In the decades after the Civil War, the Republican Party was the party of liberals and the North, whereas the Democratic Party was dominant in the South. Over the last century, particularly the last thirty years, there has been a shift and reversal of this trend. The Democratic Party is now primarily supported in the Northeast and on the West coast. Whereas the Republican Party has its greatest success in the Deep South.

The Republican Party emerged in the 1850s, solidifying in 1854, in opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the extension of slavery into the territories. By the election of 1858, the Party contained former Whigs, Free-Soilers, and many Northern Democrats, and it carried the majority in every Northern state. It was led by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.

The Second Party System in America evolved during the highly contentious elections of 1824 and 1828. The Jacksonian Democrats, led by Andrew Jackson, were pitted against the Whigs, who were for the most part led by Henry Clay. The Second Party System followed the Era of Good Feelings, in which only the Democratic-Republicans existed as a major party. The Second Party System ended in the 1850s, as the party split heavily over the issue of slavery.

The First Party System in American political history witnessed the Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, pitted against the Democratic-Republicans. The Federalists favored a strong central government and close ties with Britain, whereas the Democratic-Republicans (usually considered to be led by Thomas Jefferson) favored more power in the hands of the States. The First Party System endured until the end of the War of 1812, when the Federalists refusal to support the war effort effectively looked like cowardice and treason in the face of America’s favorable emergence from the war.

The Presidential election of 1980 was the election that ushered Ronald Reagan into the White House on the back of a landslide victory over incumbent Jimmy Carter. It witnessed a dramatic shift in the American voting public towards conservatism, which has not really abated in the thirty years since. It showed that the general public had completed its turning away from the New Deal ideology of Roosevelt and the 1930s Democratic Party and now desired lower taxes and less government intervention in the economy, not to mention a much larger military.

When the Whig Party collapsed in the 1850s, it was largely attributable to a defection of Southern Whigs to the Democratic Party over the issue of slavery. The remaining anti-slavery Whigs banded together with Northern Democrats who were anti-slavery, as well as a few other smaller political groups, to form a new party, christened the Republican Party, for the 1856 Presidential Election.

The election of 1964 is incredibly important, in terms of realignment and the South. Before getting into it, however, we need to examine a decent amount of background information.

Remember: Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, comes to be associated with abolition and winning the civil war, among many other things. For some strange reason, he was not popular among Southern whites (hopefully you can see why this is true).

Remember: The South, in the wake of the Civil War and after the end of Reconstruction, aligned with the Democrats. This make sense, if you think about it: Republicans (anti-slavery, civil war victors) and Democrats (fought a war in part based off of slavery, lost the civil war) were natural enemies. Thus, after the end of Reconstruction, southern whites voted exclusively for Democrats—on all levels of government. Southern blacks, then, came to associate the Democratic Party with racial oppression (Jim Crow), as Democrats controlled southern governments and brutally enforced race laws. Many political scientists describe the political atmosphere of the south (during this time) as existing in a vacuum—it stayed basically the same, while Democrats in the rest of the country evolved differently.

We see this difference in a particularly bright light with the policies of FDR during the New Deal. FDR, a Democrat, appeals nearly nationwide and managed to weave incredibly diverse groups together with the New Deal. His liberal policies appealed particularly strongly to northern African Americans (among other groups). Political scientists generally refer to this as one of the first major racial realignments, as northern African Americans realigned (that is, changed party allegiances) to the Democratic Party. Southern African Americans, however, did not realign with the Democratic Party. Remember: southern blacks lived day-to-day under the oppressive politics of Democrats at a STATE level, thus making a realignment (from being Republican) to that party relatively unlikely.

The election of 1964, however, marks the beginning of a massive change. LBJ, a democrat—from Texas no less!—runs on a platform that stresses civil rights. Barry Goldwater, however, a Republican from Arizona, runs on a platform that stresses states’ rights. It’s around this time that southern blacks realize that the Republican Party may no longer be their party of choice, and whites in the Deep South vote for a Republican president. 

Party realignment occurs when the dominant party is displaced and ousted from power by the minority party. Such shifts usually happen as the result of what is known as a critical election– a shakeup of an election in which fissures caused by new issues and/or disagreements within the majority party conspire to divide voters, so that some voters end up deserting the party altogether. This desertion weakens the majority party from the inside out and ultimately prevents it from maintaining its governmental dominance. In turn, this allows the minority party to take advantage of the newly-opened power vacuum and thus rise to prominence by in fact becoming the new majority party.

In the modern American two-party system, a "third party" candidate, someone who is neither a Republican nor a Democrat, has a few major disadvantages. Many of these are related to the fact that most third party candidates do not have the strong base of financial, political, and electoral support that a major party candidate can enjoy. One place where a third party candidate can have an advantage is that their political ideology and platform does not need to be tied to the strict limits of a major party.

The Republican Party generally controlled the Presidency and the Legislature from 1860 to 1932. The key here is to remember that 1860 was the outbreak of Civil War when the Republican Party came to represent preservation of the Union, the Northern war effort, rights of former slaves, and so on. The Democratic Party at this time was dominant in the South, but elected only two Presidents in the time period. By 1932, however, the nature of the political parties had greatly altered. The Great Depression ushered in the Democratic Party under Franklin D. Roosevelt who dramatically changed the nature of the Party and of United States’ government itself.