On Acorns and Oaks: Revisiting the Partisan Realignment of the White South 1
David O. Sears
University of California, Los Angeles
Nicholas A. Valentino
The University of Michigan
April 4, 2005 (34)
1
Abstract
The mass realignment of Southern whites to the Republican party since the 1960's has
sharply changed the partisan balance of the nation as a whole. We explore the convergence of (1)
historically high levels of racial animosity among white Southerners, (2) the particular historic
salience of race in the South, and (3) the conservative values at the heart of the surging religious
fundamentalism in the South, hypothesizing that they are responsible for much of the shift of
white Southerners to the Republicans.
One set of analyses shows strong continuity between the state-by-state presidential vote
results between the present era and the two previous periods in which the parties were sharply
divided on racial policy, the antebellum and civil rights eras. The current party alignment does
not resemble those in the much longer periods in which the parties did not differ on racial issues.
A second set of analyses, using NES data, show that (1) symbolic racism has become
increasingly closely associated with Republican party identification over the last thirty years in
the old Confederacy, but not in the North and West; (2) Southern white evangelicals are
considerably more racially conservative than are other white Southerners, Northern white
evangelicals, or people of other faiths; (3) white evangelicals are also more conservative than
other whites in non-racial domains, but without systematic regional differences, presumably
because the political distinctiveness of the white South is mainly limited to racial issues; (4)
evangelical Protestantism is associated strongly with Republican party identification in both
South and North, but that association is explained by racial conservatism only in the old
Confederacy; and (5) evangelical Protestants dominate the Southern white electorate, but are a
much smaller minority elsewhere in the nation.
These findings suggest the continuing power of specifically racial conservatism,
especially as associated with evangelical Protestantism, in producing the mass partisan
realignment of the white Southern electorate.
2
The purpose of this paper is to reexamine the partisan realignment of the American
voting public that has been occurring since the 1960's. Realignments normally are understood as
involving shifts in the party coalitions over time (Key, 1959; Burnham, 1965; Bartels, 1998;
Mayhew, 2002; Petrocik, 1984). Since 1960, region has become associated less closely with
partisanship, most notably as the once solidly Democratic South has converged toward the rest of
the nation. As shown in Figure 1, the proportion of white Southerners who are Republican has
surged, whereas the proportion who are Democrats has dropped precipitously, according to the
National Election Studies’ surveys conducted over the past half century.
[Insert Figure 1 about here]
Region is of course not the only demographic dimension that has changed in relation to
partisanship. Race, religious observance, gender, and socio-economic status have become
associated more closely with partisanship, as whites, especially the more religiously observant,
males, and those with higher socio-economic status have moved toward the Republicans
(Abramowitz & Saunders, 1998; Manza and Brooks, 1999; Miller & Shanks, 1996; Petrocik,
1987; Kauffmann and Petrocik, 1998).
These changes have changed the balance of political power in the United States. A nation
with a consistent Democratic majority at mid-century has evolved into one that is closely divided,
if not tilting toward the Republicans. The Democrats have not captured a majority of the
presidential vote in a quarter of a century. In 1994 the Republicans took full control of the
Congress for the first time in nearly half a century, and seem to be solidifying their position. In
state politics, the once healthy Democratic majority of the governorships has switched to a strong
Republican majority, and Republicans have come at least to parity in the state legislatures. In
terms of party identification, Republicans have overcome the stable majority once held by
Democrats (Abramson et al., 2002; Flanigan and Zingale, 2003; Miller & Shanks, 1996).
A phenomenon of this importance always generates extensive scholarship. Any brief
summary of its results risks doing violence to its inevitable nuances. We advance a somewhat
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different account than the current conventional wisdom, also a risky proposition, and it will
ultimately require a lengthier exposition than possible here. We hope that its contours can be
sketched out here with sufficient evidence to make a plausible case.
