11.5The great party inversion

Civil rights shattered the New Deal coalition. When Democratic President Lyndon Johnson championed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, he reportedly predicted his party would lose the South for a generation—and it did. White Southern conservatives, long the backbone of the Democratic "Solid South," began abandoning the party.

Republicans, sensing opportunity, pursued a "Southern strategy" to appeal to these disaffected voters. Over the following decades the parties' regional bases swapped: the once solidly Democratic South became a Republican stronghold, while Black voters and the Northeast moved firmly toward the Democrats. The party of Lincoln and the party of the Confederacy's defenders had, in effect, traded places—the most dramatic realignment in modern American politics.