious Hill Country, and while the Hill Country continued its slow but steady progression away from the Democratic Party in the following year, the Black Belt did the opposite. Between 1948 and 1964, Alabama shifted from a 61 point “Democratic” margin21 to a 39 point Republican margin.22 Southern discontent with the national Democratic Party had been brewing since the late 1930s (Barnard, 1974), but the war effort and Roosevelt’s popularity had kept it at bay. The 1948 sweeping Democratic victory in Alabama was in fact a full-scale rebellion—Truman did not appear on the ballot, and 21 In 1948, the Democratic candidate in Alabama was “Dixiecrat” Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, an act of rebellion against Harry Truman’s pro-Civil Rights platform and his efforts to desegregate the military. 22 After 1964, the state would only vote for a Democrat for President once: in 1976 for fellow Southerner Jimmy Carter.

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Fig. 2.1 President: 1948–1956

Thurmond’s Dixiecrat party was listed as the Democratic ticket in the state, subverting the decision of the Democratic National Convention.23 However, it was not until Barry Goldwater that a Republican actually carried the state in a presidential election. In 1960, Alabama voters, unlike voters in the other 49 states, selected presidential electors individually instead of as a slate. As a result, the eleven (all Democratic) electors selected consisted of five pledged to Kennedy and six un-pledged electors who subsequently all cast their votes for Harry F. Byrd’s and Strom Thurmond’s Southern Democratic ticket. Unlike in 1948, voters in Alabama did have the option of voting for the national Democratic nominee, but the result of the state primary had led to a majority of Democratic electors remaining un-pledged, thereby creating 23 The Alabama delegation had also walked out of the convention in protest of Truman’s Civil Rights stances.

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Fig. 2.2 President: 1956–1964

substantial rebellion: only five of the eleven electors would end up being pledged to John F. Kennedy, with the remaining six having to be either un-pledged Democrats or Republican electors pledged to Nixon. While the end result unsurprisingly consisted of split electoral votes between Byrd and Kennedy, Nixon did garner a significant amount of support in Alabama and even carried seven24 of its 67 counties (Fig. 2.2). While the period between World War II and the passage of the Civil Rights Act is still one of uniform Democratic dominance in the South in general and in Alabama in particular,25 presidential elections already foreshadow what was to come: A Democratic turn towards open support for 24 The counties were the Hill Country counties Franklin, Winston, Jefferson, and Chilton, the Black Belt counties Dallas and Montgomery, and (barely) Houston county in the Wiregrass region. 25 Barnard (1974) shows that many Southern Democrats, such as Alabama Governor Frank Dixon, were already railing against their own party by the early 1940s, accusing the

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Civil Rights on the national level, and a subsequent Southern, and therefore Alabamian, realignment. While this was slow to trickle down through congressional and state-level elections and while it took another three decades for the transformation to be complete, the presidential shifts laid out the roadmap for what lay ahead. Presidential selection, unlike that of members of Congress, Senators, Governors, or other state-level officials, is not in the hands of Alabama Democratic Party officials or Alabama voters alone, which explains the diverging party affiliations and the accelerated shift towards the Republican Party on the presidential level. But even these shifts were not (yet) regionally uniform: between 1956 and 1960, the Gulf Coast Plain and Wiregrass regions in the Southern part of the state, as well as part of the Hill Country in North Alabama, resisted the incipient shift towards the Republican party, while the Black Belt and Tennessee Valley led the way. And while the entire state moved towards the Republican Party between 1960 and 1964, South Alabama—the Black Belt, Gulf Coast Plain, and Wiregrass regions—moved much more strongly than the Tennessee Valley and Hill Country counties did. But even within these regional trends, there were exceptions: individual counties that followed their own individual patterns. A counterweight to Winston county,26 a staunchly Republican county in the Hill Country region for example, was Macon county in the Black Belt: The only county in the state that steadfastly remained blue on the presidential level throughout the entire period from 1945 until the

national Democratic Party of waging war on the Southern way of life and pushing centralization and social change. Barnard cites Dixon as saying that Southern Democrats find themselves in a position where “it is their own party which is dynamiting their social structure, which is arousing bitterness and recrimination (...) The Federal Government, in Democratic hands, is now tampering with the one thing we cannot permit, will not permit, whatever the price to ourselves” (p. 3). Despite these rumblings, however, Alabama Democrats entered the second half of the 1940s securely in the hands of proNew Deal Democrats, including both Senators John Sparkman and J. Lister Hill as well as newly elected Governor James B “Big Jim” Folsom 26 As Key (1949) recounts, Winston county opposed secession in 1861, going so far as to proclaim that if a state can secede from the Union, a county can likewise secede from a state. In that spirit, Winston county declared itself neutral. This neutrality, however, was expectedly short-lived, as the confederate cavalry descended upon Winston county and gave all those subject to the Conscription Act a choice between taking up arms for the Confederacy or execution. According to Key, Winston county remained known throughout Alabama as “The Free State of Winston” well into the twentieth century (pp. 282–283).

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present day,27 first resisting the Republican trend of the rest of the state presumably out of a stubborn loyalty to tradition and then counteracting it through an increasing share of (Democratic) Black voters.28 But 1948 was not only the year of Dixiecrat rebellion against the national Democratic Party in the presidential election,29 it was also the year in which the conservative (Bourbon/Black Belt planter) faction within Alabama Democratic politics successfully regained a significant portion of their power from the progressive faction (rooted in the Hill Country populism of the 1920s as well as in the political legacy of Andrew Jackson) of Governor James “Big Jim” Folsom (Barnard, 1974). ProNew Deal progressive Senator John Sparkman enjoyed uniformly high support across the state from 1948 well into the 1960s. The county-level shifts between 1948 and 1954 however show that regional differences persisted: while the Hill Country counties were unsurprisingly the least Democratic region of the state, they became more Democratic at a time when the deep blue Black Belt shifted away from the party as part of the Dixiecrat revolt against the progressive dominance within the state party, exemplified by Governor Folsom as well as both Senators Sparkman and Hill (Fig. 2.3).30

27 In 1956, Eisenhower won Macon county by 2 points, the only Republican win in the county. 28 Burnham (1964) notes that in 1962, Macon deviated from the electoral pattern of

the rest of the Black Belt, because it was the only Black-majority county in Alabama in which Black voters were able to vote relatively freely in 1962, due to a federal judicial decree in 1961, implementing the Civil Rights Act of 1960 in Macon county specifically after the Supreme Court had invalidated the state legislature’s gerrymander in Gormillion v. Lightfoot (1960). 29 Dixiecrats had taken over the state legislature in 1948 and had managed to take

partial control of the state’s delegation to the 1948 Democratic National Convention (and complete control of the state’s Democratic electors), which culminated in a full-scale rebellion against Truman’s nomination and led to Strom Thurmond’s name appearing on the ballot in Alabama as the Democratic candidate for President, not Truman’s. 30 What complicates this picture additionally is of course the internal split within the progressive/Loyalist faction of Folsom, Sparkman, and Hill. Folsom for example supported a 1948 primary challenge against Sparkman. While Sparkman was able to win the primary and therefore keep his seat, this internal division weakened the Loyalists and allowed Dixiecrats to, for example, take control of the State Democratic Executive Committee and subsequently sweep the May primary for presidential electors, essentially assuring an Alabama revolt against Truman in the fall.

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Fig. 2.3 Senate 2: 1948–1960

The 1948 and 1954 primaries31 provide further evidence for this, with Sparkman losing support in the Black Belt between 1948 and 1954, but holding on to (and in some counties actually expanding) his vote margin in the Hill Country. Sparkman lost Wilcox, Dallas, Lowndes, and Bullock counties by substantial margins to U.S. Representative Laurie C. Battle in 1954, after winning them easily against Phillip J. Hamm in 1948. In 1952 Sparkman had helped include a Civil Rights plank in the Democratic platform for the Stevenson ticket on which he served as the vice presidential candidate. His constituents, especially those in the Black Belt, repaid him

31 Blue counties are those won by Sparkman, counties in orange are won by his opponent.

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Fig. 2.4 Senate 2: 1948 and 1954 primary—winner vs runner-up

for that by partly abandoning him in the 1954 primary and even shifting towards the Republican candidate in the general election (Fig. 2.4).32 Things did not improve for the progressive wing in the early 60s. Sparkman’s margin decreased from 40.5% in 1960 to 22.1% in 1966. Senator J. Lister Hill, a supporter of the New Deal and fellow member of Alabama’s progressive faction, held on to his seat throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s where he barely faced serious opposition to reelection, by taking a strong stance against Civil Rights legislation and by expressing unwavering support for segregation. However, his close race against a Republican opponent in 1962 (Fig. 2.5) foreshadowed once again the Republican shift the state was about to undergo during the coming decades. As can be seen in Fig. 2.5, Hill faced opposition concentrated in the Black Belt and other regions of Southern Alabama, while the Hill Country and Tennessee Valley remained loyal to him, another testament to the deep roots of the progressive faction of the Alabama Democratic

32 Though as can be seen above, Sparkman still carried the Black Belt overwhelmingly in 1954, despite the attrition he suffered among some voters.

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Party enjoyed in the northern parts of the state.33 In 1968, the Democratic margin for Hill’s former seat shot up to 47.9% again after Hill was replaced by James B. Allen, a close ally of Governor George Wallace who had served as Lieutenant Governor during Wallace’s first term. The bulk of the electoral shift between Hill’s last election and Allen’s first came from the Black Belt counties, which moved from Republican back to deep Democratic as soon as the seat changed hands from the progressive to the conservative faction within the party.34 The Hill Country moved as well, but much less, partly because the region had remained Democratic even under Hill whose remaining support was clustered in his faction’s stronghold, the Hill Country and Tennessee Valley regions of North Alabama. The strong regional component—and its origins in the Black Belt’s history as the region of large plantations and the Hill Country’s as that of small family farmers—becomes even clearer when incorporating demographic factors into the analysis. Hill Country counties, generally among those with the highest percentage of white residents, clearly shifted towards the Democratic Party between 1948 and 1954,35 while Black Belt counties by and large shifted towards the Republicans.36 If we fast 33 Burnham (1964) notes that Hill’s surprisingly close 1962 election was evidence of a critical realignment of sorts, because the traditionally more pro-Republican North supported him while the Black Belt, longtime Democratic stronghold, shifted towards Republicans. But as I have shown above, these patterns, rooted in factional divisions within the Democratic Party as much as national issues and reorganization of the Alabama Republican Party, were already apparent in earlier elections, albeit generally less pronounced. 34 It is worth mentioning that George Wallace himself initially considered himself a Loyalist and part of the progressive faction. He refused to walk out of the 1948 Democratic National Convention but did not support Harry Truman’s nomination either (Barnard, 1974). His initially comparatively moderate stance on issues of Civil Rights and race became those of a hardline segregationist after his initial defeat in the 1958 gubernatorial primary. He later expressed regret for his failure to join the Dixiecrat walk-out in 1948. 35 With Winston, Cullman, Marshall, and Marion counties, all in the Hill Country, leading the way. 36 With Macon, Greene, Lowndes, and Wilcox counties, all in the Black Belt, leading

the way. For the 1962 election, Burnham (1964) asserts that the percentage of Black voters in a county who are registered to vote is an even better predictor of Republican shift than the percentage of white voters. Counties with less than 5% of their adult Black population registered to vote swung towards Republicans by 22% between 1960 and 1962, whereas those with over 15% of adult Black voters registered swung only by 4.4%.

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Fig. 2.5 Senate 2: 1960–1966 vs Senate 3: 1962–1968

forward to the 1966 and 1972 elections however, we see that much of this regional division has now been washed out, and electoral shifts were almost uniform across the different regions of the state. The issue of race was becoming much more dominant in the late 60s and early 70s, and this development suppressed longstanding regional divisions on economic preferences (Fig. 2.6). On the gubernatorial level, the 1946 and 1950 elections continued to see the most defections from the Democratic ticket in the Hill Country—and that even though the Hill Country served as a stronghold

However, he also notes that the counties with lower registration rates were concentrated in the Black Belt and those with comparatively higher registration rates could predominantly be found in the Hill Country.

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Fig. 2.6 Senate 2: shifts 1948–1954 vs 1966–1972, by percent white population

of support for Governor Big Jim Folsom and his loyalist faction,37 the progressive faction which stood in opposition to the Dixiecrats (Barnard, 1974). However, the Hill Country shifted in a more Democratic direction between 1946 and 1950, when the Black Belt did the opposite. Folsom and his fellow loyalist Gordon Persons weathered the 1948 Dixiecrat revolt and remained in office until 1959, as term limits38 prevented Folsom from running again in 1958. In fact, in the 1950 primary and again in 1954, the Loyalist faction benefitted from public discontent with the Dixiecrats’ decision to make it impossible to vote for Truman in 194839 and from the persistent strong regional division in the state. However, Folsom subsequently lost a runoff election against George Wallace in 1962, a signal that the tide had shifted towards Dixiecrat rhetoric and that race now fully eclipsed other issues and divisions within state politics. George Wallace’s evolution from a Loyalist delegate who refused to walk out of the Democratic National Convention in 1948 (Barnard, 1974) to one of the most well-known, most radical symbols of the Dixiecrat movement illustrates just how much agitation around race and opposition to Civil Rights shifted the political center of gravity in the state over the course of the 1950s. While Loyalists remained in control 37 Since regional allegiance played such an important role in Alabama politics, Folsom additionally benefitted from the fact that he called the Hill Country his home. 38 Alabama did not allow governors to serve two or more consecutive terms. 39 Even though Truman and his policies were far from popular among Alabama voters,

these same voters did not approve of being the only state where it was impossible to vote for an incumbent president even if one wanted to.

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of the state party apparatus, elected officials like Wallace40 embraced the Dixiecrat stance and rhetoric on race and formed a conservative block within the Democratic Party. Those who could not bring themselves to do even this started the exodus to the Republican Party that would eventually remake a solidly blue state into a solidly red one. As Barnard (1974) further shows, regional differences were not limited to elections about government control. When the state voted on the Boswell Amendment in 1946,41 all twelve counties falling into the lowest quartile of support were located in Northern Alabama,42 and the amendment was opposed by the state’s liberal faction, most prominently Senator Hill, Senator-nominate Sparkman as well as Governor-nominate Folsom. As they did with the 1901 state constitution itself,43 Northern Alabama voters, firmly within their tradition of populist rebellion against the Black Belt dominated party elite, opposed the Boswell Amendment not for reasons of racial equality but because they suspected, and probably correctly so, that the planters, industrialists, and their Dixiecrat allies aimed to disenfranchise not only Black voters but poor Hill Country whites as well. Despite opposition from urban centers 40 Liberal Senators Hill and Sparkman succeeded in evading the issue of race enough to stay in office through the 1960s. Jim Folsom paid for his refusal to abandon his racial liberalism in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education by losing the once-supportive state legislature, seeing large parts of his program overshadowed by often openly violent protests against Civil Rights and desegregation, and finally experiencing a string of electoral defeats against segregationists like George Wallace. 41 In response to the 1944 United States Supreme Court Smith v Allwright decision ruling the white primary unconstitutional, Alabama Democrats attempted to continue Black disenfranchisement within legal bounds by amending the state constitution of 1901 to require voters not only to be able to read and write any clause of the U.S. constitution but to demonstrate adequate understanding of the text as well. The assessment of this understanding was to be left to the local boards of registrars, opening the door to the continued widespread disenfranchisement of Black voters but also potentially to white voters deemed undesirable by the Bourbon-dominated party. 42 Those twelve counties were Lauderdale, Limestone, Madison, Jackson, DeKalb, Cherokee, Etowah, Blount, Winston, Marion, Franklin, and Colbert. Seven of these— Limestone, Jackson, Etowah, Blount, Winston, Marion, and Franklin—had also been among the sixteen counties in which support for Jim Folsom in the 1946 election was highest. 43 Walton (1975) notes that Black Alabamians, concentrated in the Black Belt, overwhelmingly voted against the 1901 Constitution, but ballot stuffing by Bourbon Democrats in these very counties erased their votes, making it seem as if Black voters had supported their own disenfranchisement.

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like Birmingham and Mobile and despite considerable opposition in Hill Country and Wiregrass counties, the Boswell Amendment passed with 54% of the vote, due in no small part to the successful racial fear-mongering of its Dixiecrat supporters. County-level shifts between 1946 and 1954 continue to tell this story of regional division. The Hill Country, traditionally the region most inclined to rebel or revolt against the Alabama Democratic Party, actually became more Democratic in response to the progressive faction’s takeover of the governorship in the form of Big Jim Folsom and Gordon Persons (Fig. 2.7). In 1950, Loyalists also wrested control of the State Executive Committee away from Dixiecrats, which allowed them to push through a loyalty oath binding candidates to the nominees of the national Democratic Party and therefore preventing a repeat of the 1948 presidential election.

Fig. 2.7 Governor: 1946–1954

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While this meant an actual increase in Democratic vote share for the Hill Country between 1946 and 1950, it only meant a smaller decrease between 1950 and 1954. In other words, while the entire state shifted towards the Republican Party in the early 1950s,44 the Hill Country was now least likely to rebel, testament to the fact that its preferred internal faction was still firmly in control of the governorship. The Hill Country had also been Folsom’s base in the 1946 primary, Hill Country voters had shared his opposition to the Boswell amendment, and their electoral movements between 1946 and 1954 continue this trend of elevated loyalty to the progressive faction in this part of the state, despite a slow statewide slide towards the Republican Party based on opposition to the national Democratic Party’s pro-Civil Rights stance. In 1950, Winston County, the consistently most pro-Republican county in Alabama in the early postwar period,45 was by far the least Democratic county in the state. By 1954, it would share that title with a few other Hill Country counties, and even Dallas and Montgomery counties, both located squarely in the Black Belt, were not far behind. Looking at the 1946 Democratic primary46 for governor, this geographic split becomes yet again even more evident. Folsom performed best in the Tennessee Valley, Hill Country, and Wiregrass regions in both the first and second round of the primary compared to Handy Ellis, the runner-up.47 While the Black Belt stayed loyal to the Democratic Party in the 1946 general election, the revolt against the progressive faction clearly played out in the primary, which cascaded into a noticeable Black Belt attrition rate in the 1950s. Even if that shift was not nearly enough to flip those counties for the Republicans, it noticeably reduced the Democratic margin in many Black Belt counties due to inter-factional tensions. Folsom was the candidate of the Hill Country, and his success in winning the 1946 primary meant greater satisfaction with the Democratic 44 Though only in relative terms, as Democrats still won 73.4% of the vote in 1954, down from 91.1% in 1950. 45 Between 1948 and 2020, Winston county voted for a Democrat for President exactly once—in 1976, when Carter won the county by 5.4 points. 46 Counties in blue are won by Folsom, those in orange by Ellis. 47 Folsom outright carried Cullman and Marshall counties in the Hill Country and

Coffee county in the Wiregrass in the first round, even when compared to the vote total of his four opponents combined.