Conventional Explanations of the Realignment
Race as the initial trigger
The literature on the contemporary party system would seem to reflect a consensus about
the events triggering at least the regional component of this realignment. Perhaps the most
complete analysis, by Carmines and Stimson (1989), concludes that “[t]he struggle over race, at
its peak the dominant issue of American political life for only some three years in the mid1960’s…, permanently rearranged the American party system” (p. xiii). They argue that
realignment was triggered by the ideological polarization of the two party caucuses in Congress
after the election of 1958, shifting the balance of power in each party away from the center. The
exogenous pressures of the civil rights movement forced these more polarized parties to take
more distinctive positions on civil rights issues, departing from their similar levels of support for
the racial status quo in the years previous. The Republicans’ “Goldwater gamble” in 1964
campaigned on a states-rights justification for opposing federal intervention to protect blacks’
civil rights. It triggered a heightened emphasis on race in the two parties’ platforms, increased
polarization of party activists on racial issues, and heightened perceptions within the mass public
of that party polarization on desegregation. Later in the decade the Nixon “Southern strategy”
accelerated the realignment of Southern whites into the Republican camp.
As careful and persuasive as the Carmines and Stimson analysis is, for our purposes it is
incomplete in two key respects. First, it deals only with the period from the end of World War II
to 1980. The realignment has continued into the present, we believe. Indeed the post-1980
Reagan era is often cited as central to the Republican surge (e.g., Black and Black, 2002).
Second, they do not explicitly address the regional basis for change. In our view the most
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important cause of the change in the partisan balance of power is the conversion of the once-solid
Democratic South to a region that at least tilts Republican (Black and Black, 2002).
A dwindling role for race?
The conventional wisdom about this continuing regional realignment no longer focuses
on race. Rather, it emphasizes a regularization of the relationship between ideology and party
identification in the post civil rights era: “....a secular realignment of party loyalties along
ideological lines” (Abramowitz & Saunders, 1998, p. 634; also see Rabinowitz, Gurian, &
Macdonald, 1984). Regularization of the link between party and ideology has clearly occurred.
But ideological conservatism can be based in a number of values and attitudes. The general
consensus seems to be that the key issues attracting Southern whites to the Republican party have
been support for lower taxes, a less intrusive, New Deal-style big federal government, a
reduction in the welfare state, a strong national defense, freedom to bear arms, religious
conservatism and associated moral issues such as abortion and family values, as well as an
increasingly class-based party cleavage in the South (Abramowitz, 1994; Sniderman and
Carmines, 1997; Petrocik, 1987; Abramowitz and Saunders, 1998; Carmines and Stanley, 1990;
Green et al., 1998; Kellstedt, 1990; Steed et al., 1990).
Most writing on the subject have concluded that even if the realignment of white
Southerners may have been triggered initially by racial issues, today their support for
Republicans is due primarily to other factors. As a result, race and racial issues have played a
minor role in most of these accounts of white Southerners’ continuing political realignment. This
mirrors a common line of thinking about American politics more generally, that much of the
once-considerable force of racial prejudice has been spent: “A quarter century ago, what counted
was who a policy would benefit, blacks or whites” (Sniderman & Piazza, 1993, pp. 4-5), while
“the contemporary debate over racial policy is driven primarily by conflict over what the
government should try to do, and only secondarily over what it should try to do for blacks”
[emphasis in the original] (Sniderman & Carmines, 1997, p. 4). As a result, today “prejudice is
5
very far from a dominating factor in the contemporary politics of race” (Sniderman & Carmines,
1997, p. 73).
Three contrary indications
We are less sure. As a starting point, there would seem to be three presumptive reasons
to take a closer look at race. One is the fact that the major shift to the Republican Party has
occurred in the South, a historic bastion of racial conservatism.2 The “Solid South” voted reliably
more for Democratic presidential candidates than for Republicans from the “Compromise of
1877" to the Dixiecrat rebellion of 1948, years when most Southern blacks were excluded from
voting. Thereafter the South began slipping away from the Democrats, and in 2000 was lost
entirely. The Democrats held the majority of Southern Senate and House seats well into the
1980's, as well as a wide advantage in Southerners’ party identifications. Democratic support in
the South has dropped sharply in all these respects, though at different rates depending on the
indicator. They have lost, in succession, their once-hegemonic lead in the U. S. Senate, the
House, gubernatorial seats, and state legislatures. This partisan realignment of Southern whites
has been widely noted, though there is some disagreement about the timing of the realignment,
and about whether a transitional period of dealignment occurred (e.g., Beck, 1977; Black and
Black, 1992, 2002; Campbell, 1977a, b; Carmines & Stanley, 1990; Converse, 1966; Jewett,
1999; Miller and Shanks, 1996; Petrocik, 1987; Stanley, 1988; Sundquist, 1983; a most detailed,
state-by-state account is provided by Bullock and Rozell, 2003).
Second, the Southern movement from Democrats to Republicans has occurred almost
exclusively among white voters. Southern blacks mobilized greatly in this period, and
overwhelmingly supported Democratic candidates (Abramowitz & Saunders, 1998; Black &
Black, 1992; Burnham, 1996; Miller & Shanks, 1996). As the Blacks’ (2002) careful analysis
documents, the partisan solidarity among Southern African Americans, as well as their
considerable numbers, has at least given the Southern Democratic party a thoroughly racially
integrated face, and often perhaps a predominantly black one.
6
Third, the Southern white realignment has occurred predominantly, though not
exclusively, among whites native to the South. There is good evidence that migration from the
North was not solely responsible; many native Southerners themselves changed parties, especially
in the Deep South and to a surprising degree, among older cohorts (Beck, 1977; Campbell, 1977a,
b; Carmines and Layman, 1998; Carmines and Stanley, 1990; Glaser and Gilens, 1997; Petrocik,
1987; Stanley, 1988).
Finally, some of the emphasis on putatively non-racial issues may be suspect. A number
of issues that, while not explicitly racial in nature, have become racialized in recent decades; for
example, some have opined that “when the official subject is presidential politics, taxes, welfare,
crime, rights, or values . . . the real subject is race” (Edsall and Edsall, 1991). At an empirical
level, issues such as welfare, crime, and taxes have been shown to have a racial basis (Gilens,
1999; Mendelberg, 2001; Sears and Citrin, 1985).
Theoretical Conditions for A Continuing Role of Race
These doubts thus lead us to reappraise the possible role of racial conservatism as a
continuing factor in the realignment of Southern whites. If so, four conditions need to hold. The
first is that long-term continuities in Southern culture may have led to a continuing pattern of
unusual racial conservatism in the white South, both at the aggregate and at the individual level.
The two-caste system was deeply embedded in Southern society, and indeed central to its social
and political organization, for centuries. Half a century ago, when analyzing Southern politics,
one had first and foremost to focus on race, as V.O. Key, Jr. (1949) so clearly documented. On
both cultural and psychological grounds we are skeptical that it has disappeared as a primary
focal point of Southern politics in what is the short historical moment since the 1960's.
The long history of racial animosity and exclusion in the white South might therefore raise
suspicions about an important continuing role of racial issues in its political realignment. The
two-caste system was deeply embedded in Southern society, and indeed central to its social and
political organization, for centuries. Half a century ago, when analyzing Southern politics, one
7
had first and foremost to focus on race, as V.O. Key, Jr. (1949) so clearly documented. On both
historical and psychological grounds we are skeptical that it has disappeared as a primary focal
point of Southern politics in what is the short historical moment since the 1960's.
Historically, continuity of contention over racial issues is one of the hallmarks of
American political history. Race was a most conflictual issue at each of the young nation’s three
early pivotal moments: the debates over the language of the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution, and in the politics that triggered the Civil War and dealt with its aftermath. Much
later it was the nation’s most conflictual issue in the 1960’s during the wrenching abandonment
of the Jim Crow system. In each case the conflict over race was largely sectional. The core
documents agreed to at the founding of the nation essentially avoided the issue of slavery. Many
historians today believe that tabling the issue of slavery was the price of bringing Southern elites
to support independence, first, and then the Union.3 They did so not because it was a minor issue,
because the number of slaves was large, the economic importance of slavery was great, and
political contention over slavery was vigorous. Rather, slavery was a “deal-breaker.” However
the historical record is unequivocal with regard to the Civil War in the 1860's, the Civil Rights
Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. They were tangibly and on the record cleavages
between North and South. They revolved around race, and specifically around Southern white
opposition to equality for African Americans.
Second, at the individual psychological level, the South has been the home of
substantially greater anti-black prejudice and other negative racial attitudes than has the rest of
the country for as long as it has been measured systematically (Schuman et al., 1997). Moreover,
racial attitudes have been shown to be among the most stable of Americans’ political attitudes at
the intra-individual level (Converse and Markus, 1979; Kinder and Sanders, 1996; Sears, 1983).
Presumably long-term stability of political attitudes depends on a number of factors, such as the
recurrence of the attitude object on the political agenda, the volume of communication about it,
the cognitive simplicity of the attitude object, and so on (Sears, 1983). All of those conditions
8
would seem to be met by racial attitudes. Finally, continuity at the aggregate level derives from
the intergenerational transmission of racial conservatism among native white Southerners. Given
this pattern of continuing greater racial conservatism among Southern adults, it would be quite
surprising if young Southern whites have not been socialized to substantially greater racial
animosity than young whites elsewhere in the country (e.g., Steeh and Schuman, 1991). As a
result, the inertial power of such central cultural and psychological states should not be
underestimated.
The third condition is the easiest: a clear differentiation between the two parties in their
racial conservatism. Few would doubt that the Democrats have emerged since the 1960's as the
more liberal party on race. If one needed concrete indicators, the fact that the percent of blacks
identifying as Republicans (including leaning independents) in the NES has ranged between 3%
and only 12% since 1964 (Abramson et al., 2002, pp. 174-5). Or, the congressional Black
Caucus has been almost unanimously Democratic since its inception. The parties clearly differ on
race.
The fourth step is that race would have to be particularly salient in the South, and
therefore more psychologically accessible and easily primed, than elsewhere in the country.
Again we appeal to the historic circumstances of life in the South. Race has from the beginning
been a more central element of society as a whole in the South than elsewhere. Blacks have
always represented a considerably higher percentage of the population in the South. They have
always been more visible in the South, because they have been distributed more broadly in the
population than in the North and West, with their tradition of black segregation in large
metropolitan ghettoes. And as the Blacks (2002) have noted, in politics blacks are more salient as
well, representing a considerably higher proportion of Democratic candidates and voters than is
true elsewhere. For these reasons, race is likely to be more chronically accessible and more
frequently primed in electoral situations in the South than elsewhere. If so, racial attitudes should
be more politically powerful among white Southerners, everything else being equal.
9
Continuities in the Sectional Conflict: Aggregate Level
Our first hypothesis is that the relatively recent shift of the South to the Republicans
obscures an important long-term continuity in American politics. If we are correct, and racial
issues are central ingredients in this shift, then accounts of contemporary party realignment are
incomplete without examining the sectional division between North and South as the oldest basis
for divisions over race in American life. The realignment of the past four decades has been
primarily sectional in nature, as has been widely noted. But we suggest that the realignment has
served to restore the two parties’ support bases to those sections of the country that were most
politically divided during, and only during, the two previous eras in which the two parties were
divided most centrally on racial issues: the antebellum period, and the civil rights era. It has
swung the states of the old Confederacy into the Republican base, and the states that most
supported the Union and civil rights into the Democratic column. Presidential voting has been
the leading indicator, but other political indices have swung in the same direction with some lag.
In fact, American political history yields only two prior periods in which the parties have
been sharply polarized over issues of race. The first was the antebellum period from 1848
through 1860, beginning with the defeat of the Wilmot Proviso in 1847, the founding of the Free
Soil Party in 1848, the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, the Dred Scott decision in
1857, and ending with Lincoln’s victory in 1860 that triggered the secession of the Confederacy.
The second was the civil rights era, beginning in 1963, when the Kennedy administration first
began to take a strong position on civil rights, through the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting
Rights Acts in 1964 and 1965 (though both, in the end, with substantial Republican support) and
the clash of the Johnson and Goldwater campaigns over civil rights legislation, through the
“Southern strategy” of Richard M. Nixon, the George Wallace campaign in 1968, and the rise of
black militancy. The two parties had, of course, almost exactly reversed positions on racial issues
in the meantime. Lincoln, the Republican who signed the Emancipation Proclamation, was
succeeded by Goldwater, who voted against the Civil Rights Act. Douglas, the Democrat who
10
promoted the Kansas-Nebraska Act, was succeeded by Lyndon Johnson, who strongly supported
civil rights legislation.
We carry out a quasi-experiment to test this. We compare presidential voting in the
present era with that in these two past eras, using the full periods in question (1848 to 1860 and
1964 to 1972). We also use an individual focal year for each prior period: 1856, because it was
the first presidential election in which the Republican party provided a candidate, and
immediately preceded 1857, which Stampp (1993) argues was the pivotal year for the ultimate
breakdown of sectional harmony, and 1964, in line with most recent scholarship (e.g., Carmines
& Stimson, 1989).
Continuities across eras of party polarization over race
Indeed, the partisan alignment of today shows a striking level of continuity with its
alignment in those two most racialized periods in the history of American political parties, in
several respects. First of all, the geographical pattern of the presidential vote is strikingly similar
across these two periods, tracking the almost complete inversion of the two parties’ positions on
racial issues in the interim. The Pearson correlation of the state-by-state Democratic presidential
vote across the two focal years, 1856 and 1964 was r = -.60. Considering those eras more
broadly, the average correlation was r = -.56 between the antebellum and civil-rights-era
elections, taken a pair at a time.
Second, we find striking continuities between the presidential votes cast in both eras with
those cast in 2000. The states taken by the Democrat James Buchanan in the focal year of 1856
were much the same as the “red states” taken by George W. Bush in 2000, although the two
elections were separated by 144 years, and the states taken by the Republican John C. Fremont
were much the same as the “blue states” taken by Al Gore. Figure 2 shows this continuity in
detail. Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi stand out as the strongest supporters of both Buchanan
and Bush, while Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New York stand out as strong supporters of
both Fremont and Gore. The correlation between the state-by-state vote tallies in the two years is
11
r = -.68, and the average correlation of the results in the elections in the full antebellum period
with the 2000 results is r = -.59, as shown in Table 1. Much the same continuity holds from the
second racialized period, the civil rights era, to the present, though that is less surprising. The
correlation of the focal year of 1964 with the year 2000 is r = .55, and the average correlation
between the results from the full civil rights era and the 2000 results is r = .65,
[Insert Figure 2 and Table 1 about here]
We have used the year 2000 as our focal year for the present era, but it is not at all
unusual. We could have selected virtually any presidential election in the past two decades to
make the same point. Table 2 demonstrates the same continuity for all the presidential elections
since Reagan-Mondale in 1984. The antebellum elections correlate on average r = - .50 with
elections over that two-decade period, and the civil rights era, an average of r = .66.
[Insert Table 2 about here]
Third, if our hypothesis is correct, the present should show more continuity with those
two earlier eras in which the parties were racially polarized than with the far more numerous
elections in which both parties accepted the racial status quo to an equivalent degree. Indeed the
correlations of the results for all elections since 1828 with the 2000 results emphasizes how
uniquely those two past racialized eras foreshadow the present. As mentioned above, the
antebellum elections and the civil rights era elections correlate r = -.68 and r = .55 with the 2000
result, respectively. But the correlations are much smaller for the elections before and between
these two brief racialized eras, elections when race was neither a major national political issue nor
a point of great difference between the parties. Table 1 shows those correlations grouped into
different eras, but all show the same low absolute level: for example, the average correlation of
the results for the 1872-1956 elections, inclusive, with the year 2000 is r = -.18. It exceeded plus
or minus .30 only once in those 20 elections, in 1896.
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Sectional conflict
Finally, what the two past racialized eras and the present have in common is the
continuity of specifically sectional conflict. This is revealed in two ways. It is apparent from
Figure 1 that the states of the old Confederacy were strongest for Buchanan and for Bush, and the
states of the Northeast were strongest for Fremont and Gore. The slave states that remained in the
Union were intermediate. If we examine differences among individual elections, the centrality of
sectional conflict is also apparent. There was a substantial aggregate-level switch of Southern
states away from the Democrats to the Republicans after World War II, anticipated in the
Dixiecrat revolt in 1948 and in the 1960 election, and then solidified in the 1964 election. As
shown in Table 2, to a lesser extent the nomination of Bill Clinton in 1992 weakened continuity
with the civil rights era, but by 1996 it is clear that Southern whites’ affinity for their native sons
had largely eroded, and almost completely disappeared in 2000. Indeed the Southerner Al Gore’s
vote reflected the antebellum alignment just as strongly as did the Massachusetts liberal Michael
Dukakis.
In other words, the partisan alignment has, for the past decades, resembled, more than
any other in American history, the sectional cleavages of the antebellum and civil rights eras.
James Buchanan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush all drew their voting strength from
about the same areas. In addition, the contemporary party alignment is quite dissimilar from the
one that held in the long period between the Civil War and the civil rights era, when race was
essentially off the national political agenda. These aggregate-level results are of course not
conclusive evidence about individual-level processes; they are merely circumstantial. But they
are consistent with the hypothesis that divisions over race have been central to the sectional
cleavage in all three eras. We next move to public opinion data to examine their role in the
contemporary era at the individual level.
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Continuing Regional Differences in Racial Conservatism
Our second hypothesis is that Southern whites have continued to hold substantially more
negative racial attitudes than do whites living elsewhere, net of other factors. To begin with, we
need to specify what we mean by racial attitudes. If one sought to find a basis for white
Southerners’ partisan realignment in the old-fashioned (or “Jim Crow”) racism of half a century
ago, based on support for segregation, formal discrimination, and a belief in inherent black
inferiority, one would be disappointed. That form of racism has little support or political
influence (Sears et al., 1997; Kluegel, 1990; Schuman et al., 1997; Kinder & Sanders, 1996). We
also have some doubts about the continuing value of such traditional measures of racial animosity
as trait stereotypes and group thermometers, because of their blunt and blatant form in an era of
strengthened norms about suppressing the expression of racial prejudice (Mendelberg, 2001).
Rather, the nature of white Americans’ racial attitudes has changed in important ways. A
new form of racism seems to have largely replaced the traditional forms of racial prejudice just
described, variously been described as “symbolic racism” (Kinder and Sears, 1981; Sears et al.,
1997), “modern racism” (McConahay, 1986), or “racial resentment” (Kinder and Sanders, 1996;
Mendelberg, 2001). The basic tenets of symbolic racism are widely accepted by whites today,
tending to split whites about evenly (Henry and Sears, 2002; Tarman and Sears, 2004).
Moreover, it has been shown to have more political influence than do other racial attitudes (Sears
et al., 1997; Kinder and Sanders, 1996; Hughes, 1997; Bobo, 2000; Sears and Henry, 2004; Sears
et al., 1997). If the historically greater levels of racial animus in the white South have persisted,
as we expect, symbolic racism should have been consistently higher in the South than elsewhere
throughout the last several decades, despite the decline of Jim Crow racism.
Trends in racial conservatism
Mean levels of Jim Crow racism did indeed sharply decline throughout the country
between the 1970’s and the 1990’s, as shown in the top panel of Figure 3. A multivariate analysis
(see Valentino and Sears, 2004) yields a large and highly significant drop for the entire sample,
14
from .39 to .14 on a 0-1 scale (p < .001). But both the Deep and Outer South continued to house
substantially higher levels of Jim Crow racism than the North throughout the last three decades,
as reflected in the large coefficients for the two regional dummies (b = .31 and .21, both p <
.001). The size of the regional difference does diminish slightly over time, as reflected in the two
small but significant region*year interactions, but mostly due to a floor effect for the scale. Thus
small regional differences in Jim Crow racism have persisted over time, as it has been
disappearing in the North and barely hanging on in the South.
[Insert Figure 3 about here]
The story for symbolic racism is much different than that for Jim Crow racism. First
mean levels of symbolic racism have actually increased slightly over time, rather than declining
(see the second panel of Figure 3), as reflected in a significant main effect for year in the
regression analysis. Second, the regional difference in symbolic racism is very large, with
considerably more symbolic racism in the South than the North and West at all time points. This
is shown in Figure 3, and revealed statistically in significant region main effects. But third, the
South did not converge to the rest of the country in symbolic racism between the 1970’s and the
1990’s; neither region*year interaction on symbolic racism is statistically distinguishable from
zero (Valentino and Sears, 2004). Unlike Jim Crow racism, then, there is no declining trend in
symbolic racism in any region.
Do we find Southern whites in the contemporary period to be considerably more racially
conservative than whites living elsewhere, above and beyond their more general political
conservatism, on all dimensions of racial animosity, or are they specific to Jim Crow and
symbolic racism? To test the generality of current regional differences, we examine the period
beginning in the 1990’s, and broaden the range of racial attitudes by pooling available surveys
across years (all NES surveys since 1992 with relevant measures, and all the GSS surveys since
1990). We again examine Jim Crow and symbolic racism, but add conventional measures of
15
traditional prejudice, stereotyping of blacks, and the feeling thermometers. To isolate the racial
element from other factors, we control for ideology and relevant demographics.
On each of these four measures, the South, and especially the Deep South, includes a
disproportionate share of the highly racially conservative (Valentino and Sears, 2004). For
example, 55% of the whites in the Deep South, but only 32% of those in the North and West, fall
in the top third of the national distribution of symbolic racism. If so, are such differences merely
a spurious effect of Southerners’ more general conservatism or demographic distinctiveness? The
impact of region is highly statistically significant for each measure in analyses of variance that
include controls for education, age, gender, and ideology. White Southerners are today more
racially conservative than whites living elsewhere on all conventional dimensions of racial
attitudes. These regional differences in racial conservatism are not explained by regional
differences in more general political conservatism or demographics.
Trends in political ideology
Is the Southern realignment driven by an increased conservatism among whites that goes
beyond race? In fact the Southern white electorate has not become relatively more ideologically
conservative. The mean political ideology among whites has been quite stable over the available
period (1972 to 2000), shifting only from 4.23 to 4.42 on the one to seven liberal-conservative
scale. There appear to be no large regional differences in this small conservatizing trend. As
shown in Figure 4, the Deep and Outer South were slightly but consistently more conservative
than the rest of the country throughout this time period. The slightly expanded regional difference
in 1998 and 2000 comes too late to explain the long realigning trends across three decades. The
multivariate analyses (see Valentino and Sears, 2004) show that the Deep South*year interaction
is non-significant, while the Outer South*year interaction shows a slightly increasing
convergence to the rest of the country. In other words, the ideological complexion of the three
regions has been relatively stable over time, so the massive shifts in Southern whites’ party
16
identifications cannot be explained as resulting from comparable conservatizing shifts in political
ideology in the South.4
[Insert Figure 4 about here]
In sum, party identification has swung sharply to the Republican party among white
Southerners since the Civil Rights era, but not elsewhere in the country. Jim Crow or “oldfashioned” racism has diminished drastically, but the South has consistently retained more of it
than the rest of the country. In contrast, symbolic racism has, if anything, been increasing over
time, but again the South has been consistently higher than the rest of the country. We do find
that white Southerners have been consistently more conservative in terms of political ideology
than other whites, but there has been no change in the size of that difference. Changes in regional
differences in racial attitudes and/or political ideology are unlikely candidates for explaining the
white Southern realignment over the past three decades, therefore.
Roots of Southern Realignment in Racial Conservatism?
Presumably racial issues did not strongly differentiate the two parties in the pre-1963
South. But as Democratic and Republican elites more and more clearly polarized on race after
1964, and conservative white Southern elites moved to the Republican party, the mass public’s
party identifications should have gradually fallen in line. Racial conservatism should have
become increasingly with associated with Republican rather than Democratic partisanship in the
South. Moreover, if we are correct that race has historically been more salient in both Southern
politics and its society more generally than in the North, the strength of that linkage between
racial conservatism and partisanship should have become greater in the South.
As a result, our third hypothesis is that the distinctive realignment of Southern whites to
the Republican party is associated significantly with their racial conservatism, even considering
sources of political conservatism with no manifest racial content. Specifically racial conservatism
continues to be a stronger force in attracting Southern whites to the Republican party than is true
for whites elsewhere in the nation.
