Random Thoughts

As we saw last week, Democrat Harry Truman won the presidential election of 1948 even though he failed to carry four states in the South.

In the 11 former Confederate states, Truman garnered 87 electoral votes and fellow Democrat Strom Thurmond, running an independent segregationist campaign, received the region’s other 39 electoral votes. Republican nominee Thomas Dewey got none.

At that time, most southern white voters could not bring themselves to vote for a Republican. The South remained solidly Democratic. The final vote total was Truman 303, Dewey 189, and Thurmond 39.

If we can imagine for a moment that the South had won the Civil War and was no longer part of the U.S., the final tally would have been Truman 216 and Dewey 189. Truman would still have won.

The next close presidential election was in 1960 when Democratic standard-bearer Senator John Kennedy defeated the Republican nominee, Vice-President Richard Nixon.

By then, white southerners were getting nervous about some members of the Democratic Party (especially northerners) supporting civil rights for African Americans.

Three Confederate states (Virginia, Tennessee, and Florida) gave their combined 33 votes to Nixon. Mississippi and Alabama cast 14 votes for anti-civil rights Democratic Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia. Kennedy won six southern states with 81 votes.

The final totals were Kennedy 303, Nixon 219 and Byrd 14. These results are strikingly similar to those of 1948 except that the Republican candidate – not a southern segregationist – got 33 Confederate electoral votes, chipping away at the solidly Democratic South.

Again, had the South not been voting, the results would have been Kennedy 222 and Nixon 186. Once more, the final result would have remained the same.

But that was all about to change. In 1963, less than six months before his assassination, Kennedy publicly declared his support for the laws that became the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Those statutes drove many more white southerners from the Democratic Party into the Republican Party – as we will see next week.