Steve Suitts, Southern Political Report
In early 1965 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told President Lyndon B. Johnson that passage of the federal Voting Rights Act would create a “coalition of the Negro vote and the moderate white vote that will really make the New South.” Congress passed the Act seven months later, but Dr. King’s New South coalition became a long deferred dream as racially divided voting patterns in national elections quickly widened and stayed below the Mason & Dixon line. Millions of new black voters registered and voted as Democrats, but millions of white voters, especially in the Deep South, left the party of their parents for the Republican Party.
In all but one of the 12 presidential elections since 1960 (the first election year when civil rights became a national political issue), Democrats have received a majority of black votes in the Deep South and, in turn, have lost most of those states. Only in 1976, when Georgia’s former governor Jimmy Carter became president, has a Democratic candidate for president won the Deep South with black and white voters. In all other presidential elections, including President Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 and 1996, Democrats failed to muster a coalition that could carry the Deep South.
