Rural Republican Realignment in the Modern South

The Untold Story

M.V. Hood, III, Seth C. McKee

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781643363028, 9781643363011
• eBook ISBN: 9781643363035
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

An inside look at why the Republican Party has come to dominate the rural American South

Beginning with the Dixiecrat Revolt of 1948 and extending through the 2020 election cycle, political scientists M.V. Hood III and Seth C. McKee trace the process by which rural white southerners transformed from fiercely loyal Democrats to stalwart Republicans. While these rural white southerners were the slowest to affiliate with the Grand Old Party, they are now its staunchest supporters. This transition and the reasons for it are vital to understanding the current electoral landscape of the American South, including states like Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia, all of which have the potential to exert enormous influence over national electoral outcomes.

In this first book-length empirically based study focusing on rural southern voters, Hood and McKee examine their changing political behavior, arguing that their Democratic-to-Republican transition is both more recent and more durable than most political observers realize. By analyzing data collected from their own region-wide polling along with a variety of other carefully mined sources, the authors explain why the initial appeal of 1950s Republicanism to upscale white southerners in metropolitan settings took well over a half-century to yield to, and morph into, its culturally conservative variant now championed by rural residents. Hood and McKee contend that it is impossible to understand current American electoral politics without understanding the longer trajectory of voting behavior in rural America and they offer not only a framework but also the data necessary for doing so.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Rural Republican Realignment in the Modern South
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• Introduction: Texas: Thirty Years Apart
• 1 America’s Longest and Deepest Realignment
• 2 Measuring Place and the Data Associated with It
• 3 Presidential Republicanism and Democratic Darn Near Everything Else
• 4 Voting for the Biggest Prize: Presidential Elections
• 5 US Senate Elections: Republicans’ Most-Promising and Attainable Seats
• 6 The Rural Transformation in Southern Gubernatorial Elections
• 7 Rural Voters in Southern US House Elections
• 8 Survey Says? Rural Whites’ Changing Party Identification
• 9 More Evidence: Rural Voters in Four Southern States
• 10 How Are Rural and Urban Southerners Different?
• 11 The 2020 Elections in the South
• 12 Too Little, Too Late?
• APPENDICES A AND B
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX