Different Party, Same Ideology

The South Switched Teams but Kept the Same Ideology

There’s a favorite talking point on the American right: “Democrats were the party of slavery. Democrats were the party of Jim Crow.” They throw it out like a grenade in political arguments, as if it were a trump card that delegitimizes any modern conversation about race, justice, or the parties’ respective commitments to equality. And yes, it’s true — the Democratic Party was the party of slavery. It was the party of Jim Crow.

But that was then. And this is now.

The part they always leave out — intentionally — is the political realignment that took place in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. Because if you follow the story of what happened after Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, you’ll find a transformation not of values, but of party. The party label changed. The ideology didn’t. And the South — always the stronghold of racial hierarchy — found a new political home in the Republican Party.

The Great Defection

The passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act was a moral victory, a constitutional correction, but also, a massive political gamble. Johnson knew it. “We have lost the South for a generation,” he reportedly said after signing the Civil Rights Act. What he didn’t know is that the defection would last far longer than that.

Southern white voters had been the bedrock of the Democratic coalition since the Civil War — a coalition rooted not in shared economic values but in shared racial ones. But once the national Democratic Party turned against segregation and embraced federal civil rights protections, southern white conservatives began the long process of realignment to a new party which planeed on capitalizing on Johnson’s “betryal” by deploying what became known as the GOP’s Southern Strategy.

The Southern strategy worked so well that by the 2000s they were taking it national on Long Southern Strategy and combining it with new cultural grievances around feminism, abortion, and later, gay rights.

This wasn’t an overnight shift. Contrary to popular myth, the South didn’t just flip a switch in 1968. Most southern states continued electing Democrats for decades, at least on the local and statewide level. Georgia didn’t elect a Republican governor until 2002. But presidential politics moved faster — Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” in 1968 was the proof of concept that race-based appeals to white resentment could win red states. And Ronald Reagan perfected it. By the 1980s, the GOP had successfully rebranded itself as the party of “law and order,” “states’ rights,” and “family values” — all coded language for keeping the old racial order intact.

Racial Voting Patterns Don’t Lie

In modern American politics, nothing is more predictable than how someone in the South will vote based on the color of their skin.

White voters in the South vote overwhelmingly Republican — we’re talking 75 to 85% margins in state after state, year after year. That’s not random. That’s not “economic anxiety.” That’s not just a cultural difference. That’s political behavior rooted in race — as consistent, powerful, and enduring as Black support for Democrats.

And why do Black voters vote Democratic? Because the Democratic Party — for all its original flaws, contradictions, and compromises — is the party that ended segregation, the party that passed the Voting Rights Act, the party that’s still defending access to the ballot, and to education.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party has become a political sanctuary for white conservatives who oppose the changing racial and cultural makeup of the country.

They may not say it outright (though some do, in fact, many now, and often), but the GOP’s policy priorities scream it: voter suppression laws, bans on teaching the history of racism, attacks on affirmative action, dismantling civil rights protections, cutting diversity programs, and criminalizing dissent.

Trump’s administration argued the price for shooting an unarmed Black woman asleep in her own bed should be just one day in jail.

It’s no accident that the states with the most aggressive anti-Black policies — like banning AP African American studies or closing polling places in Black neighborhoods — are the same states where white voters are giving Republicans 80% of their support.

That’s not just partisan loyalty. That’s ideology. And that ideology is older than either party.

Georgia: The Southern Outlier

Of the old Confederate states, Georgia stands out. It’s the only southern state that currently elects Democrats for senate, even if narrowly. And that’s not because white conservatives in Georgia have had a change of heart — it’s because the state has experienced a massive demographic and educational transformation.

Georgia has one of the highest rates of college-educated residents in the South, especially in and around Atlanta. This is from a smart piece of policy passed back when normal Republicans made policy and not troll content. That policy proves a free college education to every Georgia student that graduates high school with the good GPA- even the wealthy kids.

It’s also home to a large and politically active Black middle class. Add to that a growing population of Latino, Asian American, and young white progressive voters, and you get a coalition capable of punching through the old southern mold.

But even in Georgia, the white vote is still starkly polarized. In 2020, an estimated 70% of white Georgians voted for Trump. Candidates like Jon Ossof and Raphael Warnock win because of the strength of the Black vote, the organizing power of leaders like Stacey Abrams, and the changing suburban demographics that peel off some college-educated whites.

Georgia isn’t proof that the South has changed. It’s proof that the South can change — if the demographics and organizing are strong enough to overcome a deeply rooted ideology.

Different Jersey, Same Team

So yes, the Democratic Party was once the party of slavery. The party of segregation. The party of the KKK. But all of that was regional — a function of the South’s stranglehold on the Democratic coalition. And when the national party broke with that legacy in the 1960s, southern white conservatives left.

They didn’t change their minds. They changed their uniforms.

Though they still LOVE to talking about how much they love limited government, Trump’s actions tell a different story. The modern GOP is not just the party of tax cuts for billionaires. It is the inheritor of the Dixiecrat tradition — the same ideology that resisted Reconstruction, enforced Jim Crow, and opposed the Civil Rights Movement. Some of today’s southern Republicans no doubt had parents and grandparents that were Democratic segregationists. Today’s Republicans may fly the flag of “freedom,” but they govern with the same intention: to preserve an unequal racial and social order.

That’s why they fight to suppress votes, not expand them. That’s why they frame DEI programs as “anti-white.” That’s why they attack immigrants and shout about “globalists” and “elites” — all stand-ins for the same old enemy: anyone who threatens white conservative dominance.

Conclusion: Follow the Ideology, Not the Party

The ideology of white supremacy didn’t die when the South left the Democratic Party. It simply migrated. It found a new host. A new party label. A new lexicon of coded language. But the goals remain the same.

So when Republicans point fingers and shout, “Democrats were the real racists,” don’t take the bait. Ask them this: If that’s true, why does your party now hold 80% of the white vote in the South — and zero support from Black voters?

History didn’t erase racism. It just gave it a makeover.

-Rachel