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Fig. 2.8 Governor: 1946 primary—winner vs runner-up

Party in this historically more dissatisfied region. Both Folsom’s successor Gordon Persons as well as Folsom himself benefitted from the decrease in hostility, as the Hill Country now displayed movement towards the Democratic Party48 when the Black Belt moved in the opposite direction (Fig. 2.8). As Fig. 2.9 shows, the entire state shifted against Democrats between the 1950 and 1954 gubernatorial elections, which led to less visible geographic division in 1954 than in 1950. However, this was once again caused by more pronounced shifts in the Black Belt, made up of counties with a lower percentage of white inhabitants.49 The northern part of the state, which historically displayed greater willingness to rebel against the Democratic Party, reversed this trend when its preferred faction successfully maintained control over the gubernatorial nominations.

48 Or, in 1954, at least weaker movement towards the Republican party than the rest of the state. 49 In Lowndes, Sumter, Perry, and Wilcox counties, the Democratic vote share decreased more than 50% between 1950 and 1954. In Hale county it decreased more than 60% and in Dallas County more than 80%. All these are located in the Black Belt. In Winston, Cullman, and Marshall counties, all located in the Hill Country, the Democratic vote share decreased by less than 10%.

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Fig. 2.9 Governor: 1950 and 1954 general elections, by percent white population

The blanket dominance of the Democratic Party in elections during the immediate postwar years and into the 1960s obscures these significant geographic divisions, which are the result of fundamental differences in economic situation. North Alabama embraced populism because the fight of the “little guy” against the powerful elites spoke to the small farmers who felt exploited and often disenfranchised by the wealthy planter and industrialist class in the Black Belt that had been dominating Alabama politics since before the Civil War. Similarly, Table 2.2 shows that especially in the 1948 Senate and 1950 gubernatorial elections. Richer counties with a lower percentage of white inhabitants (the affluent planters and industrialists of the Black Belt) tended to vote Democratic at statistically significantly higher rates,50 but that the shifts from election to election were clearly running counter those 50 Election results are coded from 100 (Democrats win 100% of the vote) to −100 (Republicans win 100% of the vote), so the negative correlation between Percent White

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patterns. Percent White and Median Family Income (Tiers) are less significant in 1954, precisely because the Hill Country counties had shifted less strongly towards the Republican Party than the Black Belt.51 The relationship between electoral shifts and these demographic and economic factors likewise displays statistical significance, but in the opposite direction to that seen for the elections themselves. Hill Country voters, while never the strongest source of support for Democrats in the state, displayed greater affinity—and therefore lower rates of attrition—towards the progressive faction within the Alabama Democratic Party during their time of control over both the gubernatorial mansion as well as the senate seat. Just like Folsom’s strongest counties in the 1946 primary had been in the Hill Country, it was the Hill Country that similarly resisted the Republican shift between 1950 and 1954 the most, thus once again displaying the greatest loyalty to Folsom. John Sparkman received a slightly lower overall margin in 1954 than in 1948, but he actually made gains among Hill Country voters, which can be seen both in the weakening of the statistical significance for Percent White as well as the disappearance for the relationship between Median Income (Tiers) and electoral results. The regional split in Sparkman’s gains and losses translates into the results in column six (Table 2.2), underlining once again that regional divisions in the state were wrapped up in both economic as well as demographic differences and did translate into significant political differences even during times of one-party-rule. In other words, the reversed direction between the statistically significant coefficients for the elections compared to the electoral shifts suggested that the counties most likely to vote for Democrats were also the ones shifting more strongly away from Democrats between 1948 and 1954 (Senate class 2) and 1950 and 1954 (Governor), respectively. The strong regional bases of the competing factions within the Democratic Party in the late 40s and into the early 60s meant that progressive control of both the senate seat as well as the gubernatorial mansion led to less attrition in those counties historically most likely to rebel, and

and the election result means counties with a higher percentage of white inhabitants tended to vote less Democratic. 51 Shifts are coded from 100 (a 100% shift towards the Democratic Party) to −100 (a 100% shift towards the Republican Party), so a positive correlation between Percent White and Median Family Income (Tiers) and the Shift variable suggests either a shift towards Democrats or a weaker shift towards Republicans than in the Black Belt.

4.65* (3.13) 19.98 (178.56) 67 0.57

−1.77 (3.65) −338.16 (201.84) 67 0.14

4.36* (2.61) 79.84 (144.31) 67

*= p < 0.1, **= p < 0.05, ***= p < 0.01 The bold numbers are the statistically significant results

Observations R-Squared (Standard Error in 0.41 Parentheses)

Percent Male Employed Percent Women Not in Labor Force Median Family Income (Tiers) Constant

Percent Male

−0.89*** (0.17) 0.40 (2.99) 0.81 (0.56) 0.17 (0.47)

0.02 (0.20) 6.66* (3.41) 1.18* (0.64) −0.26 (0.52)

−0.54*** (0.14) −0.06 (2.44) 0.40 (0.46) 0.01 (0.37)

Percent White

1948 Senate (Class 2)

1954 Governor

1950 Governor

0.14

1.36 (3.21) −89.77 (177.64) 67

−0.30* (0.18) 2.73 (3.00) 0.71 (0.56) −0.15 (0.45)

1954 Senate (Class 2)

0.61

−6.13* (2.37) −418.01 (132.37) 67

0.56*** (0.13) 6.72*** (2.22) 0.78* (0.42) −0.27 (0.33)

Shift 1950–1954 (Governor)

Democratic vote share and electoral shifts, Governor and Senate (Class 2)

Variables

Table 2.2

67

−3.57** (1.78) −141.29 (98.39) 67

0.59*** (0.10) 2.58* (1.67) −0.02 (0.31) −0.17 (0.25)

Shift 1948–1954 Senate (Class 2) 2 THE ALABAMA OF THE DYING OLD SOUTH: 1945–1968

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comparatively greater attrition in the historically most loyally Democratic counties.

Conclusion During the postwar years up until 1968, Alabama was a true oneparty state. Democrats consistently carried the overwhelming majority of seats on all electoral levels. Republicans and third party candidates were confined to winning a handful of mostly local races in some Hill Country counties, but were otherwise locked out of power in the state completely.52 Yet this picture of complete Democratic dominance obscures the tensions and cracks that were already apparent below the surface. The war within the state party between the pro-New Deal progressive faction and the conservative Bourbon/Dixiecrat faction divided the state along geographic lines, with progressives enjoying the most support in the Hill Country of North Alabama, and Bourbon/Dixiecrats dominating the Black Belt counties in the southern part of the state. This division was mostly economically based: North Alabama consisted of smaller family farms, while the Black Belt belonged to the heirs of the planter and industrialist elite of the antebellum years. North Alabamians had a populist streak that was disliked and sometimes feared by the old ruling class in the Black Belt. While these divisions were not originally about race—in fact racism united the Hill Country and the Black Belt despite their otherwise significant differences—it took on a racial component when Progressives/New Dealers became at least tentatively (and sometimes unwillingly) aligned—or at least associated—with the nascent pro-Civil Rights platform of the national Democratic Party. With Dixiecrats in full revolt against Truman, the Progressives took on the mantle of loyalists to the national party. This association hurt them electorally, but the regionally based factionalism meant it hurt them more in the Black Belt than in the historically rebellious Hill Country. Alabama Democrats’ reaction to the national party’s shift towards an openly pro-Civil Rights stance in the 1950s and early 1960s already foreshadowed the partisan realignment that was to come in the 1970s and 52 Between 1902 and 1950, no Republican was elected to the Senate from a southern state (Black & Black, 2002).

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1980s, but even here, traditional regional divisions and allegiances still played a significant role in altering the county-level picture. These internal tensions and intra-party battles however are not visible unless one pays close attention to electoral movements on the county level. Even during the state’s time as a solid one-party state, Alabama voters continued the long-standing regionally based factional battles that had characterized the political climate in the state since Reconstruction. The rise of Civil Rights to a prominent position of contention on which (national) Democratic elites took public stances was not the cause for fissures and conflicts in the fabric of Alabama’s one-party-rule, it was the glue that helped the Alabama Democratic Party paper over the longstanding economic and regional conflicts a little bit longer. The unifying effect of race however came at a steep price for Alabama’s established Democratic leaders: the long-lasting turn of Alabama voters away from the Democrats and towards Republicans. While this transformation was not completed until the mid-1990s, and while it took the Civil Rights Act for it to fully come to life, its beginnings can be seen in the rebellion of Alabama Dixiecrats against Truman, in the fight over control of the state executive committee between Loyalists and Dixiecrats, and in attempts to win Democratic primaries in the 1950s by painting your opponent as too pro-desegregation.53 In the following decades, economic divisions were fully eclipsed by southern whites’ almost universal opposition to Civil Rights, and the new national partisan alignment along issues of race and racial equality set in motion the South’s transformation from uniformly Democratic to almost as uniformly Republican. But as the following chapter will show, even during these turbulent times of change and realignment did the old economically founded regional divisions in Alabama persist to a certain degree.

53 In 1958, George Wallace, at the time a Barbour County circuit judge, lost the gubernatorial primary to John Patterson, who ran with the endorsement of the KKK. Wallace subsequently became one of the leading and most outspoken segregationists in the state and won the primary in 1962. Patterson himself said in 1988 that his uncle, former Congressman Lafayette Patterson, had cautioned him against using race during his campaign against Wallace, but “If I’d listened to him I wouldn’t have been governor. But you know what? He was right” (“John Patterson, Alabama governor during Freedom Rides, dies at 99”, Montgomery Advertiser, June 5, 2021, accessed 09/15/2021).

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References Aistrup, J. A. (1996). The Southern strategy revisited: Republican top-down advancement in the South. University of Kentucky Press. Baggett, J. L. (2018). “A law Abiding People”: Alabama’s 1901 constitution and the attempted lynching of Jim Brown. The Alabama Review, 71(3), 200–233. Barnard, W. D. (1974). Dixiecrats and democrats: Alabama politics, 1942–1950. University of Alabama Press. Black, E. (1983). A theory of southern factionalism. The Journal of Politics, 45(3), 594–614. Black, E., & Black, M. (1982). Successful durable democratic factions in Southern politics. In L. W. Moreland, T. A. Baker, & R. P. Steed (Eds.), Contemporary Southern political attitudes and behavior: Studies and essays, Chapter 5. Praeger. Black, E., & Black, M. (2002). The rise of Southern republicans. Cambridge University Press. Burnham, W. D. (1964). The Alabama senatorial election of 1962: Return of inter-party competition. Journal of Politics, 26(4), 798–829. Feldman, G. (1999). Politics, society, and the Klan in Alabama, 1915–1949. University of Alabama Press. Grantham, D. (1983). Conceptualizing the history of modern Southern politics. The History Teacher, 17 (1), 9–31. Hadley, C. D. (1981). Survey research and southern politics: The implications of data management. Public Opinion Quarterly, 45, 393–401. Hadley, C. D. (1994). Blacks in Southern politics: An agenda for research. The Journal of Politics, 56(3), 585–600. Jeffries, H. K. (2006). SNCC, black power, and independent political party organizing, 1964–1966. The Journal of African American History, 91(2), 171–193. Key, V. O. (1949). Southern politics in state and nation. Alfred A. Knopf. Knuckey, J. (2017). The myth of the “two souths?” Racial resentment and white party identification in the deep south. Social Science Quarterly, 98(2), 728– 749. Loewen, J. W. (2005). Sundown towns: A hidden dimension of American Racism. New Press. McKee, S. C. (2012). The past, present, and future of Southern politics. Southern Cultures, 18(3), 95–117. McKee, S. C., & Springer, M. J. (2015). A tale of “two souths”: White voting behavior in contemporary Southern elections. Social Science Quarterly, 96(2), 588–607. Merrfield Wilson, L. (2018). “Who is Bettye Frink?”: The billboards and the secretary of state who changed Alabama politics, 1958–1962. The Alabama Review, 71(3), 234–257.

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Norrell, R. J. (1991). Labor at the ballot box: Alabama politics from the new deal to the Dixiecrat Movement. The Journal of Southern History, 57 (2), 201–234. Perkins, J. (1982). Ideology in the South: Meaning and bases among masses and elites. In L. W. Moreland, T. A. Baker, & R. P. Steed (Eds.), Contemporary Southern political attitudes and behavior: Studies and essays, Chapter 1. Praeger. Robinson, S. R. (2013). Rethinking black urban politics in the 1880s: The case of William Gaston in post-reconstruction Alabama. The Alabama Review, 66(1), 3–29. Shafer, B. E., & Johnston, R. G. C. (2001). The transformation of southern politics revisited: The house of representatives as a window. British Journal of Political Science, 31(4), 601–625. Springer, M. J. (2019). Where is “the south”? Assessing the meaning of geography in politics. American Politics Research, 47 (5), 1100–1134. Sutton, C. D. (1982). Party competition in the South’s forgotten region: The case of Southern Appalachia. In L. W. Moreland, T. A. Baker, & R. P. Steed (Eds.), Contemporary Southern political attitudes and behavior: Studies and essays, Chapter 7. Praeger. Thornton III, J. M. (1968). Alabama politics, J. Thomas Heflin, and the expulsion movement of 1929. The Alabama Review 21(2). Tullos, A. (2011). Alabama getaway: The political imaginary and the heart of Dixie. University of Georgia Press. Walter, B. M. (2019). Nostalgia and precarious placemaking in Southern poultry worlds: Immigration, race, and community building in rural Northern Alabama. Journal of Rural Studies, 82, 542–552. Walton, H., Jr. (1975). Black republicans: The politics of the Black and Tans. The Scarecrow Press. Webb, S. L. (1997). Two-party politics in the one-party South: Alabama’s Hill Country, 1874–1920. University of Alabama Press. Wiener, J. M. (1978). Social origins of the new South: Alabama 1860–1885. Louisiana State University Press. Wilkerson-Freeman, S. (2002). The second battle for woman suffrage: Alabama white women, the poll tax, and V.O. Key’s master narrative of Southern politics. Journal of Southern History, 68(2), 333–374.

CHAPTER 3

Tidal Wave of Change: 1970–1994

Abstract This chapter traces the period of electoral upheaval that would finally lead to Alabama’s political realignment through county-level electoral shifts, showing how the old regional factions remained relevant, even as economic divisions were competing with the rise of race as a partydefining issue. Using presidential, senatorial, and gubernatorial elections, I show that realignment proceeded unevenly across political offices as well as regional divisions. Keywords Civil rights · Realignment · Alabama politics · Electoral shifts · Political change · Enfranchisement

The Era of Civil Rights and Partisan Disruption in Alabama By the end of the 1960s, major electoral change had started to come to Alabama, and race was at the heart of it all. In 1966, Donald R. Matthews and James W. Prothro observed that there was “a revolution in process” with respect to the increasing participation of Black Southerners in electoral politics (Matthews & Prothro, 1966). Earl and Merle Black describe the “Southern transformation” of the 1960s which accompanied the “rise © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. L. Wagner, Electoral Patterns in Alabama, Palgrave Studies in US Elections, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06770-9_3

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of Southern Republicanism” (Black & Black, 2002). Over the course of the decade, tensions started to build as a growing number of Black Americans as well as their white allies, predominantly from the North, started to demand equality, including in the arena of electoral politics. Black-led civil rights organizations started registering Black voters and preparing them for literacy tests. Not infrequently, these attempts at political participation were met with hostility and outright violence from white Southerners (Matthews & Prothro, 1966). While Southern Democrats continued to oppose these efforts at integration with every tool at their disposal, the national Democratic Party gradually allied itself more and more with the Civil Rights Movement, causing the issue to be aligned along partisan lines in a way it had not been before (Shafer & Wagner, 2019) and initiating a slow partisan realignment that had its roots in the Dixiecrat revolt against Harry Truman in 1948 and accelerated rapidly with the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement and its embrace by the national Democratic Party. This realignment was further hastened and exacerbated by the emergence of the Republican “Southern Strategy”1 intent on capitalizing on the racial animus and racist beliefs among many previously loyal Democrats in the South (Hughes, 2018; Maxwell & Shields, 2019).2 Republicans, who had been locked out of electoral success in the South since the end of Reconstruction due to their affiliation, in the minds of Southern whites, with Lincoln and the North in the Civil War, saw a chance to make the region if not Republican, then at least competitive after decades of uncontested Democratic rule, which also meant abandoning their old (and relatively weak)3 status as the party of racial equality and implicitly ceding this

1 In fact, Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act was an important factor in turning Black voters away from the Republican Party and separating the modern Republican Party from the “party of Lincoln” in the minds of white Southerners (Carmines & Stimson, 1989; Hughes, 2018). Previously, Southern discontent had at least in part been focused on Republicans due to their role in desegregation (Aistrup, 1996). 2 Maxwell and Shields (2019) argue further that what they call the “long southern strategy” was not solely about race, but further focused on activating conservative sentiment on issues of women’s rights and religion, a factor that might have played a role in the rise of cultural values as a partisan cleavage especially since the 1990s (Shafer & Wagner, 2019). 3 As Heersink and Jenkins (2020) write, post-Reconstruction Republican Party politics in the South, especially between 1880 and 1950, revolves around the clashes between two factions, the “Black and Tans” and the “Lily Whites”. The Southern Strategy was

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mantle to the national Democratic party. Whereas economic and racial conservatism proceeded on comparatively separate tracks before 1970, they were joined together to reshape the political landscape between 1970 and 1994, joined together by the national Democratic Party’s embrace of civil rights, but joined together also by those Republicans who perceived of themselves as the true heirs of George Wallace (Carter, 1999). “The new rhetoric”, Carter writes, drawing the line from Wallace and Goldwater to Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Gingrich, “may lack Wallace’s visceral edge (and wit), but it reflects the same callous political exploitation of the raw wounds of racial division in our country” (p. xiv). While political patterns in Alabama in prior decades had been primarily factional battles within the Democratic Party, combined with a few revolts in Hill Country counties, Alabama politics from the mid-1960s onward was shaped by decisions made by both major parties: The national Democratic Party’s decision to embrace the Civil Rights Movement, and the Republican Party’s decision to abandon bi-racial coalition building efforts in favor of the new “Southern Strategy.” Prior to the mid-1960s, the general public appeared largely unaware of the growing differentiation between the parties on matters of race and civil rights (Carmines & Stimson, 1986), even though elected Dixiecrats and their allies grew increasingly concerned throughout the 1950s. As Maxwell and Shields (2019) write, the Dixiecrats had imagined their 1948 revolt to turn into a show of strength that “would bring Democrats to their knees begging for reconciliation with their southern base” (p. 1). That did not happen, and their intermittent victories on the state level, in Alabama as well as other states across the region, did not reverse the national party’s trajectory towards a commitment to racial equity and inclusion in the long run. In Alabama, J. Lister Hill, after all, had almost suffered a surprise defeat in 1962 at the hands of Republican candidate James D. Martin because, in the white voting public’s perception, Hill’s reputation had become tainted by his association with the national Democratic Party and the Kennedy administration (Black & Black, 2002). Martin ran a campaign of open racial appeals and went

the result of the “Lily Whites”’ victory. In Alabama, however, the “Lily Whites” had successfully taken over the Republican Party much earlier: by 1912, after disenfranchisement following the 1901 Constitution had all but pushed Black Alabamians out of politics altogether, the Black and Tans had disappeared as a noteworthy faction inside the Alabama Republican Party (Walton Jr., 1975).

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as far as to call for “a return of the spirit of 1861” (Lamis, 1984). Hill’s own consistent votes against civil rights legislation did nothing to prevent this electoral sea change, and his replacement was a much more (racially but also economically) conservative Democrat, Wallace stalwart Jim Allen. Longtime Alabama Senator John Sparkman managed to avoid Hill’s fate, but this meant that he himself became much more conservative over the 1970s than he had been in prior decades. Alabama, which had once had the most (economically) liberal Democratic senators of the Deep South states, quickly shifted into solidly conservative territory for both Democrats and Republicans competing for its Senate seats starting in the early 1970s (Black & Black, 2002).4 White Alabamians, who had long been willing to support economic liberalism5 if it was understood that white supremacy and racial segregation were to remain untouched, began looking for an alternative political home when it became clear the national Democratic Party was no longer willing to tolerate or overlook this pact in the South. Forced to choose between economic liberalism and racial liberalism or racial conservatism and economic conservatism, many white Alabamians prioritized racial conservatism. Burnham (1964) had predicted that the end of one-party-rule in Alabama might lead to a reinvigoration of the old regional and class-driven factional divisions, and might very well entail a coalition of poor North Alabama whites and Black voters. However, it seems that he may have underestimated the unifying effect that the Civil Rights Movement had on Alabama whites. No individual events had a bigger impact on the partisan realignment and the rise of the Republican party in the South than the 1964 presidential election, the passage of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965) (McKee & Springer, 2015). What followed was a true tidal wave of change—the complete de- and then realignment of

4 It should be noted that Howell Heflin, Sparkman’s successor and the last Democrat to hold a U.S. Senate seat from Alabama until Doug Jones’ victory in 2017, was generally a conservative Democrat, but much more moderate than many other Southern Democrats on issues of race, especially in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1993, for example, he supported Senator Carol Moseley Braun’s effort to deny renewal of a Confederate Flag patent to the Daughters of the Confederacy. When working on a possible compromise to extend the Voting Rights Act in 1982, Heflin wanted his work in support of the extension to be kept quiet. He is quoted as having said: “Don’t give me any credit. I don’t want to be in the newspapers on this matter” (Browder & Stanberry, 2010). 5 In fact, Hawkey (1982) finds that in 1976, low-income whites in the South were less conservative than their northern counterparts.

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the South from solidly Democratic to almost equally solidly Republican. This electoral tidal wave, set in motion in 1964, transformed Southern politics between 1970 and 1994. In fact, the complete partisan realignment in Alabama, like in much of the South, only took several decades because it was delayed by incumbency effects and by attempts of the Alabama Democratic Party to aggressively separate itself from the national party. Without the incumbency advantage and the open ideological break with the national party, Republican dominance in the state and the region would likely have risen even faster.6 In 1994, Hadley (1994) asserted that the bi-racial Southern Democratic coalition was in danger of being blown up by issues of affirmative action and economic advancement. It turned out to have been much weaker and less stable for the past two decades than previously assumed.7 McKee (2012) argues that the creation of large numbers of majority-minority districts actually sped up the ascendancy of the southern Republican party by eliminating the electoral base of white southern Democrats—bi-racial coalitions which included considerable numbers of white voters—and simultaneously concentrating core Democratic voters in fewer districts, drastically reducing the number of swing or competitive districts. Creating incumbent-less new districts also helped speed up the dissolution of partisan attachments some southern white voters still felt for the Democratic party and especially their current (often still Democratic) representatives. As Lupton and Thornton (2019) demonstrate, white Southerners responded to the passage of major civil rights legislation in the midand late 60s with increased partisan ambivalence independent of the 6 Alabama senator Howell Heflin, John Sparkman’s successor, for example, managed to hold on to his seat into the 1990s. However, once he retired in 1996, Republican Jeff Sessions easily won the open seat, suggesting an already completed ideological and partisan reshuffling that was only delayed by loyalty to an incumbent Southern Democrat. Richard Shelby’s switch from Democrat to Republican after the 1994 midterm, however, suggests that by the 1990s, not even incumbency was enough to further delay a complete partisan realignment in Alabama. Heflin, though himself a moderate to conservative Democrat, was more liberal than Shelby and actually a moderate on issues of race. 7 It should however also be noted that white racial moderates felt more at home in the changing Democratic Party than they had been in the old one. For example, Gaillard (2006) writes that Lowndes County probate judge Harrell Hammonds told a reporter in 1970 that he felt “freer” now than before. He was a racial moderate who had faced intimidation attempts and threats. “Even in the bad times,” he is quoted as saying, “there were people who wanted to do what was right but they were afraid or didn’t know where to start.”

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prior strength of partisan attachment, a decoupling of partisanship from partisan evaluations, and a gradual shift in partisan attachments. This does not mean an immediate change of partisan self-identification—and in fact white Southerners did remain Democrats in the immediate aftermath of the Civil Rights movement and the passage of major civil rights legislation. That is, elite partisan polarization on issues of race within the national parties started the process of “Republicanization” of white Southerners, as those voters began relying less on partisanship and more on policy-relevant attitudes when making voting decisions. As white Southerners became more ambivalent (Lupton & Thornton, 2019),8 an early sign of their impending detachment from the Democratic Party culminating in the 1994 election, Black Southerners became the most loyal Democratic constituent bloc after 1965 and were crucial in handing the presidency to Jimmy Carter (Hadley, 1994). Initially however, Black voters supported national Democrats but withheld their support from Alabama Democrats on the state level and conservative and segregationist Dixiecrats were able to win Democratic primaries and general elections without Black support up until the mid-1970s. Starting in 1978, however, Democrats facing more serious Republican opposition relied on Black voters even in Alabama, a sign of how far white de- and realignment had progressed by then (Lamis, 1984). Considerable progress was made for black Southerners over the course of the 1970s and the following decades, such that their share of elected black officials was at times larger than their share of the black electorate (Hadley, 1994). In Alabama in 2000, Black voters made up 24% of the electorate. Black elected officials made up 25.7% of Alabama State Representatives and 22.9% of Alabama State Senators in the same year. Black elected officials made up 16.7% of all elected officials in Alabama, across levels of government (Bositis, 2000). Southern Black voters rapidly affiliated with the Democratic Party over the course of the early 1960s. As Matthews and Prothro (1966) show, about 51% of Black Southerners identified as Democrats in 1961. By 8 Maxwell and Shields (2019) show that white male Southerners on average identified as Democrats until 1968, were stuck in independent territory between 1972 and 1996—with the exception of 1976, which briefly brought them back into the Democratic fold—and have been identifying as Republicans since 2000. White southern women lagged a little behind, entering independent territory only 1984, and crossing over to Republican party identification in 2004, with a temporary return to a more independent lean in 2008. Both of these trends show that as expected, party ID was comparatively slow to change.

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1964, this number had risen to 76%. At the same time, Black voter registration rates increased dramatically: in 1962, less than 15% of Alabama’s Black population was registered to vote. By 1972, this number had climbed to over 60%, and by 1986, it had reached 75% (Hood III et al., 2012). For comparison, white attrition from the Democratic Party in the South was a much slower process: 61% of white Southerners identified as Democrats in 1961, compared to 64% in 1964, remaining essentially unchanged. In fact, white Southerners in 1964 remained emotionally attached to the Democratic Party (Matthews & Prothro,1966) and unlikely to change their party affiliation in the near future. However, their voting behavior, especially in national-level elections, was much less stable. In other words, one important precursor to partisan realignment was prior partisan de-alignment: Between 1952 and 1984, the share of Southerners identifying as Independents increased from 10 to 35% of the electorate (Black & Black, 1987). Dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party may have led to less desire to actively identify as Democrats, but during the 1960s and 1970s in particular, resistance to affiliation with the long-hated Republican Party was still strong, even when vote choice, especially in presidential elections, began shifting towards Republicans.9 The other precursor to partisan realignment among white Southerners was a change in party image, and here, a shift was noticeable among white Southerners as early as the mid-1960s (Matthews & Prothro, 1966). Matthews and Prothro also show that race was the main reason for defection from the Democratic Party for Southern whites: in 1960, 100% of voters who identified as strong Democrats and liberals and held racially moderate and integrationist views voted for Democrats, compared to 67% of weak Democrats with the same set of attitudes. However, among those who saw themselves as liberals and strict segregationists, the numbers were 93% for strong Democrats and 67% for weak Democrats. 79% of conservative strict segregationists voted for Democrats if they thought of themselves as strong Democrats, compared to 47% if they considered themselves weak Democrats (Matthews & Prothro, 1966). In other 9 It is important to note here that the partisan realignment may have been further slowed and masked by the rise of a new kind of Southern politician: the white Democrat quietly trying to court newly enfranchised Black voters while—at least for the time being—still holding on to a large enough share of their traditional white base through the expression of conservative attitudes. Browder and Stanberry (2010) call this “stealth reconstruction”, and their examples of successful practitioners include, among others, longterm Alabama Senator Howell Heflin.

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words, where ideological disconnect and tension was the largest, the willingness to defect even in 1960 increased dramatically if party identification was weak. By 1994, Democratic Party identification in Alabama10 had fallen to 54%11 and by 2007 it had declined to 42%.12 Aistrup (1996) notes that by the early 1990s, a full 24% of Republican activists in Alabama were converted Democrats. In addition to changes to Southern politics caused by the burgeoning Civil Rights movement and increasing pressure to desegregate, the Southern electorate was also changing due to migration. Whereas in 1950, only 8% of the South’s white population was born outside of the South, this number had risen to 20% by 1980 (Black & Black, 1987). For Alabama, these numbers were 3% and 8%, respectively, but that still amounts to almost a tripling of non-Southern whites in the Alabama electorate over a period of 30 years. During the 1950s, but especially the 1960s and 1970s, Alabama’s voters became less homogenous because of enfranchisement of Southern Black voters as well as because of inmigration of Northern whites. Both contributed to a changing politics, and both are likely to have added to an under-siege mentality of the formerly fully dominant faction in Alabama politics, Alabama-born white voters. Chapter 2 showed consistent and long-established regional divisions within Alabama when it came to electoral behavior, with Hill country whites both being least likely to identify with the old Alabama Democratic Party in the first place, and least likely to defect in the 1950s, when Progressives and Dixiecrats fought over control of the Alabama Democratic Party and its nominating procedures. These divisions still persisted in this following period of upheaval and change, but they broke down in favor of uniform partisan shifts at times. By 1994, they started to solidify into a new pattern: a Democratic Black Belt, caused by its

10 These numbers are for all Alabamians, regardless of race, so numbers for white

Alabamians automatically have to be proportionately lower. 11 The American National Election Studies (www.electionstudies.org), 1994 Time Series Study. 12 Party affiliation among adults in Alabama, Pew Research Center, accessed 01/07/2022. In 2014, 80% of Black Alabamians identified as Democrats, compared to only 20% of white Alabamians (Pew Research Center).

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high share of Black voters and their strong affiliation with the Democratic Party, and a Republican rest of the state, caused by a near uniform shift of white Alabamians towards the Republican Party. Whereas in the 1940s and 1950s, regional divisions were driven by splits within the white (non-northern-born) electorate in Alabama (Black voters remained largely disenfranchised), starting in the 1960s, the emerging regional changes and new voting patterns are largely driven by splits along racial lines, with whites from all parts of the state becoming increasingly Republican (albeit at uneven rates) and Black voters rapidly solidifying in the Democratic camp. Black enfranchisement was able to mask white attrition in the Democratic strongholds of Alabama, the Black Belt counties, for a while, but the shifts and changes are visible throughout the 1970s and 1980s. It also bears repeating that the realignment happened at differing speed for presidential elections, senatorial elections, and gubernatorial elections, further contributing to shifting patterns during this time of electoral upheaval. In other words, the contours of electoral competition in Alabama started to fundamentally change with the advent of the Civil Rights Movement. During the decades of one-party-rule and the uncontested dominance of the Alabama Democratic Party, factional divisions had been the main vehicle for political disagreement. Elections were decided on the primary stage, and Dixiecrats and Progressives, with their respective regional bases, fought over control of the party apparatus and nominating process—and with it, control of the state. These divisions were cleavages along regional divisions formed by different economic histories and circumstances. The Dixiecrats and Bourbon Democrats represented the old planter and industrial elites of the Black Belt, the part of the state where the soil had been most amenable to large cotton plantations and therefore the pre-war heart of Alabama slavery. The Progressives found support in the Hill Country of North Alabama, which was populated by small farmers and where the standard of living for the white population was lower, and populist sentiments were widespread. North Alabama harbored long-running resentment over the political dominance and economic exploitation by the southern part of the state, and frequently expressed this resentment at the voting booth. This was, however, predominantly an intra-Democratic civil war. While there was some attrition among North Alabama whites, with portions of voters choosing independent or even Republican candidates in local elections,

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the vast majority of white Alabamians remained loyal to the Democratic Party. By the late 1960s, these economic divisions were largely supplanted by racial divisions. The reasons for this were twofold. First of all, whites in the old Alabama had shared a belief in white supremacy. Even racial moderates did not campaign on being racial moderates, for the most part they mostly avoided the issue. Open racism did and could win elections, but adherence to a belief in white superiority and segregation was also implicitly assumed among Alabama white voters. That changed after Brown v Board of Education and with the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, when open battle lines on issues of race were drawn, and the national Democratic Party sided with those fighting for racial equality. Secondly, the pre-Civil Rights Movement electorate in Alabama was almost exclusively white. Black voters were successfully disenfranchised, which meant that the political discussion was entirely a debate among different factions of white Alabamians. By the late 1960s, this started to change, and with the breakdown of segregation, race stopped being a latent factor where broad agreement among (white) Alabamians was often quietly assumed, and became an open fault line. It could no longer be assumed that all politicians (or all voters) shared a belief in white supremacy. Economic divisions, therefore, became less potent as a dividing line for white Alabamians, and with increasing competitiveness, electoral conflict moved from factional infighting to inter-party campaigning.13 Dixiecrats asserted control over the Alabama Democratic Party more completely and successfully from the late 1960s through the 1980s, but the terrain had changed. Factional control over the Alabama Democratic Party started to no longer automatically mean de facto control over the state and (almost) all its elected offices. Regional divisions among the electorate persisted, but they became different divisions. No longer was it solely or even predominantly

13 As Acharya et al. (2018) note, Black Belt whites have consistently held higher racial resentment than whites in parts of the South with lower rates of slavery. This pattern applies to Alabama’s regional divisions as well. However, as can be seen throughout this chapter, this divergence in racial attitudes was not large enough to mitigate the partisan realignment of white Alabamians. It did mean, however, that Black Belt whites, traditionally the most loyal to the Bourbon Democrats, both had the most room to swing and swung more quickly.

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a fight between small farmers and old planter and industrial elites,14 it became a clash between racial moderates and segregationists, between white and black voters, between longtime natives and northern transplants, between the shrinking rural and the growing suburban parts of the state. Political divisions and their regional expressions did not vanish, but the battle lines were transformed.

County-Level Shifts 1970–1994: Partisan Realignment While Republicans started to make inroads among Alabama voters from the 1960s onwards, the Dixiecrats and their open efforts to distance themselves from the national Democratic Party and its civil rights platform meant an uneven pace for realignment. Table 3.1 clearly shows this varying speed at which Alabama transformed its different political offices from Democratic into Republican strongholds. On the presidential level, the transformation was swift: after the rebellions of 1948 and 1960, Alabama voted for Goldwater in 1964 and remained Republican from then on, with the exception of 1976, where the nomination of fellow Southerner Jimmy Carter seemed to briefly sway white Alabamians. As Maxwell and Shields (2019) remind us, in 1968, the first presidential election after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, Strom Thurmond endorsed Nixon over Wallace, who was running as a third party candidate that year, out of fear that Wallace could not win but Humphrey very well could. Humphrey of course had been the driving force behind the inclusion of a civil rights plank in the Democratic platform in 1948, which caused the first Dixiecrat revolt.

14 The longevity of the old economic divisions, however, could be seen for example in the 1966 gubernatorial race, when George Wallace was not permitted to succeed himself and Republicans therefore hoped for a pickup by leaning into segregationist rhetoric and running James D. Martin, former challenger to Senator Hill and current member of the U.S. House. When Lurleen Wallace, George Wallace’s wife, ran in his stead, their hopes were quickly dashed because while “no one doubted that Congressman Martin was a segregationist, (...) it is hard for a rich man’s segregationist to beat a poor man’s segregationist” (Strong, 1972), a nod to Wallace’s populist rhetoric and roots. However, Wallace still faced the most opposition in the Hill Country, most likely partly due to his very public switch from a member of the loyalist/progressive faction in the 1940s to the leader of the Dixiecrat/Bourbon Democrat faction by the 1960s.

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Despite these early shifts on the presidential level, Alabama’s two senate seats were held by Democrats until 199415 and 1996, respectively. Incumbency and the ability of Alabama senators to define a brand independent of the national Democratic Party played a decisive role here. On the state level, the full transformation took even longer but was preceded by a longer period of partisan competition, due partly to even greater independence of candidates and elected officials from the national parties, partly to term limits and consequently a reduced incumbency effect.16 Aistrup (1996) calls this the “top-down advancement” of Republicanism in the South. Between 1987 and 2002, Alabama behaved as a swing state when it came to gubernatorial elections, alternating between Republican and Democratic office holders, with elections often being decided by small margins. In other words during this time period, statewide voting patterns in presidential elections were an expression of Alabamians’ view of the national Democratic Party, senatorial election patterns reflected powerful incumbency effects, and gubernatorial patterns were a result of term limits and therefore most accurately reflected the partisan de- and realignment process even at the state level, and the resulting competitiveness of elections among (white) Alabamians. These new realities are also reflected in county-level shifts across elected offices. The new regional divisions become apparent for national and state-level elections over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, but, due in large part to the varying strength of incumbency as well as association with the national Democratic Party, they manifest at different points in time. For presidential elections (Fig. 3.1), the realignment happens faster and with it the reversal of the county-level shift patterns that were observable in earlier decades (see Chapter 2): the Black Belt, traditionally the region most loyal to the Bourbon Democrat faction in the Alabama Democratic Party, was rebelling against (in other words shifting away from) Democrats the most strongly in the 1950s and early 1960s. With the arrival of the Civil Rights Movement and especially desegregation and enfranchisement efforts as well as the passage of the Civil Rights Act, 15 Though Richard Shelby ran in 1992 and 1998, he switched parties after the 1994 midterms. 16 From 1901 until 1968, Alabama governors could not serve more than one consecutive 4-year term. Since then, they are limited to two consecutive 4-year terms. They may however serve an unlimited number of non-consecutive terms.

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Table 3.1 Winning margins of select elections in Alabama, 1970–1994 Year

Office

Winning party

Candidate

1972

President

Republican

1976 1980 1984

President President President

Democrat Republican Republican

1988

President

Republican

1992

President

Republican

1966

Senate 2

Democrat

1972

Senate 2

Democrat

1984

Senate 2

Democrat

1990

Senate 2

Democrat

1986 1992

Senate 3 Senate 3

Democrat Democrat

1974

Governor

Democrat

1978 1982

Governor Governor

Democrat Democrat

1986

Governor

Republican

Richard Nixon (I) Jimmy Carter Ronald Reagan Ronald Reagan (I) George H. W. Bush George H. W. Bush (I) John Sparkman (I) John Sparkman (I) Howell Heflin (I) Howell Heflin (I) Richard Shelby Richard Shelby (I) George Wallace (I) Fob James George Wallace H. Guy Hunt

Percent

Margin

Voter turnout

72.4

46.9

42.9

55.7 48.8 60.5

13.1 1.3 22.3

46.3 49.1 50.9

59.2

19.3

47.0

47.7

6.8

55.4

60.1

22.1

41.0

62.3

29.2

44.8

62.7

26.3

48.4

60.6

21.2

39.8

50.3 64.8

0.6 31.7

42.1 51.8

83.2

68.4

24.4

72.6 57.6

46.7 18.5

28.7 40.5

56.4

12.8

42.9

Black Alabamians entered the electorate in significant numbers. They were both loyal to the (national) Democratic Party as well as concentrated in the Black Belt. The result of this expansion of the electorate is both an increase in turnout (see Table 3.1) as well as a shift of Black Belt counties towards the Democratic Party in presidential elections during this time where the state as a whole shifted away and in fact switched to the Republican Party. In 1964, the old pattern was still in place (see Fig. 2.4 in Chapter 2): the once-loyal Black Belt was in full revolt, the once-skeptical Hill Country remained more loyal to Democrats. By 1972, the state seemed uniformly Republican on the presidential level, with regional divisions appearing all but erased entirely. Between 1972 and 1976, the

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Fig. 3.1 President: 1972–1980

state shifted uniformly towards the Democratic Party, giving it its last victory in Alabama in a presidential election, due in large part to Jimmy Carter’s Georgian roots. The new regional pattern became visible immediately after that, however: Between 1976 and 1980, the Black Belt became more Democratic due to the addition of Black voters to the electorate, their concentration in Black Belt counties, and their loyalty to the national Democratic Party. This happened while white Alabamians across the state became increasingly Republican. Starting in 1984 (Fig. 3.2) this new pattern is firmly established, and while electoral shifts in the 1980s are more uniform, the election results from then on display the pattern reflecting the unmistakable new reality: electoral fault lines for presidential elections had shifted from “Progressives versus Dixiecrats” to a division along racial lines, and the new regional patterns strongly and clearly reflected that.

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Fig. 3.2 President: 1980–1992

A small remnant of the old pattern, however, still remained into the 1980s, a glimpse of the political battles of decades past. As can be seen in Fig. 3.3, between 1980 and 1984, Percent White predicts Democratic vote loss almost linearly. There are, however, a handful of counties that

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Fig. 3.3 President: shift 1980–1984, by percent white and percent male unemployed

defy the trend: Marion, Winston, Franklin, Jackson, and Cherokee counties record slightly lower Democratic losses, despite being among the counties with the highest percentage of white residents. Marion, Winston, Franklin, and Cherokee are all Hill Country counties, while Jackson is in the Tennessee Valley. All of them have a relatively high male unemployment rate. Hill Country counties were traditionally poorer, their population was made up of workers and small family farmers who traditionally resented the (white) planter and industrial elites of the Black Belt. In those predominantly white counties that were hit harder by unemployment, attrition from the Democratic Party among white voters appears slowed, a reminder of the lingering effect of the old regional and political divisions.17

17 By far the hardest hit counties were Greene, Lowndes, Sumter, Wilcox, and Hale, all in the Black Belt. All five are majority Black counties.

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Senator John Sparkman (Senate Class 2), who in earlier decades had been losing support particularly in the Black Belt due to his reputation as a relative liberal and his appearance on the Stevenson ticket in 1952, which had included a Civil Rights plank with Sparkman’s support, successfully avoided further electoral decline and therefore helped postpone partisan de- and realignment for Alabama’s senate seats. In fact, Sparkman and Hill had both been New Deal Democrats and at least ideological allies of Governor “Big Jim” Folsom in the 1950s. However, whereas Hill continued to lose support and faced an unexpectedly close election in 1962, where he beat his Republican opponent by a mere 1.7%,18 Sparkman’s electoral fortunes rebounded once he recalibrated and rebranded as a much more conservative Democrat in the 1960s and 1970s.19 Whereas J. Lister Hill was succeeded by the much more conservative Wallace ally and Dixiecrat Jim Allen, John Sparkman’s successor, former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Howell Heflin, was more moderate than Sparkman in his later years. Heflin defeated U.S. Representative Walter Flowers, a longtime Wallace ally, in the primary and ran unopposed in the 1978 general election. Sparkman’s support in his later years did not show much regional variation, but the shifts between 1972 (Sparkman’s last election) and 1984 (Heflin’s first contested election) show the now-familiar pattern of increasing support among the Black Belt and eroding support in the Hill Country of North Alabama (see Fig. 3.4).20 In 1980, Republican Jeremiah Denton had won J. Lister Hill’s old seat (Senate Class 3). Jim Allen, the close ally of George Wallace’s who had succeeded Hill in 1969, died in office in 1978. Wallace appointed his 18 Hill’s opponent in the 1962 general election, near-victorious Republican James D. Martin, banked on the unpopularity of the Kennedy administration’s civil rights initiatives and ran a campaign fueled by unapologetic and unmitigated racial appeals, going as far as to openly call for a “return of the spirit of 1861” (Lamis, 1984). 19 As Burnham (1964) notes, Hill was consistently one of the most liberal Southern Democrats in the Senate on all domestic issues with the exception of race. But even on racial issues, he was a relative moderate. He only veered in a markedly more conservative direction in the months before the 1962 election, perhaps in anticipation of the troubles he might face from a conservative Republican challenger in a changing electoral climate. 20 Heflin increased support compared to Sparkman in parts of northern Alabama, specif-

ically in his home county of Colbert and the neighboring counties of Lauderdale and Franklin, but those are likely hometown effects more than ideological or regional fault lines. Sparkman had been a longtime enemy of the Dixiecrat faction, especially in the 1950s, and the resulting regional loyalty likely persisted throughout the rest of his Senate career.

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Fig. 3.4 Senate 2: 1966–1984

widow, Maryon Pittman Allen, to fill the seat until a special election was held that fall. However, Pittman Allen lost the primary to Donald Stewart, in part because of her critical comments about George Wallace. Pittman Allen attacked Stewart as a “flaming liberal” during the campaign, and her brother had even formed a group of conservative Democrats supporting his Republican opponent. Stewart prevailed in the November election, however, and entered the Senate as a moderate, more liberal than Allen and with the enthusiastic support of organized labor. In 1980 however, Stewart lost the primary to Jim Folsom Jr., “Big Jim” Folsom’s son, who ran to Stewart’s right and garnered support from the Bourbon Democrats and Big Mules who had despised his father. He lost the general election to Jeremiah Denton, who benefitted from a Republican wave year and lack of an incumbency effect. As Lamis (1984) notes, Alabama voters in 1980 had a choice between two conservatives—one a Democrat, one a Republican—and in that scenario,

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Reagan’s coattails were enough for Denton. Conservative and better-off whites went to Denton, and Folsom retained support among Black voters and poorer whites (Lamis, 1984). Faced with two ideologically conservative candidates and no incumbent, the partisan realignment among the Alabama electorate became obvious even in 1980. In 1986, Richard Shelby flipped this seat back for Democrats, though the election was decided by a 0.6% margin. Shelby expanded his support, and in 1992 won reelection comfortably with a 31.7% margin. He saw the writing on the wall, however, and switched his party affiliation to Republican immediately after the Republican wave in the 1994 election. Shelby’s first electoral victory in 1986 (Fig. 3.5), happening during the period of realignment and against a Republican incumbent, clearly showcased Democratic strength among the expanded Black Belt electorate and their weakness among the (whiter) rest of the state. Between 1986 and

Fig. 3.5 Senate 2: 1984–1990 vs Senate 3: 1986–1992

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1992, Shelby benefitted from a uniform shift in his favor, a clear expression of the lingering power of incumbency. The Black Belt remained his strongest region, but his support increased more or less uniformly across the state. 1992 marked Shelby’s last election as a Democrat, and by 1998, Shelby won by a 26.9% margin as a Republican and his electoral base had flipped: he lost the Black Belt and won the rest of the state. Shelby’s electoral calculation had paid off and 1992 should become the last time a Democrat had won a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama until Doug Jones’ 2017 victory. Looking at Shelby’s gains between 1986 and 1992 (Fig. 3.5), they seem at first glance to defy the established pattern for this time period. He gains the most in whiter, wealthier areas, and the margin drops off in the Black Belt and those North Alabama counties with higher male unemployment (Fig. 3.6). Of course, this makes sense when taking into account that he competed against a Republican incumbent in 1986. Those areas— areas that had become Republican faster—were where he expectedly did

Fig. 3.6 Senate 3: shift 1986–1992, by percent white and percent male unemployed

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the worst initially. As an incumbent, and after establishing his bona fides as a conservative Democrat, these are the areas with the most room for growth, and consequently the areas that shifted most strongly in his favor. In other words, Shelby, who had reliably been one of the more conservative Democrats while serving in the U.S. House, managed to halt and even to a certain degree reverse realignment in his initial reelection. However, the 1994 Republican wave appears to have convinced him that his electoral fortunes going forward would be weighed down by the Democratic Party brand rather than helped by it. On the gubernatorial level, electoral results are both shaped by the state Democratic Party’s relative success to continually distance itself from the national party, which slowed down realignment compared to presidential elections, and the comparative lack of an incumbency advantage,21 which masked partisan realignments in senatorial elections into the mid-1990s. Lamis (1984) quotes Ray Jenkins, editor of the Alabama Journal as going so far as to assert that Wallace, due to his populist rhetoric and roots in the progressive faction of the party combined with his aggressive race-baiting, segregationist stances, and leadership of the Dixiecrat faction in the 1960s and 1970s, “had the effect of obliterating the old Dixiecrat-Loyalist split.” The old regional division with “the conservative South Alabama voting Dixiecrat and the somewhat liberal North Alabama voting Loyalist” had ceased, so Jenkins. However, even during the Wallace years, county-level patterns oftentimes show Wallace’s comparative weakness in North Alabama, despite the region’s overwhelmingly white population. The Hill Country seemed to see him more as a Dixiecrat than Jenkins surmised. By 1986, Alabama essentially behaved as a swing state when it came to selecting its governors. Fob James, who succeeded Wallace in 1978, was a Republican turned Democrat for the sake of this election.22 Even though James won every county except for Cullman, Winston, and Blount counties in the Hill Country in 1978 (see Fig. 3.7), the electoral shifts from 1974 to 1978 already show the new partisan division, with the Black Belt remaining loyal to Democrats or even moving more in their

21 George Wallace circumvented the limitation to two consecutive terms between 1962 and 1978 by having his wife Lurleen step in for one term, but with the continuous Wallace streak broken in 1978, there was more room for partisan competitiveness. 22 He won a second term as a Republican in the mid-1990s.

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direction, and the rest of the state shifting towards Republicans. Interestingly, this pattern is broken for the 1978–1982 shifts before returning again for the 1982–1986 shifts. In part, this might be explained by George Wallace’s 1982 return to the governor’s mansion. Even though Wallace, in his contrite later years, received significant support from Black Alabamians, there might have been residual resentment at work, causing him to do slightly worse in many Black Belt counties than James had done or that (ultimately defeated) Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill Baxley would do in 1986.23 After Hunt’s election in 1986, Alabama experienced a number of close and competitive gubernatorial elections before becoming firmly Republican on the gubernatorial level in 2006. In other words, partisan change on the state level was slower to complete than for national offices. When looking at the 1982–1986 county-level shifts by Percent White and Percent Male Unemployed, the trends enhancing and obscuring the new patterns become clear: Whiter counties shift more forcefully away from Democrats, underscoring the growing attachment of white Alabamians to the Republican Party. However, male unemployment rates can reduce these shifts somewhat—whiter counties where male unemployment is higher shift less strongly towards Republicans than their percentage of white population would have suggested. There is, in other words, still a remnant of economic attachment to the Democratic Party among poorer white voters in North Alabama (Fig. 3.8). A further comparison between gubernatorial and senatorial elections (Table 3.2) underlines the importance of this time period as one of electoral upheaval and realignment that was nonetheless patterned in predictable ways. Generally speaking, and as is obvious from the maps, whiter (and richer) counties vote more Republican in both senatorial and gubernatorial elections, while Percent Male Unemployment remains a comparatively strong predictor of higher Democratic vote share across elections and types of office. However, gubernatorial and senatorial patterns start to diverge when looking at the inter-electoral shifts.24 On 23 During his time as Alabama Attorney General in the 1970s, Baxley became famous for his successful prosecution of Robert Chambliss, one of the perpetrators of the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing in Birmingham in 1963. 24 Keep in mind, however, that the gubernatorial elections are George Wallace’s last election and the election of Guy Hunt, first Republican to be elected to the Alabama Governor’s mansion since Reconstruction. For the Senate, these two elections capture

3

Fig. 3.7 Governor: 1974–1986

TIDAL WAVE OF CHANGE: 1970–1994

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Fig. 3.8 Governor: shift 1982–1986, by percent white and percent male unemployed

the gubernatorial level, counties with a higher percentage of white population shift more towards Republicans, a reversal of the trend observed in the previous chapter. On the senatorial level, the old pattern still remains in place, with weaker shifts for the least Democratic counties, a fact that can most likely be attributed to incumbency effects. The same uncoupling emerges for Median Family Income (Tiers), where the most affluent counties—those least likely to vote for Democrats in the first place— remain less inclined to shift further towards Republicans, but this time this pattern holds only for the gubernatorial level. Percent Male Unemployed, the strongest predictor of a higher Democratic vote share, is also

Richard Shelby’s first victory against a Republican incumbent as well as his resounding reelection in 1992. Therefore, some of the decoupling that becomes obvious here is likely caused by idiosyncracies related to these elections. However, the patterns as well as the divergences still highlight how realignment was progressing on different tracks and at diverging speed for different elected offices.

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the strongest predictor of a larger shift away from Democrats on the gubernatorial level, but the opposite is true for the senatorial level. In other words, in this period of electoral upheaval and realignment we see a steady decoupling of electoral patterns for state- and national-level offices. Old partisan patterns and attachments still linger, but they are starting to be superseded by new political divisions and fault lines. Expansion of the electorate, migration from other states, the association of the national Democratic Party with the Civil Rights Movement as well as the Republican “Southern Strategy” all caused old regional patterns and factional divisions to break down over the course of the 1970s and 1980s. The emergence of a more competitive Republican Party and the partisan alignment along issues of race caused the breakdown of the old factional divisions and the creation of new partisan attachments, but this transformation proceeded unevenly: Presidential elections had essentially flipped by the mid-1960s, senatorial elections masked their realignment up until their abrupt switch in the mid-1990s, and gubernatorial elections became competitive in the mid-1980s and remained so the longest, up until 2002 when they also firmly transitioned into Republican hands.

Conclusion Alabama ceased to be a (Democratic) one-party state largely because of the decisions of the two (national) parties: the Democratic Party’s embrace of the Civil Rights Movement as well as the Republican Party’s Southern Strategy25 opened the door to a more competitive political climate throughout the 1970s and 1980s that would eventually culminate in the partisan transformation of the state from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican by the mid-1990s. The Alabama Democratic Party attempted to stave off this electoral sea change by distancing itself forcefully from the national party, reaffirming its commitment to white supremacy and segregation as an organizing political principle, and generally embracing conservative economic as well as racial stances.26 25 The Southern Strategy was a top-down approach, which also explains the trickledown nature of partisan realignment (Aistrup, 1996). 26 There were, of course, exceptions to this rule, but Alabama’s moderates, especially the racial moderates, still wanted to keep attention to their views at a minimum, much like they had in the past. New Deal Democrats became rarer in Alabama after the mid-1960s than they had been in prior decades, though they also did not disappear completely.

(4.28) 1.66

(1.37) −2.66 (2.11) 127.06 67 0.73

(5.42) 2.35

(1.74) −1.07 (2.67) 70.47 67 0.68

(5.49) 3.02*

(1.76) −8.87***

*= p < 0.1, **= p < 0.05, ***= p < 0.01

(2.71) Constant −127.81 Observations 67 R-Squared 0.43 (Standard Error in Parentheses)

Median Family Income (Tiers)

Percent Women Not in Labor Force

Percent Male Unemployed

Percent Male

−0.63*** (0.11) −2.87 (2.13) 22.73***

−0.78*** (0.13) −2.33 (2.70) 27.21***

−0.15 (0.14) 2.45 (2.74) 11.47**

Percent White

1986 Senate (Class 3)

1986 Governor

1982 Governor

(2.20) 144.53 67 0.55

(2.49) 198.28 67 0.49

(1.61) 7.81***

(5.04) −0.67

(4.46) 1.73

(1.43) −4.77**

−0.62*** (0.12) −4.77* (2.51) 15.75***

Shift 1982–1986 (Governor)

−0.36*** (0.11) −2.24 (2.22) 6.12

1992 Senate (Class 3)

Democratic vote share and electoral shifts, governor and senate (Class 3)

Variables

Table 3.2

(1.67) 17.47 67 0.40

(1.09) −2.10

(3.39) 0.07

0.27*** (0.08) 0.62 (1.69) −16.61***

Shift 1986–1992 (Senate Class 3)

72 R. L. WAGNER

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Despite the emergence of new partisan attachments and political fault lines—the regional and economic divisions and factional battles were if not completely replaced then at least complimented and at times overshadowed by divisions over issues of race, by migration, by an expanded electorate, and by the emergence of a more and more competitive Republican Party—some of the old patterns and battles still persisted. Hill Country whites still felt some attachment to the economically populist wing of the Democratic Party, Black Belt whites still “came home” to their ancestral political home for George Wallace and for conservative Democrats like Richard Shelby. In 1976, Jimmy Carter’s status as a fellow Southerner overrode the ideological affinity for Republican presidential candidates already felt by many white voters throughout the state. However, these were no longer the only or the defining patterns. They were increasingly pushed to the background by racial realignments and divisions over issues of equality and segregation. Electoral realignment did not happen overnight, it took several decades to complete, and in Alabama it proceeded less quickly than in other parts of the South (Lamis, 1984). On the presidential level, where the Republicanization of Alabama’s white voters progressed most quickly, the process was largely completed by 1964—but its beginnings could be felt as far back as 1948.27 This turning point came only three presidential elections after Democrats changed their numerical requirements for presidential nominations, abolishing the two-thirds threshold for delegates in favor of a simple majority (Shafer & Sawyer, 2021). This change essentially ended the Southern veto over presidential nominations and over the national Democratic Party’s policy stance on race (Black & Black, 1992). Twelve years after this 1936 reform, realignment on the presidential level was set in motion. In 1948, the Dixiecrats believed that their rebellion would force national Democrats to correct course, to realize they could not win without the South (Maxwell & Shields, 2019). When Truman did win without them, the Dixiecrats were the ones who had to adjust their strategy. Significant electoral shifts, which can be observed on the county level, were largely masked for U.S. Senate elections, especially in the case of 27 As Black and Black (1992) remark, the South (and with it Alabama) was solidly Democratic on the presidential level only between 1880 and 1944. Presidential candidates, the purest incarnation of the national party, were the first to fall victim to the slow electoral realignment among Southern whites.

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John Sparkman’s seat, by lingering loyalties to longterm incumbents. For Sparkman, in his earlier days an enemy of the Bourbon Democrat establishment and a strong leader in Alabama’s Progressive faction, this loyalty contained a regional component, based in long-running factional allegiance. In other words, Sparkman’s established association with the populist faction combined with his increasingly conservative stance on race provided him with a longer-lasting stable constituency spanning the old regional and factional divisions. This lingering loyalty resulted in rather abrupt partisan change in the mid-1990s, with Richard Shelby’s switch of parties and the retirement of Howell Heflin, John Sparkman’s successor. By 1997, both Senate seats were in Republican hands and would remain so until Doug Jones’ surprise victory in 2017. In 1993, both Senate seats had been held by Democrats. On the gubernatorial level, the state party’s attempts to distance itself from the national Democratic Party as well the limit to two consecutive terms for governors caused a yet again different progression: partisan competitiveness started to emerge in the 1980s, but it took until 2002 for this process to complete, almost a decade later than for the senatorial elections and almost four decades after realignment had happened on the presidential level.28 Poorer whites, especially in the Hill Country, remained more open to their old partisan attachments, especially to the populist-leaning Progressive faction of the Democratic Party.29 Their willingness to support Democratic candidates from North Alabama counties, especially in places where economic conditions were worse, hints at the persisting existence of the old factional divisions. The alignment of the national party 28 In fact, George Wallace was so successful at keeping Republican gains at bay on the state level that in 1974, Robert Vance, chair of the Alabama Democratic Party, is quoted as saying he is “inclined to believe that that opportunity is past” in reference to Alabama becoming a Republican state (Lamis, 1984). 29 In the 1970 Democratic primary, George Wallace ran an openly race-baiting campaign against Albert Brewer, who enjoyed strong support from Alabama’s Black voters. Brewer, however, was additionally courting Hill Country whites with support for education initiatives and reforming the 1901 Constitution, which had disenfranchised many poor whites in Northern Alabama along with Black voters in the state. Wallace narrowly won the runoff with 51.6% of the vote, but the Hill Country remained split despite Brewer’s refusal to engage in race-baiting. Brewer ended up winning several counties in North Alabama, such as Hill Country counties DeKalb, Cullman, and Winston as well as Madison county in the Tennessee Valley and Morgan county, partly in the Hill Country and partly in the Tennessee Valley.

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system along civil rights issues created partisan and electoral conditions that suppress or mask these old fault lines between populist Progressives and Bourbon Democrats and their Dixiecrat heirs. The comparatively complete takeover of the Alabama Democratic Party by Dixiecrats during the 1960s and 1970s also gave North Alabamians little reason to remain loyal to the Democratic Party which was now controlled by their old nemeses. With many if not most elected Alabama Democrats embracing both racial as well as economic conservatism during this time, the old economic fissures became dormant on the state level and were overshadowed by the parties’ respective stances on issues of race on the national level. As the following chapter will show, this means that after the mid-1990s, when Alabama Democrats, having largely given up their hopes of an enduring bi-racial winning coalition and being geographically more and more concentrated in majority-minority districts, became less ideologically distinguishable from national Democrats than they had previously been, the ideological space formerly occupied by the populistleaning Progressive faction in Alabama politics, who had been largely liberal on economic issues and largely conservative on issues of race,30 remains unoccupied by either party. What this means is that once again, a seemingly one-party state, this time under Republican control, is more internally and politically fractured than it appears.

References Acharya, A., Blackwell, M., & Sen, M. (2018). Deep roots: How slavery still shapes Southern politics. Princeton Universtiy Press. Aistrup, J. A. (1996). The southern strategy revisited: Republican top-down advancement in the South. University of Kentucky Press. Black, E., & Black, M. (1987). Politics and society in the South. Cambridge University Press. Black, E., & Black, M. (1992). The vital south: How presidents are elected. Cambridge University Press. Black, E., & Black, M. (2002). The rise of southern Republicans. Cambridge University Press. Bositis, D. A. (2000). Black elected officials: A statistical summary 2000. Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. 30 Oftentimes, this racial conservatism had been implicit and conveyed through omission, it was, until for example John Sparkman’s turn in the late 1960s, rarely as openly expressed as it was by the rival Dixiecrats.

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Browder, G., & Stanberry, A. (2010). Stealth reconstruction: An untold story of racial politics in recent Southern history. New South Books. Burnham, W. D. (1964). The Alabama senatorial election of 1962: Return of inter-party competition. Journal of Politics, 26(4), 798–829. Carmines, E. G., & Stimson, J. A. (1986). On the structure and sequence of issue evolution. American Political Science Review, 80(3), 901–920. Carmines, E. G., & Stimson, J. A. (1989). Issue evolution: Race and the transformation of American politics. Princeton University Press. Carter, D. T. (1999). From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the conservative counterrevolution, 1963-1994 (Rev. ed.). Louisiana State University Press. Gaillard, F. (2006). Cradle of freedom: Alabama and the movement that changed America. University of Alabama Press. Hadley, C. D. (1994). Blacks in southern politics: An agenda for research. The Journal of Politics, 56(3), 585–600. Hawkey, E. W. (1982). Southern conservatism 1956–1976. In L. W. Moreland, T. A. Baker, & R. P. Steed (Eds.), Contemporary Southern political attitudes and behavior: Studies and essays, Chapter 3. Praeger. Heersink, B., & Jenkins, J. A. (2020). Republican party politics and the American south, 1865–1968. Cambridge University Press. Hood III, M., Kidd, Q., & Morris, I. L. (2012). The rational southerner: Black mobilization, republican growth, and the partisan transformation of the American south. Oxford University Press. Hughes, D. A. (2018). Alabama: Race, realignment, and one party politics. In C. S. Bullock III & M. J. Rozell (Eds.), The new politics of the old South. Rowman and Littlefield. Lamis, A. P. (1984). The two party South. Oxford University Press. Lupton, R. N., & Thornton, J. R. (2019). Partisan ambivalence, partisan intensity, and racial attitudes: The impact of shifting policy positions on partisan evaluations in the 1960s. American Politics Research, 47 (6), 1259–1282. Matthews, D. R., & Prothro, J. W. (1966). Negroes and the new Southern politics. Brace and World. Maxwell, A., & Shields, T. G. (2019). The long Southern strategy: How chasing white voters in the South changed American politics. Oxford University Press. McKee, S. C. (2012). The past, present, and future of Southern politics. Southern Cultures, 18(3), 95–117. McKee, S. C., & Springer, M. J. (2015). A tale of “Two Souths”: White voting behavior in contemporary Southern elections. Social Science Quarterly, 96(2), 588–607. Shafer, B. E., & Sawyer, E. M. (2021). Eternal bandwagon: The politics of presidential selection. Palgrave Macmillan.

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Shafer, B. E., & Wagner, R. L. (2019). The long war over party structure: Democratic representation and policy responsiveness in American politics. Cambridge University Press. Strong, D. S. (1972). Alabama: Transition and alienation. In W. C. Havard (Ed.), The changing politics of the South. Louisiana State University Press. Walton Jr., H. (1975). Black republicans: The politics of the black and tans. The Scarecrow Press.

CHAPTER 4

Change Meets Continuity: 1996–2020

Abstract This chapter traces the emergence of Alabama as a one-party state of the Republican persuasion, analyzing the shifting foundations of old regional divisions. I show that after the completion of partisan realignment, Alabama ended up in many ways more polarized than it had been during its initial period as a Democratic one-party state. While even now traces of the old economic divisions can be found, they have been firmly pushed into the background by partisan splits along racial lines. Keywords One-party politics · Alabama politics · Electoral shifts · Political parties

Alabama---One-Party State Once Again? Glenn Feldman famously noted that “the South did not become Republican so much as the Republican Party became Southern” (Feldman, 2011). Others have said, in similar fashion, that the South did not leave the Democratic Party as much as the Democratic Party left the South. Regardless of how one looks at it, these assessments seem to suggest that the South changed very little while the party system changed a lot. When the two national parties stopped being aligned solely on the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. L. Wagner, Electoral Patterns in Alabama, Palgrave Studies in US Elections, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06770-9_4

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main cleavages of social welfare and started to extend partisan conflict to issues of race, culture, and foreign policy (Shafer & Wagner, 2019), white Southerners felt increasingly at odds with their longtime political home. Carmines and Stimson (1989) argue that, for example, a decision by Lyndon B. Johnson to moderate his strong stance on civil rights after the 1964 election as a conciliatory gesture towards the white South might have altered the course of this fundamental restructuring and conflict extension in long-lasting ways. Johnson decided to do the opposite, which accelerated what they call “issue evolution” and the consequent transformation of American politics. The implications of this conflict extension are far reaching and reverberated throughout the American policy space over several decades, but one of the most immediate consequences concerns the longterm prospects of Alabama as a one-party state. In other words, has Alabama come full circle and returned to its earlier state as a one-party state, as Hayes and McKee (2008) speculated for the entire Deep South, or are things once again less clear-cut when we examine them through a county-level lens of shifts and movements? If Feldman is correct, Alabama’s realignment period may have simply been the outward expression of Alabama’s unchanging political climate confronted with a rapidly and fundamentally changing party system. As Shafer and Johnston (2001) note, partisan change in the South has often been interpreted as the breaking up of a partisan solidarity that papered over racial and economic cleavages to sustain a one-party region for decades. But what does the apparent emergence of a Republican one-party region to replace the Democratic one mean in this context and are things really as stable in partisan terms as they may appear at first glance? McKee (2012) argues that the apparent Republican hegemony in the South still obscures a much more complex and potentially competitive political environment, but political conflict in recent decades seems more easily explained by racial divisions than economic ones, as for example the slow but fundamental change in party identification among white Southerners suggests. Whereas 71.3% of southern whites identified as Democrats in 1964, that number had fallen to 26.7% by 2016 (Maxwell & Shields, 2019). Chapter 3 showed that changes in party ID lagged significantly behind electoral shifts, especially for national elections, but even here, change did happen and it happened along racial lines. Alabama last voted for a Democrat for president in 1976. Before Doug Jones’ surprise victory in 2017, the state had last elected a Democratic

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U.S. senator in 1992—Richard Shelby, first elected in 1986, who paid tribute to the sea change of partisan realignment by switching parties before his 1998 reelection campaign and subsequently holding on to his seat as a Republican. Jeff Sessions, who occupied Alabama’s other Senate seat prior to his resignation in order to serve as Attorney General in the Trump administration, had even run unopposed in his bid for reelection in 2014. Republicans have held a veto-proof supermajority in both chambers of Alabama’s state legislature since 2014, and a trifecta in state government since 2011.1 The last Democratic governor of Alabama was Don Siegelman, who lost reelection in 2002 amid a controversy receiving national attention: after initially being declared the winner on election night, November 5, a late night re-tabulation of votes in (Republican) Baldwin county reduced Siegelman’s margin by 6334 votes, handing the victory to his Republican opponent Bob Riley and setting off a controversy about the legitimacy of the election result that raged for years. A recount the following day was denied by Alabama Attorney General Bill Holcombe Pryor, and—in what would prove to be a miscalculation when it came to Alabama’s political climate—Siegelman opted not to pursue a lengthy legal battle, conceding on November 18, apparently under the impression that he would be able to win back the governorship the following election.2 How could Siegelman, who had served his state not only as Governor but also as Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, and Secretary of State over the course of his twenty-six-year-long career in Alabama politics, misjudge the political climate so fundamentally that he went on to lose even the primary election the following cycle? Should a seasoned politician like him have been able to see the shifting tides, like Richard Shelby had done on the federal level four years before? While Shafer and Johnston (2006) argue that the South has been and will continue to be converging towards national voting patterns, McKee and Springer (2015) contend that Southern exceptionalism, expressed as

1 2010 first time The vast (Hughes,

marked the year Democrats lost control of the Alabama state legislature for the in 136 years, and almost all their losses came among white elected Democrats: majority of Black Democratic state legislators were able to keep their seats 2018).

2 “The changing of the guards: Bay Minette, election night,” Gulf Coast News, July 19, 2007 https://archive.vn/20130619222438/http://www.gulfcoastnewstoday.com/area_n ews/article_8eca1697-c5e1-589b-a405-b232e6947510.html.

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the overwhelming dominance of the Republican party throughout the region, is here to stay for years to come, especially in Deep South states such as Alabama. Knuckey (2017) finds no difference in racial resentment between white Democrats and white Republicans in Alabama, with overall racial resentment scores in the state among the highest, but suggests that partisan realignment in the state has been completed, with Republicans holding a 32 point advantage in party identification. Does this mean Alabama has entered a stable new era as a one-party state but this time of the Republican persuasion, or is there any evidence for recent movement—or the potential for future movement—on the county level?3 Ongoing demographic change might matter here as well: McKee and Springer (2015) show that whites in the Deep South states (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina) are significantly more likely to vote Republican for high-profile statewide offices than white voters in peripheral South states such as Virginia, Arkansas, or Tennessee. While prior to the 1990s, native southern white voters tended to be more Democratic than whites who moved to the region (Hadley, 1981), this pattern reversed after 1990, with white migration to the South being significantly more Democratic than the increasingly Republican native population (McKee, 2012). Alabama voters have generally demonstrated consistent conservatism on social issues in recent decades. A contemporaneously conducted poll showed that 78% of Alabamians approved of Alabama Supreme Court justice Roy Moore’s 2001 decision to place a monument of the ten commandments in the Alabama State Judicial Building rotunda, and 51% supported his refusal to remove it after a court had ordered him to do so (Shaw & Nicholls, 2010). This suggests at least some cross-partisan appeal of socially conservative positions in the state. Maxwell and Shields (2019) argue that the “Southern Strategy” was successful because of its three-pronged approach, combining racial resentment with anti-feminist rhetoric and conservative Christian values. At the same time, ideology and partisanship have become more closely aligned in recent years. In 1968, white Southern Democrats were on average slightly more conservative (4.82 on the 7-point ideological self-placement scale) than Southern 3 Knuckey (2017)’s finding of considerable differences with respect to racial resentment, both in absolute terms as well as in its effect on party ID, between white Alabamians and white Mississippians is both puzzling and supports the hypothesis that a more in-depth look at differences between Deep South states is both warranted and promising.

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Republicans (4.79). By 2008, this had shifted: the remaining white Democrats, at 3.92, were significantly more liberal than Republicans at 5.81 (Hood III et al., 2012). Shafer and Johnston (2001) however show that the partisan realignment of Southern whites did differ sharply by economic class: as the South overall became more prosperous, the partisan shift from Democrats to Republicans was confined largely to the top and later the top and middle income terciles,4 while the share of Republican voters among white voters in the (shrinking) low-income tercile remained unchanged throughout this period of intense partisan realignment—suggestive once again of a joint impact of both race and class as dominant partisan cleavages. Walter (2019) notes however that, in his study of Trump support in Albertville, Alabama, white residents seemed less motivated by economic anxieties than by what he calls “racialized nostalgic notions of nation and community”—remnants, perhaps, of the Old South and its notions of racial hierarchy and segregation? The debate about the importance of race and class in today’s Alabama is additionally confounded by the myriad interactions between the two. Alabama remains a poor state, its poverty rate of 15.5% exceeds the national average (12.3%) and the racial disparities within the state remain considerable—a poverty rate of 11.8% for white Alabamians versus 23.5% for Black Alabamians and 26.1% for Hispanic or Latino Alabamians of any race.5 These economic patterns further overlap with in- and out-migration: Northern Alabama’s reliance on the poultry industry created increased Latino migration to the region starting in the 1990s (“Nuevo New South”) (Walter, 2019). Alabama experienced a 145% increase in its Latino population between 2000 and 2011 (Morales-Alemán et al., 2020), from around 76,000 to about 186,000.6 At the same time, anti-immigrant sentiment in Alabama has reached new heights. Alabama HB56 for example, which was passed in 2011, is often described as

4 Hawkey (1982) finds for example that in 1976, low-income whites in the South were less conservative than their northern counterparts. 5 U.S. Census Bureau Data, 2019. The national numbers are 10.3% white, 21.2% Black, and 17.2% Hispanic or Latino of any race, so the discrepancy for white and Black Alabamians is comparable to the national average, while that for white Alabamians and Hispanics/Latinos of any race is somewhat larger. 6 By 2020, this number had grown to just under 200,000, or around 4% of the state’s population.

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“the harshest immigration law in the United States” (Walter, 2019). Walter recounts how Latino residents of the Northern Alabama town of Albertsville describe the current political climate in their community: “for a long time, to be honest with you, we didn’t feel the fear that African Americans did. We were like sort of in the background. The issue of race is between you two: Black and white. But now [after the election of Trump] it’s like, it is inclusive over everything - now we can feel in our own skin what African Americans have been telling us they feel.” Alabama also experienced significant intra-state migration between 2000 and 2010,7 fifteen out of twenty-seven Hill Country counties gained population, while twelve lost population. For the Black Belt, eight out of twenty-one counties experienced population gain, while thirteen experienced population loss (Stewart, 2016). In addition to economic hardship and demographic changes, Alabama was hit hard during the opioid crisis erupting in the first decades of the new millennium, with the state’s drug-related overdose deaths increasing by 82% between 2006 and 2014 and its opioid overdoses tripling between 2013 and 2020 (Lee et al., 2020). Most of this increase was due to opioids, and rural counties in the northwestern part of the state (Franklin, Marion, Walker, and Winston8 ) were hit particularly hard, exceeding the state average in a state with an opioid prescription rate double that of the national average (Lee et al., 2020). But despite all these hardships, Southern identity has remained strong—and not just among southern whites. As Maxwell (2014) notes, a higher percentage of Black Southerners (54.4%) than white Southerners (51.7%) identify with the label “southern,” which, she notes “requires a fundamental reconsideration of the very nature of southern identity.” Multiple political cleavages and fault lines in a state with a history of regional and factional divisions, combined with multiple layers of hardships and demographic change as well as a strong regional identity suggest that the superficially observed stability we see in electoral patterns might mask the potential for change. Walter (2019) ends his ethnographic study of Albertville in Marshall County in Northern Alabama on a hopeful note, stating that “wandering around the graveyard, it was hard not to feel a 7 In- and out-migration were about even for the state, and overall population growth was modest compared with most other Southern states. 8 All four of these counties are located in the Hill country, suggesting again some persistence of the long-running regional divisions within the state.

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little hopeful about Albertville’s future. Things were changing in insuppressible and often surprising ways. Even though people might try, it is nearly impossible to grip the past tightly enough to prevent change.”

County-Level Shifts 1996–2020: New and Old Patterns It is easy to forget just how fundamentally the South was transformed by the electoral upheaval of the 1970s and 1980s. As Maxwell and Shields (2019) note for example, by 1996, a full 70% of U.S. senators from Southern states—and 100% of U.S. senators from Alabama—were Republicans, up from 0% in 1960. As shown in Chapter 3, this both lagged behind Alabama’s transformation on the presidential level, which was essentially complete by 1964, and preceded the state-level realignment, which took until the mid-2000s to complete.9 This transformation went hand in hand with higher voter turnout, again in large part driven by the enfranchisement of Alabama’s Black voters starting in the mid-1960s. Whereas voter turnout in the 1950s ranged from around 12% to 17% for Senate elections, for example, this had climbed to about 40–60% by the early 2000s. While these are still relatively low numbers, the involvement of an expanded electorate forced Alabama Democrats to slowly change their electoral strategies. For example, George Wallace’s 1970 gubernatorial campaign has been described as one of the most racist campaigns in history—Wallace leaned fully into race-baiting and whipping up racial hatred and fear among white Alabamians as a strategy to win the primary against Albert Brewer, who was the first gubernatorial candidate since reconstruction to actively court Alabama’s Black voters. By 1982, Wallace’s own strategy had changed with a changed electorate, and Wallace himself was now relying on votes from Alabama’s Black community (Table 4.1). As Chapter 3 showed, national Democrats fared worse in Alabama much more quickly than those running for state-level office. While Alabama voters continued to support Democratic candidates for governor or senator well into the 1990s or even 2000s due to incumbency effects and successful distancing of the Alabama Democratic Party from its 9 As noted above, Republicans did not hold a trifecta in Alabama state government until after the 2010 election, which did for Alabama state government what the 1994 midterms had done for the congressional level.

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Table 4.1 Winning margins of select elections in Alabama, 1990–2020 Year

Office

Winning party

Candidate

Percent

1990

Senate 2

Democrat

60.6

21.2

39.8

1996

Senate 2

Republican

52.5

7.0

47.2

2002

Senate 2

Republican

58.6

18.8

40.8

2008

Senate 2

Republican

63.4

26.9

60.6

2017 2020

Senate 2 Senate 2

Democrat Republican

50.0 60.1

1.7 20.4

40.5 63.0

1992

Senate 3

Democrat

64.8

31.7

51.8

1998

Senate 3

Republican

63.2

26.5

39.9

2004

Senate 3

Republican

67.6

35.2

55.0

1994 1998

Governor Governor

Republican Democrat

50.3 57.9

0.9 15.8

38.6 40.7

2002 1994

Governor Lieutenant Governor Lieutenant Governor Lieutenant Governor

Republican Democrat

Howell Heflin (I) Jeff Sessions Jeff Sessions (I) Jeff Sessions (I) Doug Jones Tommy Tuberville Richard Shelby (I) Richard Shelby (I) Richard Shelby (I) Fob James Don Siegelman Bob Riley Don Siegelman Steve Windom Lucy Baxley

49.2 62.3

0.2 24.6

41.3 X

50.3

0.6

X

51.5

4.8

X

1998 2002

Republican Democrat

Margin

Voter turnout

national counterparts, Alabama essentially stopped voting for Democrats for President in 1964, with the exception of Jimmy Carter in 1976.10 As a consequence of the swifter completion of its electoral transformation, presidential election results in Alabama had by and large started conforming to a new pattern by 1984: largely uniform shifts towards one party between elections, stark regional divisions on election day, with the Black Belt voting for Democrats and the rest of the state for Republicans. By the late 1990s, senatorial elections started to display the same patterns, 10 Carter benefitted from the fact that white Alabamians considered the Georgia peanut farmer one of their own.

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with Democratic strength confined to counties in the state’s Black Belt. However, even then some variation remained. Fig. 4.1 compares election results for J. Lister Hill’s old seat (Senate class 3), held by Richard Shelby since 1986, with those for John Sparkman’s old seat (Senate class 2), held by Jeff Sessions from 1996 to 2017, Doug Jones from 2017 to 2020, and Tommy Tuberville since then. It shows election results for Shelby’s last three elections (2004, 2010, and 2016) as well as Sessions’ last two contested elections (2002 and 2008) as well as Tuberville’s first election. Doug Jones’ election in 2017 is left out of this comparison because of its high level of idiosyncrasy, which is discussed below in greater detail.

Fig. 4.1 Senate 3: 2004–2016 vs Senate 2: 2002–2020

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Across the board, Shelby does somewhat better than Sessions and Tuberville,11 including in the Black Belt. For example, Shelby won Russell county in 2004 and 2016, whereas neither Sessions nor Tuberville won that county. Shelby has also done better in Marengo, Barbour, and Montgomery counties than both Sessions and Tuberville.12 Just as the progressive faction was able to reduce attrition among North Alabama whites in the 1940s and 1950s, the 2000s and 2010s have shown that Republicans could pick up additional votes in the Black Belt by running candidates like Shelby over those like Sessions (Fig. 4.1).13 Between 1990 (Howell Heflin’s last election) and 2020, the state consistently and relatively uniformly shifted more towards the Republican Party during each election for John Sparkman’s old seat (Senate class 2). The one exception to this pattern is the 2017 special election, where Democrat Doug Jones managed to win the seat (Fig. 4.2). Longtime incumbent Jeff Sessions had resigned from the seat earlier that year to serve as Attorney General in the Trump administration. Sessions had held the seat since 1996, and he had run unopposed in his last reelection in 2014. Jones, a former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama under President Bill Clinton, had successfully prosecuted Ku Klux Klan members for their role in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombings in 1963, and enjoyed high popularity among Black Alabamians. 11 In 2004, Shelby won by a margin of 35.1%, compared to Sessions’ 18.8% margin in 2002. In 2010, Shelby’s margin was 30.5%, and Sessions’ was 26.9% in 2008. In 2016, Shelby won by 28.1 points, whereas Tuberville won by 20.4 points in 2020. 12 Both Sessions and Shelby have been losing support in Black belt counties over time, but Shelby was able to retain a higher level of support than Sessions even under those increasingly polarizing circumstances. 13 While I would argue that Shelby and Sessions are not part of different factions within the Republican Party per se, they do represent different approaches to governing, with Shelby being content to stay away from hot button issues and focusing primarily on using his position on the Senate Appropriations Committee to benefit his state. Sessions on the other hand built a reputation as a conservative firebrand. In 1986, his nomination to a federal judgeship was withdrawn after testimony from Civil Rights leaders and organizations, which led then-Alabama Senator Howell Heflin to withdraw his support for Sessions’ nomination. For the 114th Congress (2015–2017), Shelby was rated more conservative than 73% of the Senate and more conservative than 50% of Senate Republicans, according to first dimension DW-NOMINATE scores. Sessions was rated more conservative than 84% of the Senate and 71% of Republicans (VoteView.com). To use the distinction made by Grimmer et al. (2014), Shelby is an appropriator whereas Sessions and Tuberville are position takers.

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Fig. 4.2 Senate 2: 2008–2020

Jones won the Democratic primary in the first round, capturing 66.1% of the vote in a field of eight candidates. Republicans were faced with a much more contentious primary battle, which culminated in a runoff election between incumbent Senator Luther Strange, who had been appointed to the seat after Sessions’ resignation, and former judge Roy Moore. Moore had served as Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court twice,14 from 2001 to 2003 and 2013 to 2017, and had both times been removed from office for judicial misconduct.15 Even though Donald Trump endorsed 14 The Alabama Supreme Court has been elected since 1868 and has at times adopted a “third way” approach with respect to judicial decision-making as well as judicial policymaking (Drake, 2016). 15 In 2003, Moore was removed for defying a court order to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments from the Alabama Supreme Court, which he himself had installed after his election. In 2017, he was removed for six different violations of the Alabama Canon of Judicial Ethics, all of which were focused on an administrative order

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Luther Strange, much of his based preferred the more populist-sounding conservative firebrand Moore, who ended up winning the runoff by around 9%. A month before election day, the Washington Post ran a story about four women who were accusing Moore of sexual misconduct when they were teenagers and he was in his 30s.16 Moore ended up losing to Jones by a margin of 1.7%. Turnout, at 40.5%, was comparatively low, hinting at depressed enthusiasm among Republicans.17 In 2020, Jones lost to Republican nominee and former Auburn University football coach Tommy Tuberville by a margin of over 20%. All counties in the state uniformly shifted towards the Republican Party between 2017 and 2020. Between 200818 and 2017, the state had uniformly shifted towards Democrats (Fig. 4.2), with the exception of five counties that actually became more Republican during that time: Marion, Lamar, Fayette, Walker, and Cleburne, all in the Hill Country. By the 2010s, Sparkman’s old seat seemed to have settled into its new pattern, with uniform shifts across the state from election to election, but stark regional divisions during each election. This pattern looks similar for Shelby’s seat, with the shifts being equally uniform but slightly weaker between elections.19 On the gubernatorial level, things were predictably less clear even by the 1990s. Between 1994 and 1998, the state on average shifted Democratic. This shift was stronger in the Black Belt counties than in the rest of the state, but it was visible everywhere. As a consequence, control of Alabama’s Governor’s Mansion passed from Republican in 1994 to Democratic in 1998—the last time the state should have a Democratic governor for the time being (Fig. 4.3). Moore had sent to Alabama’s probate judges, essentially ordering them to defy the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling on same-sex marriage. 16 “Woman says Roy Moore initiated sexual encounter when she was 14, he was 32,” Washington Post, November 9, 2017. Accessed 02/04/2022. 17 In fact, a post-election analysis by the news outlet Politico showed a higher drop off in voters for more Republican counties compared to Democratic counties, measured against turnout for the 2016 election (“Alabama Senate 2017 special election: Moore vs. Jones”, Politico, December 12, 2017. Accessed 02/04/2022). 18 Jeff Sessions’ last contested election. 19 For presidential elections, shifts from 2000 on, and especially since 2008, have been

so weak as to be almost non-existent, suggesting that the regional divisions are currently fairly settled and the movement between elections is smaller than during any other period since 1945.

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Fig. 4.3 Governor: 1994–2002

Between 1998 and 2002 and then again between 2002 and 2006, the entire state shifted towards Republicans, though once again the shift was less pronounced in the Black Belt counties. In other words, while even this region became more Republican in the early 2000s, it did so less strongly in those counties that were to remain the Democratic stronghold in the state. This meant that by 2006, the new pattern was more or less in place on the gubernatorial level—about ten years after the senatorial level, and over twenty years after the presidential level. However, between 2006 and 2010, shifts displayed a regional split, with north Alabama becoming more Republican and south Alabama becoming more Democratic, deviating from the previous two uniform shifts (Fig. 4.4). The end result, however, was a further strengthening of the new regional division: Democratic strength in the Black Belt, driven by overwhelming support from Black voters, combined with Republican strength in the rest of the state,

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including in those Hill Country counties who used to be most rebellious in earlier years with their relative openness to Republican candidates. In some ways then Alabama appears to have ended up where it started: in the 1940s, the Hill Country of north Alabama was a (comparative) Republican stronghold in the state20 and the Black Belt was the uncontested Democratic stronghold. By 2010, the intercept has shifted towards Republicans but the split remains the same. However, this is where the similarities end. Whereas in the 1940s and 1950s, the Hill Country was willing to support Republicans out of discontent with a state Democratic Party dominated by industrialists and Black Belt planters, these are hardly the reasons the region supports today’s Republican Party. As for the Black Belt, the foundation for its past Democratic strength had been those very same planters and Big Mules—wealthy elites who exhibited both racial and economic conservatism. By 2010, when the gubernatorial patterns had finally come into alignment with presidential and senatorial patterns and the state once again looked uniform across electoral levels and contests, it was previously disenfranchised Black voters who formed the foundation of enduring Democratic strength in the Black Belt counties. As a result of the regionally divided county-level shifts between 2006 and 2010, Robert Bentley’s first electoral victory in 2010 was a more pronounced version of Bob Riley’s 2006 reelection map: whereas Riley had still lost a handful of counties outside the Black Belt21 , Bentley lost only two: Conecuh and Henry in the Wiregrass region. By 2014, Bentley won every county outside the Black Belt.22 Shifts between 2014—Bentley’s reelection—and 2018—Kay Ivey’s first election23 —were 20 The Hill Country was still overwhelmingly Democratic in those years, but when

there was rebellion against and attrition from Democratic dominance, it happened in the Hill Country. 21 Most notably Lawrence, Franklin, and Coosa counties in the Hill Country as well as the Tennessee Valley county of Colbert. 22 He barely won Jefferson County, which has trended Democratic in recent years despite its location outside the Black Belt, due to the fact that the city of Birmingham is located there. 23 Kay Ivey, previously the Lieutenant Governor of Alabama since 2011, became governor in 2017, after Bentley resigned over a sex scandal that eventually led to his arrest. Bentley resigned on April 10, 2017, when the Republican-controlled state legislature opened impeachment proceedings. As part of his later plea agreement he accepted a lifetime ban preventing him from ever holding political office in Alabama again.

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Fig. 4.4 Governor: 2006–2018

somewhat more ambiguous, with Ivey24 losing some support in the Hill Country and improving in parts of the Black Belt. However, the resulting pattern for 2018 reaffirms these new regional divisions, albeit in a marginally weaker version than Bentley’s 2014 victory did (Fig. 4.4). As Alabama adopted this new electoral reality, it became more obvious that in the battle between race and class over the dominant and decisive position in Alabama politics, race was winning out in these more recent decades. One example of this development is depicted below (Fig. 4.5). Between 2000 and 2004, counties with a higher rate of households falling below the poverty level tended to shift towards a higher Democratic

24 In a reflection of the political realignment of the state, Ivey unsuccessfully ran for Sate Auditor as a Democrat in 1982, switched to the Republican Party in 2002, and successfully ran for State Treasurer in 2003, before defeating incumbent (Democratic) Lieutenant Governor Jim Folsom Jr. in 2010.

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Fig. 4.5 President: Shift 2000–2004 vs. 2016–2020, by percent household income below poverty line

vote share in presidential elections. However, on closer examination, this pattern was driven in large part by comparatively poor Black Belt counties such as Dallas, Wilcox, Greene, Bullock, and Perry. In the rest of the state, Democrats improved more among better-off counties such as Baldwin (Gulf Coast Plain), Madison, Jefferson, and St. Clair (Hill Country) than among the poorer Hill Country counties such as Cullman, Marshall, Walker, and Bibb. Between 2016 and 2020, the pattern for shift in Democratic vote share and share of the population living below the poverty line appears reversed. Here, too, this can largely be explained by race. Hillary Clinton’s support among Black voters was generally stronger than Joe Biden’s.25 Biden, however, did somewhat better among white voters, including working class whites, than Clinton 25 Despite somewhat improving in Alabama, compared to Clinton—Biden won 36.6% of votes in the state, compared to Clinton’s 34.4%—Biden underperformed Clinton in several Black belt counties, such as Wilcox, Sumter, Barbour, and Macon counties.

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Fig. 4.6 President vs Governor over time, by percent white

did. His biggest improvements over Clinton’s performance however came in counties that were both white and comparatively better off—Shelby and Jefferson in the Hill Country as well as Madison and Limestone in the Tennessee Valley.26 The growing importance of race—and with it the diminishing importance of the old class divisions among Alabama’s white voters—becomes even more apparent in Fig. 4.6. This figure compares the Democratic margin (Democratic minus Republican vote share) for three presidential and gubernatorial elections each between 1950 and 2018. In the 1950s, the relationship between Percent White and the Democratic margin in any given county was modified by other factors, such as the established old divisions between intra-Democratic factions and economic considerations. The 1952 presidential election, for example, situated already within the realignment period for presidential elections, 26 One exception is Autauga, a relatively better-off Black Belt county where Biden improved over Clinton’s performance. As of 2020, Autauga county is 70.7% white.

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shows little to no difference between the Democratic margin in those counties with the highest share of white voters and those with the lowest share, whereas the 1950 gubernatorial election still displayed a uniformly Democratic state, with the exception of the most rebellious Hill Country counties.27 Compare, for example, Winston County in the Hill Country, of “Free State of Winston” fame, which voted for only one Democrat for President between 1948 and 2020 (Jimmy Carter in 1976) with Dallas County in the Black Belt. Winston has the lowest Democratic margin both in the 1950 gubernatorial and the 1952 presidential election.28 Dallas county on the other hand gave Governor Persons near 100% of its votes in 1950, but nearly rivals Winston for lowest Democratic margin at around -10% in the 1952 presidential election. Presidential and gubernatorial elections in this first period appear not only uncoupled from each other, but also only partly predictable through the racial make-up of the county. Of course, this immediately makes sense considering the disenfranchisement of Alabama’s Black voters prior to the mid-1960s. By the 1980s, this is clearly shifting. The curves for the 1982 gubernatorial and 1980 presidential election look roughly similar in shape, though the scales are anchored differently. Across the board, Democrats received higher margins in the gubernatorial election,29 but the patterns are similar: the highest support in both cases comes from Black Belt counties, where the percentage of white voters is low. The linear relationship between lower margins for Democrats as the percentage of white voters increases levels off at about 40% white population. For counties with between 40 and 100% white population, the relationship with the Democratic margin is essentially flat, suggesting that even in the 1980s, racial make-up could only explain part of the story. By the 2010s, Percent White is a textbook predictor of Democratic margin for both the presidential and gubernatorial levels. As 27 Gordon Persons, successor of “Big Jim” Folsom, belonged to the progressive faction, so the Hill Country actually shifted towards Democrats during this time period, whereas there was some attrition among Black Belt Bourbon Democrats. However, Democratic margins in the Hill Country still remained somewhat below the rest of the state. 28 With a Democratic margin of +15% in 1950 and −20% in 1952. 29 1982 was George Wallace’s last election, and the only one he contested after his

visit to Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery to apologize in 1979. His 1982 campaign was his only successful campaign where he both not only refrained from using racist appeals to activate white Alabamians but rather actively courted votes from Black Alabamians.

