The Parties Switched Story Meets the Record and What the Evidence Shows

You know the line. It shows up in a classroom, a comment thread, a Thanksgiving argument, always delivered with the calm confidence of someone who has never been asked a follow-up question: "The parties switched." Sometimes it comes with a date, usually 1964. Sometimes with a villain, usually Richard Nixon. And it usually arrives at the exact moment you mention that the Republican Party was founded to stop the spread of slavery and that Lincoln was a Republican. The response is a shrug and four words: "Well, the parties switched."

I am not going to wave that away, and I am not going to answer it with a bumper sticker. The claim has a real core, and a version of it is true. The honest question is how much of it is true, and what exactly changed. So here is how I will do this. First, the claim at its strongest, stated so that a thoughtful person who believes it would nod along. Then six numbered answers, each resting on records you can check. Then my verdict, which is more nuanced than either side's slogan.

The claim at its strongest

Here is the best version, the one that academic historians and serious partisans actually make.

In the first century after the Civil War, the South was the Democratic Party's base. The segregationist political machine of the Jim Crow era was a Democratic machine, and for decades "the Solid South" meant a region that voted Democratic in nearly every election. Black Americans, meanwhile, were Republican loyalists for generations after emancipation.

Then things changed. In 1948, a group of Southern Democrats walked out of their party's convention over a civil rights plank and ran Strom Thurmond for president as a States' Rights Democrat, the Dixiecrat ticket. In 1964, Barry Goldwater, who voted against the Civil Rights Act, carried five Deep South states that had not voted Republican since Reconstruction, and his campaign was the first big Republican breakthrough there. In 1968, Nixon pursued what became known as the Southern Strategy, aiming at white Southern voters unhappy with the national Democratic Party's civil rights stance; the strategist Kevin Phillips described the approach in a 1969 book. In 1980, Ronald Reagan gave a speech at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, near where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964, and used the words "states' rights." And over the following decades, white Southerners moved into the Republican column while Black voters became overwhelmingly Democratic.

Put it together, the argument says: the parties did not just drift. They traded coalitions. The party of Jim Crow became the party of civil rights, and the party of Lincoln became the party of the South. Anyone who points to the Republican past is using a ghost.

That is a coherent argument with real evidence behind it, and anybody who dismisses it as nonsense has not read the maps. Now let me answer it, point by point.

Answer one: the segregationists mostly stayed Democrats

If the parties had switched wholesale around 1964, you would expect the leading segregationist politicians to have moved to the Republican Party. Mostly, they did not. Richard Russell, who led the filibuster against the Civil Rights Act, died in 1971 a Democrat. The long-serving Southern committee chairmen in the Senate and House of that era, including James Eastland of Mississippi and J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, stayed in their party. Robert Byrd, who filibustered the Civil Rights Act in 1964, remained a Democrat for the rest of his career and later said he regretted his role in that fight. Governors like Orval Faubus of Arkansas also stayed in the Democratic Party.

Strom Thurmond is the famous exception. He switched to the Republican Party in September 1964, and his move is the best case for the "switch" theory. But look at how rare he was. For a claim about two whole parties swapping, the evidence of individual officeholders changing sides is thin. It is a record of a few switchers and a great many who stayed.

Answer two: the Southern state legislatures stayed Democratic for decades

If white Southern voters had flipped overnight in the 1960s, the statehouses would have flipped with them. They did not. For the most part, Democrats continued to control Southern state legislatures through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, long after Southerners had begun voting Republican for president. Republicans won the Southern majority in the U.S. House delegation in 1994, for the first time since Reconstruction. Georgia's state Senate went Republican in 2002 and its House in 2004. Texas's House flipped in 2002. Alabama's legislature went Republican in 2010 for the first time since Reconstruction.

This is a powerful fact, and it is rarely mentioned. A realignment that took forty years at the state level is not a switch; it is a slow generational change. And slow change is what you would expect if the cause was something other than a single moment in 1964, such as the gradual replacement of older voters by younger ones, population growth and economic change.

Answer three: Republicans were already winning Southern votes before 1964

Here is the date problem for the story. Dwight Eisenhower carried several Southern states in 1952 and again in 1956, including Virginia, Tennessee, Texas and Florida in 1952, with Louisiana added in 1956. Richard Nixon carried Virginia, Tennessee, Florida and Kentucky in 1960. These gains came from the growing, urbanizing, suburban South: the cities and the new business districts of the Sun Belt, rather than the old plantation counties. Whatever was happening in the South was already underway a decade before the Civil Rights Act.

That does not mean race played no role. It almost certainly did in some places. But the timing shows more than one thing at work, and it undermines the neat picture of a single date on which everything changed.

Answer four: the civil rights votes followed region, not party

Look again at the vote on the Civil Rights Act, which is covered in The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Republican Votes That Broke the Filibuster. By the commonly cited figures, 80 percent of House Republicans voted yes, against about 61 percent of House Democrats. In the Senate, 82 percent of Republicans and 69 percent of Democrats voted yes on final passage. The votes against were concentrated among Southern members, overwhelmingly Democrats, and a smaller number of members from other regions.

Region was the dividing line. A Southern Democrat and a Northern Democrat in the same party voted in opposite directions. That is the evidence that the national parties were already, in effect, coalitions of different regional factions, and the national Democratic Party had a pro-civil-rights majority and a segregationist minority living inside the same tent. That tent was not new in 1964. It had been there since 1948, when Hubert Humphrey's speech at the Democratic convention pushed the party toward a civil rights plank and the Dixiecrats walked out. In fairness to Democrats, Truman's executive order desegregating the armed forces in July 1948 belongs in the record too. Both parties had people on both sides. That is exactly what you would expect if the issue cut across party lines rather than lining up with them.

Answer five: economics and suburbs explain a lot

The claim implies that race was the dominant factor, or the only one, in the Southern realignment. Many political scientists, including Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston in their book The End of Southern Exceptionalism in 2006, have argued that economic development was the main driver: as the South grew richer and more urban, its voters came to look like other prosperous, suburban voters in the country, and they voted on taxes, regulation, defense and religion. In this account, the places where Republicans gained most were the fastest-growing, wealthiest ones, not the places with the highest percentage of Black residents or the strongest history of segregation.

Reasonable scholars disagree about the weights. Some find that race remained the larger factor in the Deep South in particular. But the economic story is serious and has a lot of data behind it. It also fits what we know about other parts of the country. The same suburban voters who moved toward Republicans in Georgia and Texas also moved toward Republicans in Orange County, California, and Dallas, in states with different histories. And culture mattered: the rise of religiously conservative voters, whose story is told in How Evangelical Voters Became Republican Voters Between 1976 and 1984, pulled many Southerners toward the party for reasons that had nothing to do with 1964.

Answer six: the Black vote left the Republicans long before 1964

Now the other half of the claim: that Black voters moved to the Democrats because the parties swapped. The record says otherwise on timing. Black voters began shifting toward the Democratic Party in the 1930s, in response to the New Deal's relief programs and to the Roosevelt coalition, and the shift was largely complete by the 1940s and 1950s. Many were still voting Republican at some level into the 1950s, and Eisenhower won a substantial share in 1956, but the long trend was clear. By 1960, Nixon, a Republican with a decent civil rights record, did not recover them. The reasons for this earlier shift, which had everything to do with the Depression and little to do with 1964, are in Why Black Voters Left the Party of Lincoln for the New Deal, in Questions.

By 1964, then, the Black vote was already mostly Democratic. The Goldwater campaign did not push it there, though it certainly made the choice starker.

What I concede

I promised you nuance, so here is what I concede.

• Something real happened. The Democratic Party was once the home of the segregationist South, and that region is now strongly Republican. Anyone who denies that is not being straight.
• Race was part of the story. Nixon's 1968 campaign, Wallace's 1968 run, and the politics of the busing fights all had racial dimensions, and some campaigns used coded appeals. Republicans should not pretend otherwise. Some of the party's leaders in those years were more interested in winning the votes of white Southerners than in being careful about how.
• Goldwater's vote against the Civil Rights Act did cost the party with Black voters, and the party did not do enough in the following decades to win them back.

That is a more honest position than any slogan that pins the blame on one whole party, which is a line I will not use, because it is not an argument; it is an insult, and it explains nothing. Real historians do not talk that way, and neither should we.

A test you can run yourself

You do not have to take my word for any of this, and you should not. Here is a five-step check anyone can do in an evening with a laptop.

1. Pull up the roll call for the 1964 Civil Rights Act on Congress.gov and sort the votes by state. Count how many "no" votes came from the eleven former Confederate states and how many came from everywhere else.
2. Look up the party control of your own state's legislature across the decades. Most state legislatures publish their histories, and your state's library or secretary of state will have the lists. Note the year each chamber first flipped.
3. Find the presidential results by state for 1952, 1956 and 1960, and compare them with 1964. See which Southern states moved when.
4. Read the 1948 Democratic platform fight and the Dixiecrat walkout. It is on record, and it shows that the argument inside the Democratic Party predates 1964 by sixteen years.
5. Ask yourself which of these facts the person making the claim chose not to mention, and then ask the same question about yourself.

The last step is the hard one, and it is the one that makes the difference between history and talking points.

What the evidence says in the end

Here is my verdict, in three sentences. The parties did not trade places on race in a single moment. The South moved from the Democratic to the Republican column over about forty years, driven by a mix of economics, suburban growth, religion, migration and, yes, race. And both parties contained supporters and opponents of civil rights throughout the period, which is why the vote on the 1964 law followed region, not party.

If you want to follow how the Republican electoral map moved over a longer period, How the Republican Electoral Map Moved Across Four Eras from 1896 to 2016 covers four eras. For the earlier chapters of the story, see The New Deal Coalition and the Twenty Years the GOP Spent in the Wilderness and A timeline of the Black Republicans who sat in Congress after the Civil War. For the strange case of a landslide that built the next majority, read The 1964 Goldwater Campaign Lost 44 States and Won the Future. And the Republican Party pages let you track how members have voted on civil rights bills since.

The bottom line

• The claim "the parties switched" contains a true observation, that the South moved from Democratic to Republican, and a false implication, that it happened on one date and that the parties exchanged their principles.
• The record shows most Southern segregationist leaders staying Democrats, Southern legislatures staying Democratic for decades, Republican gains in the suburban South before 1964, and civil rights votes that followed region rather than party.
• Do not answer the slogan with a counter-slogan. Concede what is true, including that race was part of the realignment, and then correct what is wrong.
• Ask the person making the claim to name the date, the people and the votes. History that cannot survive those questions is not history.
• Be proud of the party's record on abolition and civil rights without claiming it was spotless. A fair account is stronger than a flattering one.