Race Campaign Politics And The Realignment In The South

Why has the Democratic Party persisted in winning southern congressional elections in recent decades, while Republicans have dominated in presidential elections? Drawing upon extensive eyewitness accounts, news reports, and his own direct observations, James Glaser reveals that issues of group conflict and race continue to have an enormous impact on southern politics, though not always in expected ways.

Since the Voting Rights Act of 1965, while Republican candidates have carried the South in presidential elections, the Democratic Party has persisted in winning southern congressional elections. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, this text examines this political phenomenon.

A central story of contemporary southern politics is the emergence of Republican majorities in the region's congressional delegation. Acknowledging the significance and scope of the political change, James M. Glaser argues that, nevertheless, strands of continuity affect the practice of campaign politics in important ways. Strong southern tradition underlies the strategies pursued by the candidates, their presentational styles, and the psychology of their campaigns. The author offers eyewitness accounts of recent congressional campaigns in Texas, Mississippi, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. In the tradition of his award-winning book Race, Campaign Politics, and the Realignment in the South, Glaser captures the "stuff" of politics--the characters, the images, the rhetoric, and the scenery. Painting a full and fascinating picture of what it is like on the campaign trail, Glaser provides wide-ranging insights into the ways that the "hand of the past" reaches into the southern present.

A dissection of the language of the far right, showing the continued, although masked, biases inherent in their message.

The twelve essays in this book, several published here for the first time, represent some of Tony Badger’s best work in his ongoing examination of how white liberal southern politicians who came to prominence in the New Deal and World War II handled the race issue when it became central to politics in the 1950s and 1960s. Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s thought a new generation of southerners would wrestle Congress back from the conservatives. The Supreme Court thought that responsible southern leaders would lead their communities to general school desegregation after the Brown decision. John F. Kennedy believed that moderate southern leaders would, with government support, facilitate peaceful racial change. Badger’s writings demonstrate how all of these hopes were misplaced. Badger shows time and time again that moderates did not control southern politics. Southern liberal politicians for the most part were paralyzed by their fear that ordinary southerners were all-too-aroused by the threat of integration and were reluctant to offer a coherent alternative to the conservative strategy of resistance.

The South’s New Racial Politics presents an original thesis about how blacks and whites in today’s South engage in a politics that is qualitatively different from the past. Glen Browder—as practitioner and scholar—argues that politicians of the two races now practice an open, sophisticated, biracial game that, arguably, means progress; but it also can bring out old-fashioned, cynical, and racist Southern ways. The lesson to be learned from this interpretative analysis is that the Southern political system, while still constrained by racial problems, is more functional than ever before. Southerners perhaps can now move forward in dealing with their legacy of hard history.

The 2016 presidential election has shown that the Republican Party is at a crossroads. While a Trump candidacy took even the most seasoned political analysts by surprise, the rise of racially charged anti-elitism within the Grand Old Party has been an ongoing project for the last half a century, initiated and deliberately driven by its leaders and strategists who identified the former Confederacy as the foundation for conservative majorities. This book charts the path of the party's ever increasing Southernization and simultaneous Evangelicalization while providing a detailed assessment of the GOP's future chances of fashioning majorities in a country that is undergoing momentous demographic changes.