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the percentage of a county’s white population increases, the Democratic margin decreases in a perfect straight line. There is also no longer a difference in overall scale or intercept of support between the two offices: Democratic gubernatorial candidates, specifically Tuscaloosa Mayor Walt Maddox in 2018 during his campaign against incumbent Alabama governor Kay Ivey, look almost indistinguishable with respect to vote share from Democratic presidential candidates, or more specifically from Hillary Clinton during her run against Donald Trump in 2016. Clinton received 34.4% of the votes in Alabama, and Maddox received 40.4%. In other words, racial make-up of a county now close to perfectly predicts its Democratic margin in Alabama for both national and state elections.30 When looking at gubernatorial trends from 2002 to 2018 (Table 4.2), Percent White becomes steadily more statistically significant as well as substantively larger. Percent Male Unemployed and Percent Below Poverty Line start out positive and significant, meaning that Democrats did better in counties where male unemployment and poverty was higher.31 However, this relationship grows weaker and for 2018 appears reversed. With Percent White included separately, this suggests that Democrats did worse in poorer counties and counties with higher unemployment once the racial composition of the county is controlled for. Patterns for shifts between elections look similar, suggesting that Democrats lost the most ground in those counties where they were already doing the worst (counties with a high percentage of white voters). This is a reversal of the trends observed in Chapter 2 (Table 4.2), where Democrats were gaining ground (or at least losing less ground) in their weaker counties, a testament to the Hill Country’s strong affinity for the progressive faction in the 1940s and 1950s. 30 Any remaining positive relationship between Democratic margin and percent of a county’s population living below the poverty line, for example, goes away when taking into account that the poorest counties—Dallas, Sumter, Greene, Macon, Bullock, and Lowndes, all in the Black Belt—are also those with the lowest percentage of white inhabitants. 31 Election results are coded from 100 (Democrats win 100% of the vote) to −100 (Republicans win 100% of the vote), shifts are coded from 100 (the county shifted 100% towards Democrats compared to the last election) to −100 (the county shifted 100% towards Republicans since the last election).

−0.31** (0.15) 0.26 (1.44) 2.01 (1.48) 1.79*** (0.45) −46.24 67 0.72

−0.33** (0.16) 1.02 (1.50) 2.95* (1.54) 1.26*** (0.47) −64.86 67 0.66

Percent White

−1.14*** (0.10) −0.94 (0.89) 0.61** (0.30) 0.25 (0.37) 103.69 67 0.88

Governor 2010 −1.43*** (0.09) −0.49 (0.78) 0.40* (0.26) 0.12 (.33) 92.19 67 0.93

Governor 2014

* = p < 0.1, **= p < 0.05, ***= p < 0.01 The bold numbers are the ones that reach statistical significance

Percent Male Unemployed Percent Below Poverty Line Constant Observations R-Squared (Standard Error in Parentheses

Percent Male

Governor 2006

Governor 2002

Gubernatorial elections in the 2000s and 2010s

Variables

Table 4.2

−1.75*** (0.09) −0.53 (0.83) −0.52** (0.28) −0.57* (0.35) 139.14 67 0.92

Governor 2018 0.02 (0.09) −0.76 (0.84) −0.94 (0.87) 0.53** (0.27) 18.62 67 0.11

Shift 2002 to 2006 −0.66*** (0.12) −1.21 (1.15) −1.67 (1.19) −0.63* (0.36) 125.66 67 0.45

Shift 2006 to 2010

−0.29*** (0.09) 0.45 (.80) −0.21 (0.26) −0.13 (0.34) −11.49 67 0.21

Shift 2010 to 2014

−0.32*** (0.07) −0.04 (0.64) −0.92*** (.21) −0.69* (0.27) 46.95 67 0.39

Shift 2014 to 2018

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Especially for the gubernatorial elections, the explanatory power of these variables is very high, with over 90% of the variation for 2014 and 2018 explained. R-Squared increases as the size and significance of the Percent White variable increases, suggesting that an increasing amount of the variation is captured by this variable, a pattern that was also confirmed above (Fig. 4.6). Electoral patterns in Alabama, especially after 2000, settle into a pattern that is increasingly dominated by race. As Black voters both enter the electorate and increasingly affiliate with the Democratic Party even on the state level, Republicans become the party of choice for white Alabamians, seemingly more and more regardless of their socio-economic status.

Conclusion Since the 1990s, Alabama has displayed a new electoral pattern that has consistently grown stronger in recent decades. The state is still divided into geographic regions, and the Black Belt and Hill Country still show fundamentally diverging electoral behavior, reminiscent of the 1940s and 1950s. However, these superficial similarities between the two time periods conceal deep and fundamental changes that have occurred in the state since then. The Hill Country, in prior decades the region most likely to rebel against a state Democratic Party controlled by Black Belt elites such as planters and Big Mules, has established its place as a Republican stronghold. In other words, with Republicans now firmly in control of the state, the Hill Country has become the most loyal region as opposed to the most rebellious one. Whereas their previous inclination to revolt against Democratic rule was based on economic and factional differences, their current voting patterns can almost entirely be explained by race. The Black Belt, while remaining firmly in Democratic hands throughout this period of tumultuous realignment and electoral shifts, has undergone the opposite transformation: Once a stronghold of Alabama conservatives, with its Black population disenfranchised, the Black Belt was the base of power for Democratic elites trying to maintain racial and economic conservatism in the state. Through electoral change, enfranchisement, and realignment, the Black Belt has remained the state’s Democratic stronghold, but today’s strength is powered by Black voters who make up the majority of voters in some counties in the region. The Black Belt has become the rebel among the regions in today’s Alabama.

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What these new divisions further highlight is the rising dominance of racial divisions over economic divisions. The Hill Country resentment towards the Black Belt in the mid-20th century was fueled in no small part by economic grievances and resentment. Hill Country whites were poorer than their Black Belt counterparts, and they generally resented Alabama’s Black Belt-based elites. For this reason, the populist rhetoric of the progressive faction fell on fertile ground in this region. North Alabama’s white voters were more supportive of New Deal policies, and they opposed some of the disenfranchising efforts pushed by the Black Belt elites because they suspected that they would at least partially also be applied to them. Since the early 2000s, these divisions have been eclipsed by race and culture cleavages. Poor Alabama whites support Republicans as much—some data32 suggest even more so, once race is taken into account—as their wealthier counterparts. Maxwell and Shields (2019) suggest this is because of the success of what they call the “long Southern Strategy”: an extension of conflict beyond race to include cultural issues tied to conservative Christian values for many voters in the region, such as abortion and gay marriage.33 In other words, it does seem that, as Glenn Feldman noted, “the South did not become Republican so much as the Republican Party became Southern” (Feldman, 2011). Republican efforts to fill the void left by a Democratic Party that dramatically liberalized on issues of race paid off in Alabama, and by the early 2000s, electoral patterns across presidential, senatorial, and gubernatorial elections had all settled into a new rhythm favoring Republicans across the board and in effect creating a new one-party state. There are some additional similarities between this state of Republican dominance and the old Democratic hegemony: Republicans can make further inroads—or at least reduce and delay losses—in the Democratic stronghold counties in the Black Belt by running a certain kind of candidate, namely appropriators instead of position takers (Grimmer et al.,

32 See Table 4.2 and Fig. 4.5, for example. 33 This strategy was originally implemented in a top-down fashion due to weakness

of Republican state parties across the South. The initial emphasis on presidential elections inspired Republicans to compete for senate seats and governor’s mansions next (Aistrup, 1996). Alabama’s state legislature did not switch from Republican to Democratic control until 2011.

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2014). Richard Shelby, in many ways the stereotypical appropriator,34 has done better than Jeff Sessions and Tommy Tuberville, both much more in the mold of position takers, with more vocal and more conservative profiles, overall but also most noteworthy in the Black Belt itself. Similar to how Democrats could improve in their weakest region, the Hill Country, if they nominated candidates belonging to the progressive faction and later the Loyalists instead of the Dixiecrats, Republicans seem to have some room to improve when opting for candidates in the appropriator mold. The Hill Country is full of the kind of voter Democrats have increasingly struggled with: poor, white, rural, lacking a college education, and conservative on issues of race and culture. These factors combined seem to have overridden economic concerns as the vote deciding factor for Hill Country voters, and they appear to have created a rock-solid Republican constituency in Alabama’s Hill Country counties. However, glimpses into the future suggest that change might be on the horizon—though it is hard to say how far off it might be. North Alabama has diversified over the last two decades, with increasing in-migration of Latinos. Demographic change can and very well may lead to renewed electoral change down the road. North Alabama has also suffered particularly from the opioid crisis and high unemployment. While it seems that for the time being, economic hardship is not enough to create an opening for Democrats, the seeds for electoral change—challenging economic conditions and demographic change combined with a long-running penchant for rebellion against political elites—appear to be there.

References Aistrup, J. A. (1996). The southern strategy revisited: Republican top-down advancement in the South. University of Kentucky Press. Carmines, E. G., & Stimson, J. A. (1989). Issue evolution: Race and the transformation of American politics. Princeton University Press. Drake, I. (2016). The Alabama way: Independent courts and policymaking in Alabama. The Alabama Review, 69(4), 296–320.

34 Shelby, who has by and large maintained a relatively moderate voting record and a low profile on controversial issues, despite being from a safe red state, has risen to his party’s highest spot on the Senate Appropriations Committee, which he has used to benefit Alabama.

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Feldman, G. (2011). Introduction: Has the South become Republican? In G. Feldman (Ed.), Painting Dixie Red: When, where, why, and how the South Became Republican. University of Florida Press. Grimmer, J., Westwood, S. J., & Messing, S. (2014). The impression of influence: Legislator communication, representation, and democratic accountability. Princeton University Press. Hadley, C. D. (1981). Survey Research and Southern Politics: The Implications of Data Management. Public Opinion Quarterly, 45, 393–401. Hawkey, E. W. (1982). Southern conservatism 1956–1976. In L. W. Moreland, T. A. Baker, & R. P. Steed (Eds.), Contemporary southern political attitudes and behavior: Studies and essays (Chapter 3). Praeger. Hayes, D., & McKee, S. C. (2008). Toward a one-party South? American Politics Research, 36(1), 3–32. Hood III, M., Kidd, Q., & Morris, I. L. (2012). The rational southerner: Black mobilization, Republican growth, and the partisan transformation of the American south. Oxford University Press. Hughes, D. A. (2018). Alabama: Race, realignment, and one party politics. In C. S. Bullock III. & M. J. Rozell (Eds.), The new politics of the Old South. Rowman and Littlefield. Knuckey, J. (2017). The myth of the “two souths?” Racial resentment and White party identification in the deep south. Social Science Quarterly, 98(2), 728– 749. Lee, H. Y., Eyer, J., Lee, D., Rong Won, C., Hudnall, M., & Cain, D. S. (2020). The opiod crisis in Alabama: Actional recommendations for prevention, treatment, and recovery in rural communities. Best Practices in Mental Health, 16(1), 1–11. Maxwell, A. (2014). “The duality of the southern thing”: A snapshot of southern politics in the twenty-first century. Southern Cultures, 20(4), 89–105. Maxwell, A., & Shields, T. G. (2019). The long southern strategy: How chasing White voters in the South changed American politics. Oxford University Press. McKee, S. C. (2012). The past, present, and future of Southern politics. Southern Cultures, 18(3), 95–117. McKee, S. C., & Springer, M. J. (2015). A tale of “Two Souths”: White voting behavior in contemporary southern elections. Social Science Quarterly, 96(2), 588–607. Morales-Alemán, M. M., Ferreti, G., & Scarinci, I. C. (2020). “I don’t like being stereotyped, i decided i was never going back to the doctor’’: Sexual healthcare access among young latina women in Alabama. Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, 22, 645–652. Shafer, B. E., & Johnston, R. G. C. (2001). The transformation of southern politics revisited: The House of Representatives as a window. British Journal of Political Science, 31(4), 601–625.

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Shafer, B. E., & Johnston, R. G. C. (2006). The end of southern exceptionalism. Harvard University Press. Shafer, B. E., & Wagner, R. L. (2019). The long war over party structure: Democratic representation and policy responsiveness in American politics. Cambridge University Press. Shaw, T., & K. Nicholls. (2010). Using affective attitudes to identify Christian fundamentalism: The ten commandments judge and Alabama politics. Politics and Policy, 38(5). Stewart, W. H. (2016). Alabama politics in the tewnty-first century (1st ed.). University of Alabama Press. Walter, B. M. (2019). Nostalgia and precarious placemaking in southern poultry worlds: Immigration, race, and community building in rural Northern Alabama. Journal of Rural Studies.

CHAPTER 5

Epilogue: A Look Towards the Future

Abstract This chapter examines Alabama’s status as a (Republican) oneparty state and its potential for future political change. Regionalism, factionalism, and changed political realities are brought together to assess the stability of the current political moment and its potential for further electoral upheaval. Keywords Alabama politics · Electoral shifts · Political parties · American political development · Southern politics · Voter turn-out

A continuing thread running through Alabama politics from 1945 until today—and in actuality extending back much further, stretching all the way to the beginning of the state—is its strong region-based factionalism. Key (1949) described Alabama as multi-factional, describing the “transient nature of personal factions ” (p. 46). But these factions are always divided into two camps, which are delineated by regional divisions. Key himself notes the tumultuous, populist climate in the Alabama of the 1940s, describing a “wholesome contempt for authority and a spirit of rebellion akin to that of the Populist days ”, which “resist the efforts of the big farmers and the “Big Mules”” (p. 36). Key’s Alabama was one of inelegant rebellion, but also one he found noteworthy for its ability to © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. L. Wagner, Electoral Patterns in Alabama, Palgrave Studies in US Elections, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06770-9_5

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produce progressive politicians. Writes Key: “Clearly a state that produces a Senator (and Justice) Hugo Black, a Senator Lister Hill, a Senator John Sparkman scarcely merits application of the conventional stereotype of the South as a region of hidebound reaction.” This spirit of rebellion and progressiveness was consistently based in one region: The Hill Country of north Alabama, and it competed, through various iterations of factions united by regional and ideological similarity, with the reactionary, conservative Black Belt of the planters, industrialists, the Bourbon Democrats, Big Mules, and Redeemers. The Hill Country, populated by poor subsistence farmers, and settled from the Appalachian regions of Tennessee and Virginia, shared very little in terms of experiences or political attitudes with the more affluent Black Belt. Stretching across the southern part of the state, the Black Belt, named after its abundance of rich black soil, constituted the heart of antebellum Alabama and its culture of slavery, and was home to its agricultural and industrial elites. This division, keenly visible to Key in the 1940s, would have been just as apparent to observers in the 1830s, 1860s, or 1920s— and it is still visible to us today. What has changed throughout the years were the precise contours of the factions, not their regional divisions. These regional divisions were apparent in 1945, when Alabama was for all intents and purposes a one-party state, and they remained visible throughout the upheaval of partisan realignment. The rebellious northern part of the state was slower to defect from the national Democratic Party even for presidential elections precisely because its preferred faction, the Progressives-turned-Loyalists, refused to participate in the revolt of their longtime opponents, the Bourbons-turned-Dixiecrats. All through the 1950s and 1960s, the Hill Country remained more loyal to the national Democratic Party because of its Loyalist sympathies. Democrats made gains here, in their longtime most hostile region—or at the very least lost less ground than in the rest of the state. The regional divisions did not disappear during the long period of realignment, but they slowly started to change. As the Loyalists retired (such as J. Lister Hill) or became more conservative (such as John Sparkman), and the state party was dominated more and more by Dixiecrats in the mold of George Wallace, the Hill Country felt less allegiance to the Democratic Party. At the same time, newly enfranchised Black voters in the Black Belt became steadfast Democrats. Both white attrition and increased Black loyalty happened from the top-down: it was first visible on the presidential level

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and remained in flux the longest for state-level offices. So where does this leave us today, and where is it likely to lead us in the future? Despite this fundamental change in the loyalties, and despite the transformation from factional to partisan divisions, today’s Alabama is still characterized by regional division. It is the Black Belt versus north Alabama today, just as it was the Black Belt versus north Alabama then. The difference however is the changing basis for this regional division. Whereas the factions of the old days split over economics—a belief in racial supremacy was widely shared across factions and therefore implicitly assumed as a given in pre-1960s Alabama—today’s split seems mostly along racial lines. The Black Belt remains a Democratic region in an overwhelmingly Republican state not primarily because of differing economic visions but rather because of Black enfranchisement. The Black Belt contains several majority Black counties.1 By contrast, Winston county, the Hill Country county famous for its attempt to declare neutrality during the Civil War as the “Free State of Winston” (Key, 1949), is 92% white and 0.6% Black. Between 1945 and 2020, Winston county voted for a Democrat for President only once: for fellow Southerner Jimmy Carter in 1976. Macon county in the Black Belt, with a Black population of almost 80%, similarly voted for a Republican for President only once this same time period—for Eisenhower in 1956. However, while on the surface this might suggest a continuation of the pre-existing factional divisions, something fundamental has changed. Between the end of Reconstruction and the 1960s, Alabama’s electorate changed remarkably little. That is to say, it consisted mostly of Alabama-born whites, much as it had been before the Civil War. The stable factional division of the old Alabama was born out of a remarkably stable social order. As Chapter 2 showed, this social order started coming under attack from the party Alabamians expected to uphold it starting in the late 1940s, and this sent electoral shockwaves through the state, but the fundamental transformation of the Alabamian electorate did not 1 Most often, the counties considered to be in the Black Belt are Barbour (47% Black, 41% white), Bullock (71% Black, 22% white), Butler (44% Black, 51% white), Choctaw (41% Black, 55% white), Crenshaw (24% Black, 71% white), Dallas (70% Black, 27% white), Greene (81% Black, 17% white), Hale (56% Black, 41% white), Lowndes (69% Black, 27% white), Macon (79% Black, 16% white), Marengo (52% Black, 43% white), Montgomery (57% Black, 32% white), Perry (70% Black, 28% white), Pickens (39% Black, 53% white), Pike (37% Black, 55% white), Russell (44% Black, 45% white), Sumter (73% Black, 24% white), and Wilcox (70% Black, 27% white) (all according to the 2020 Census).

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happen until the mass enfranchisement of Black Alabamians in the 1960s. This reordering of the Alabama electorate upended the old factional divisions and allegiances, and economic disagreements were often less prominent than racial issues and racially charged animus. However, as Shafer and Johnston (2006) argue, economic concerns did not fully recede from their prior status of importance: As Southern whites became wealthier, they became more conservative. In this telling, the economic advancement of large swaths of white Southerners contributed to the rapid Republicanization of the South. As discussed in Chapter 1, there still is a class and party alignment visible in the South today, it is just the case that the poorest Southerners are often Black, intertwining questions of class and race.2 In other words, economic disparities became increasingly racialized, as white Alabamians were lifted out of poverty at higher rates than their Black counterparts. All this is to say that Alabama’s society has changed both rapidly and fundamentally over the past half-century. Divisions that might look similar to the ones that characterized the state for well over a hundred years are based on a vastly changed electorate and society. And change is continuing in the state. According to the U.S. Census, Alabama’s population grew by 5.1%3 between 2010 and 2020, which is less than the national-level population growth the U.S. registered in the same decade (7.4%).4 The state’s white population decreased by 1.7%, its Black population increased by 3.6%, its (still tiny) Asian population increased by 43%, and its Latino population increased by 42.3%. Alabama’s population is diversifying, in part through in-migration from other states. Even though Alabama is not growing at the same rate as

2 According to data from the 2019 American Community Study (ACS), Alabama’s

poverty rate was 15.5%. However, it was 11.8% for white Alabamians, compared to 23.5% for Black Alabamians. 3 This puts it behind Georgia, which grew 10.6% during the same time period, but well ahead of Louisiana (2.7% growth) or Mississippi (0.2% decline). 4 https://www.census.gov/library/stories/state-by-state/alabama-population-changebetween-census-decade.html.

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Georgia5 or the sunbelt states such as Texas6 or Arizona,7 its expanding population is steadily taking it further away from the Alabama of a few decades ago, which8 was largely dominated by Alabama-born white voters. So what does all this mean for the political future in the state? In some ways the state is more polarized now than it was in the past. Let us look to Macon county in the Black Belt, a reliably Democratic county across time,9 and Winston county in the Hill Country, a reliably Republican county10 as examples. In 1952,11 Adlai Stevenson (D) won Macon county by 40 points, whereas Eisenhower (R) won Winston county by 18 points, a spread of 58 points. In 1992, Clinton (D) won Macon county by 73 points, and Bush (R) carried Winston county by 24 points, a spread of 97 points. Finally in 2020, Biden’s (D) margin in Macon county was 64 points, compared to Trump’s (R) margin of 83 points in Winston county, for a spread of 147 points. In other words, the distance between Macon and Winston has increased over time, but this is in large part because of the strong Republican drift in Winston county. In 1992, Bill Clinton received 38% of the vote in Winston. Biden in 2020 received less than 9%. By contrast, Bush received 13.5% in Macon in 1992, compared to Trump’s 17.8% in 2020. Alabama’s electorate has been steadily expanding and diversifying since the 1960s. To date, however, none of these trends are a match for the rapid and overwhelming Republicanization of Alabama’s white voters, who are still a

5 Alabama does not have a metropolitan area comparable to Atlanta, which explains a non-negligible part of this difference. 6 The population of Texas grew 15.9% between 2010 and 2020, according to the US Census’ State Profiles 2020. 7 The population of Arizona grew by 11.9%, according to the US Census’ State Profiles 2020. 8 In large part because of disenfranchisement of Alabama’s Black voters, but partly also because of a lack of in-migration from other states. 9 Macon county only voted for a Republican for president once between 1948 and 2020—in 1956 for Dwight D. Eisenhower. 10 Winston county voted for a Democrat for president only once between 1948 and 2020—for Jimmy Carter in 1976. 11 1948 is not a representative example, with Democratic nominee Harry Truman being replaced by Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond as the Democratic choice for president in Alabama.

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large majority in the state (64.1%, according to the 2020 U.S. Census). In 2020, white Alabamians turned out at a somewhat higher rate12 (65.3% for white voters, compared to 57.3% for Black voters),13 adding to their numerical advantage. Change continues to come to Alabama, slow and steady. In the long run, demographic changes seem likely to upend the state’s politics once again. In the short run, however, Alabama’s status as a (Republican) oneparty state seems secure. The lack of a major metropolitan area is slowing the stream of out-of-state migrants compared to neighboring states such as Georgia, and while Alabama’s non-white population is both substantial as well as growing, it is not (yet?) large enough to rival the size of Alabama’s overwhelmingly Republican white voters. Georgia’s newly found status as a purple state does not appear to be in the cards for Alabama in the near (or probably even midterm) future.

References Key, V. O. (1949). Southern politics in state and nation. Alfred A: Knopf. Shafer, B. E., & Johnston, R. G. C. (2006). The end of southern exceptionalism. Harvard University Press.

12 Data from 2020 U.S. Census on racial composition of the population aged 18+ and the Alabama Secretary of State’s data on 2020 general election turnout by race. 13 In Macon county, Black voters turned out at a rate of 54.8%, compared to 58.9% for white voters (data from 2020 U.S. Census on racial composition of the population aged 18+ and the Alabama Secretary of State’s data on 2020 general election turnout by race).

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Index

A Alabama Democratic Party, 3, 5, 6, 16, 18, 21, 22, 28, 32, 36, 40, 43, 51, 54–56, 58, 71, 74, 75, 85 Alabama Journal, 67 Alabama Republican Party, 32, 49 Alabama State Legislature, 21, 81 Alabama Supreme Court, 63, 82, 89 Allen, James B., 32 Allen, Maryon Pittman, 64 Anti-elitism, 18 Anti-Saloon-League, 16 Appropriators Versus Position Takers, 100 Arizona, 109 Asian population, 108 Attrition of White Voters from the Democratic Party, 53 Autauga County, 9, 95 B Baldwin County, 81

Bankhead, John H., 16 Barbour County, 43 Battle, Laurie C., 30 Baxley, Bill, 68 Bentley, Robert, 92, 93 Bibb County, 94 Biden, Joe, 94, 95, 109 Bi-factionalism, 14 Big Mules, 3, 14, 64, 92, 99, 106 Bi-racial coalition, 49 Birmingham, 20, 36, 68, 92 Black and Tans, 48, 49 Black Belt, 3, 5, 14, 15, 17–20, 24, 25, 27–35, 37–40, 42, 54–56, 58–60, 62, 63, 65–68, 73, 84, 86–88, 90–97, 99–101, 106, 107, 109 Black Power movement, 20 Black voter registration, 53 Black voter turnout, 85 Bloody Sunday, 20 Blount County, 35, 67 Boswell Amendment (1946), 35, 37

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. L. Wagner, Electoral Patterns in Alabama, Palgrave Studies in US Elections, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06770-9

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118

INDEX

Bourbon Democrats, 14–18, 20, 21, 35, 55, 56, 64, 75, 96, 106 Braun, Carol Moseley, 50 Brewer, Albert, 74, 85 Brown v Board of Education (1954), 17, 20, 35, 56 Bullock County, 30, 94, 97, 107 Bush, George H.W., 49, 109 Butler County, 107 Byrd, Harry F., 26, 27

C Carter, Jimmy, 7, 25, 37, 49, 52, 57, 60, 73, 86, 96, 107, 109 Census, 2020, 107, 110 Change of Democratic Nominating Rules (1936), 4 Cherokee County, 35, 62 Chilton County, 17, 27 Choctaw County, 107 Civil Rights Act of 1960, 29 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 16, 50 Civil Rights Movement, 1, 2, 4, 16, 20, 22, 23, 48–50, 52, 54–56, 58, 71 Civil War, 5, 18, 39, 48, 55, 107 Class-Based factionalism, 14, 15 Clay County, 19 Cleavages, 10, 55, 80, 83, 84, 100 Clinton, Bill, 88, 109 Clinton, Hillary, 94, 97 Coffee County, 37 Colbert County, 35, 63, 92 Conservative faction, 32 Constitution of 1901, 21, 22, 35 Coosa County, 92 County level shifts, 2, 24, 68 Crenshaw County, 107 Crommelin, John G., 24 Cullman County, 19, 32, 37, 38, 67, 74, 94

D Dallas County, 27, 30, 37, 38, 94, 96, 97, 107 Daughters of the Confederacy, 50 Dealignment, 52, 53, 63 Deep South, 1, 13, 14, 50, 80, 82 DeKalb County, 35, 74 Democratic margins, 96 Democratic National Convention, 26, 29, 32, 34 Democratic Party, National, 4, 6, 7, 16, 23, 25, 28, 29, 36, 37, 42, 48–50, 56–58, 60, 71, 73, 74, 106 Demographic change, 82, 84, 101, 110 Demographic diversification, 101 Denton, Jeremiah, 63–65 Desegregation, 19, 21, 23, 24, 35, 43, 48, 58 Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, 96 Disenfranchisement, 35, 49, 96, 109 Dixiecrat Party, 26 Dixiecrat Revolution, 2 Dixiecrats, 3, 8, 14, 16, 17, 23, 29, 34, 36, 42, 43, 49, 52, 54–57, 60, 73, 75, 101, 106 Dixon, Frank, 27, 28 Double-Choice Primary Law, 18 Dying Old South, 2, 8

E Edmund Pettus Bridge, 20 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 5, 29, 107, 109 Election of 1946, 6, 33 Election of 1948, 16, 24, 36 Election of 1950, 33, 38 Election of 1952, 24, 95 Election of 1954, 38 Election of 1956, 24

INDEX

Election of 1960, 26 Election of 1962, 32, 63 Election of 1964, 80 Election of 1968, 32 Election of 1972, 33 Election of 1974, 67 Election of 1976, 24 Election of 1978, 63, 67 Election of 1980, 58, 96 Election of 1982, 96 Election of 1984, 63 Election of 1986, 81 Election of 1988, 43 Election of 1992, 65 Election of 1994, 1, 9, 52 Election of 1996, 88 Election of 1998, 7, 81 Election of 2002, 81, 87 Election of 2004, 87 Election of 2006, 92 Election of 2008, 87 Election of 2010, 87 Election of 2014, 81, 88 Election of 2016, 87 Election of 2017, special, 88 Election of 2018, 92 Election of 2020, 24 Electoral shifts, gubernatorial, 9 Electoral shifts, presidential, 9 Electoral shifts, senatorial, 9 Electoral tidal wave, 51 Ellis, Handy, 15, 37 Enfranchisement, 6, 54, 55, 58, 85, 99, 107, 108 Etowah County, 35 F Farmers, 3, 5, 17, 19, 32, 39, 55, 57, 62, 106 Flowers, Walter, 63 Folsom, James “Big Jim”, 6, 15, 28, 34–38, 40, 63–65, 96

119

Folsom, Jim Jr., 7, 9, 35, 64, 93 Franklin County, 27, 35, 62, 63, 84, 92 Free State of Winston, 28, 96, 107 Frink, Bettye, 21, 22

G Georgia, 7, 14, 15, 82, 86, 108–110 Goldwater, Barry, 26, 48, 49, 57 Gormillion v. Lightfoot (1960), 29 Greene County, 32, 62, 94, 97, 107 Gubernatorial elections, 9, 38, 39, 55, 58, 68, 71, 95, 96, 98–100 Gulf Coast Plain, 28, 94

H Hale County, 38, 62, 107 Hammonds, Harrell, 51 Hamm, Phillip J., 30 Heflin, Howell, 50, 51, 53, 63, 74, 88 Heflin, J. Thomas, 16 Hidden Klan, 19 Hill Country, 3, 5, 14, 15, 17–19, 21, 23–25, 27–38, 40, 42, 49, 54, 55, 57, 59, 62, 63, 67, 73, 74, 84, 90, 92–97, 99–101, 106, 107, 109 Hill, J. Lister, 24, 28, 29, 31, 49, 57, 63, 87, 106 Hoover, Herbert C., 16 Houston County, 27 Hubbert, Paul, 7, 9 Humphrey, Hubert, 57 Hunt, H. Guy, 7, 9, 68

I Immigration, 84 Incumbency effect, 7, 51, 58, 64, 70, 85

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INDEX

Independents, 53 Industrialists, 5, 18, 35, 39, 92, 106 Issue evolution, 2, 4, 80 Ivey, Kay, 92, 93, 97

J Jackson, Andrew, 29 Jackson County, 35, 62 Jacksonian populism, 24 Jacksonians, 3, 15, 17 James, Fob, 7, 9, 67 Jefferson County, 92 Jenkins, Ray, 67 Johnson, Lyndon B., 80 Jones, Doug, 50, 66, 74, 80, 87–90

K Kennedy, John F., 27, 49, 63 Key, V.O., 13 Ku-Klux-Klan, 88

L Latino population, 83, 108 Lauderdale County, 35, 63 Lawrence County, 92 Liberal faction, 5, 35 Lily-Whites, 48, 49 Limestone County, 35, 95 Literacy test, 21, 48 Long Southern Strategy, 48, 100 Louisiana, 14, 82, 108 Lowndes County, 20, 51 Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO), 20 Loyalists, 3, 14, 16, 17, 29, 34, 36, 42, 43, 101, 106 Loyalty Oath, 36

M Macon County, 28, 29, 107, 109, 110 Maddox, Walt, 97 Madison County, 35, 74, 94, 95 Majority-Minority District, 51, 75 Marengo County, 88, 107 Marion County, 32, 35, 62, 84, 90 Marshall County, 19, 32, 37, 38, 94 Martin, James D., 49, 57, 63 Mississippi, 15, 18, 82, 108 Mobile, 15, 36 Montgomery County, 27, 37, 88 Moore, Roy, 82, 89, 90 removal from office, 89 sexual harassment allegations, 90 Morgan County, 74 Multi-factionalism, 15 Multi-party competition, 19

N New Deal, 5, 19, 28, 31, 42, 63, 71, 100 Nixon, Richard, 27, 49, 57 North Alabama, 3, 5, 14–17, 19, 28, 32, 39, 42, 50, 55, 63, 66–68, 74, 88, 91, 92, 100, 101, 106, 107 Northern in-migration, 54

O One-party state, 1, 8, 23, 42, 71, 75, 80, 100, 106 Opioid crisis, 84, 101

P Partisan attachment, 51, 52, 71, 73, 74 Partisanship, 52, 82 Party activists, 54

INDEX

Party-defining issue, 2, 3 Party ID, 52, 80 Party image, shift in, 53 Patterson, John Malcolm, 21, 43 Patterson, Lafayette, 43 Perry County, 38, 94, 107 Persons, Gordon, 34, 36, 38, 96 Pickens County, 107 Pike County, 107 Planters, 5, 14, 17–19, 35, 39, 92, 99, 106 Poll tax, 21, 22 Poll tax and women’s vote, 21 Poll tax, cumulative, 21 Populists, 3, 5, 14, 15, 17, 19, 21 Poultry industry, 19, 83 Poverty rate, 83, 108 Presidential elections, 2, 24, 27, 53, 55, 58–60, 67, 71, 73, 90, 94, 95, 100, 106 Primary elections, 9, 81 Progressives, 3–5, 14, 42, 54, 55, 60, 75, 106 Pryor, Bill Holcombe, 81

R Racial attitudes, 56 Racism, 14, 19, 22, 42, 56 Racist violence, 19, 20 Reagan, Ronald, 49, 65 Realignment, 1, 2, 7, 8, 10, 23, 28, 32, 42, 43, 48, 50, 51, 53, 55–58, 65, 67, 68, 71, 73, 74, 80–83, 85, 93, 95, 99, 106 Reconstruction, 3, 15, 17, 18, 20, 22, 24, 43, 48, 68, 85, 107 Redeemers, 17, 106 Regional factionalism, 2, 15 Republican margins, 25 Republican trifecta, 81, 85 Return of the Spirit of 1861, 50, 63

121

Revolt of 1948, 5, 16 Riley, Bob, 81, 92 Rim South, 13 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 5, 6, 25 Russell County, 88, 107 S Segregation, 3–5, 31, 50, 56, 71, 73, 83 Selma, 20 Senatorial elections, 55, 67, 68, 71, 74, 86 Sessions, Jeff, 51, 81, 87, 88, 90, 101 16th Street Church Bombing, 20 Shelby County, 17 Shelby, Richard, 51, 65, 70, 73, 74, 81, 87, 101 Shifts by percent household income below poverty level, 93, 97 Shifts by percent male unemployed, 62, 66, 68, 70, 97 Shifts by percent white, 62, 66, 68, 70 Siegelman, Don, 81 Smith, Al, 16 Smith v. Allwright (1944), 4 Social conservatism, 82 Solid South, 14, 16, 22 South Alabama, 15, 28, 67, 91 Southern Democratic Ticket (1960), 26 Southern Democrats, 27, 28, 48, 50, 51, 63, 82 Southern identity, 84 Southern Republicans, 83 Southern Strategy, 2, 5, 6, 17, 48, 49, 71, 82 Sparkman, John, 6, 24, 28–31, 35, 50, 51, 63, 74, 90, 106 State Democratic Executive Committee, 16, 29 St. Clair County, 94

122

INDEX

Stealth reconstruction, 53 Stevenson, Adlai, 24, 30, 63, 109 Stewart, Donald, 64 Strange, Luther, 89, 90 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 20, 22 Sumter County, 38, 62, 94, 97, 107 Sundown towns, 19 T Tennessee Valley, 28, 31, 32, 37, 62, 74, 92, 95 Term limits, 34, 58 Texas, 109 Third parties, 17, 20 Thurmond, Strom, 24–26, 29, 57, 109 Top-down advancement of Republicanism, 58 Truman, Harry S., 2, 4, 6, 16, 25, 29, 32, 34, 42, 43, 48, 73, 109 and 1948 Election, 2 and desegregation of the military, 4 Trump, Donald, 81, 83, 84, 88, 89, 97, 109 Tuberville, Tommy, 87, 88, 90, 101 U Unemployment, male, 62, 68, 97

United Mine Workers (UMW), 19 Un-pledged electors, 26

V Vance, Robert, 74 Voter registration, 19 Voter turnout, 14, 85 Voting Rights Act of 1965, 16

W Walker County, 19, 84, 94 Wallace, George, 32, 34, 35, 43, 49, 57, 63, 64, 67, 68, 73, 74, 85, 96, 106 Wallace, Lurleen, 57 White-Only Primary, 4 White supremacy, 3, 16, 18, 22, 50, 56, 71 Wilcox County, 30, 32, 38, 62, 94, 107 Winston County, 24, 27, 28, 35, 37, 62, 67, 74, 107 Wiregrass, 27, 28, 36, 37, 92 Women and Racism, 22 Women and Traditional Gender Roles, 21 Women in Politics, 21–22 Women’s Progress, 21