17
Indeed when we look at a time series analysis of the contribution of symbolic racism to
Republican partisanship, we find a sharp regional difference. Figure 5 shows the results of
regressing party identification on symbolic racism in the South and in the North.5 Here we are
mindful of the critique leveled by some in the past that symbolic racism does not really reflect
racism at all but non-racial conservatism instead (e.g., Sniderman and Tetlock, 1986; Tetlock,
1994; Roth, 1994). There is much recent evidence that symbolic racism has a strong and
distinctive racial component that cannot be reduced to general political conservatism, though it
does take some contribution from the latter (Henry and Sears, 2002; Sears and Henry, 2003,
2004; Tarman and Sears, 2004). Moreover, it seems clear that political conservatism has itself
absorbed a distinctly racial component over recent decades. Nevertheless, because of such
concerns, we also control on ideology in those analyses (even though this could plausibly be
argued to “over-control” for ideology).6
[Insert Figure 5 about here]
As can be seen, symbolic racism is strongly associated with Republican party
identification in the South today, even with ideology controlled. The association is present but
considerably more modest outside the South. White Southerners also show a considerable rise in
the association of symbolic racism with Republican party identification since the Reagan years, as
the most racially conservative whites left the Democratic fold, whether by choice or by death,
and/or joined the electorate as Republicans. No such historic change has occurred in the North,
where presumably race is a less central, though not trivial, partisan issue. Here, then, is evidence
that the sharp surge in support for Republicans in the South during the past 15 years is closely
associated with whites’ racial conservatism.
Alternative explanations for these effects of symbolic racism might focus on general
political ideology, both because it is thought by some to explain Southern realignment and
because some have speculated that symbolic racism taps non-racial conservatism as well or better
than it does racial resentment (e.g., Sniderman and Tetlock 1986). However, the greater impact
18
of symbolic racism in the South is not merely an artifact of stronger general political
conservatism. Table 3 shows a regression analysis for both presidential vote and party
identification in the contemporary era. The fourth row shows that ideology is, by itself, a strong
and significant predictor of both the vote and party identification outside the South. But the two
non-significant ideology*region interaction terms in the fifth row indicate that ideology has no
greater impact on partisanship in the South than elsewhere. Moreover the interaction term for the
vote actually falls in the opposite direction from the interaction for party identification, reducing
the likelihood of falsely accepting the null hypothesis. In other words, in the contemporary period
ideology has no greater partisan impact in the South than elsewhere, once the especially strong
impact of racial conservatism in the South has been taken into account.
[Insert Table 3 about here]
To compare the magnitudes of symbolic racism and ideology effects across regions, we
have converted the logistic regression coefficients in the vote preference model into probabilities.
These results are presented in Figure 6. The height of each column represents the change in the
probability of voting for the Republican presidential candidate associated with moving from the
lowest to the highest value of either the symbolic racism or the liberal-conservative ideology
scales. The bars on the left show that moving across the full symbolic racism scale leads to a 60
point increase in the probability of voting for the Republican candidate in the South, but only a 20
point increase elsewhere. The bars on the right show that the impact of ideology is larger than
that for symbolic racism, but there is no regional difference in the size of that effect. The regional
difference in the effects of symbolic racism, and the lack of any regional difference in the effects
of ideology, suggests that specifically racial attitudes have played a fundamental role in the
Southern-based partisan realignment of the past four decades.
[Insert Figure 6 about here]
We have relied primarily on symbolic racism to make the case that racial attitudes are
central to Southern realignment. To isolate its specifically racial component we have controlled
19
on standard political ideology. But it is worth making further effort on this front, since the nonracial hypothesis is a prominent alternative among both academics and the lay public. Another
approach is to compare the impact of racial, as opposed to non-racial, policy preferences. The
latter are particularly prominent in explanations of white Southerners’ presidential votes for
Republicans. To do so, we compared the effects of racial policy issues (government aid to
minorities and affirmative action) with those of legalized abortion and national defense, two
issues often invoked to explain Southern conservatism but deliberately chosen to have little
spillover from racial issues. The dependent variable is dichotomous Republican vote choice with
all other candidates in the excluded category, as before. We test the main effects of each policy
attitude and of region on the vote (with demographics controlled; we do not control for ideology
because the racial vs. non-racial contrast is carried out by the comparison across issues). The key
term is the interaction of policy attitudes and region, which we hypothesize will be significantly
positive for racial issues but close to zero for non-racial issue preferences.
The model for the impact of racial issues is shown Table 4. The first row shows that
opposition to assisting blacks strongly boosts the probability of Republican presidential voting
outside the South, since that is the excluded group in the dummy variable for region. The second
and third rows indicate that opinions about abortion and defense also have a large impact on
Republican vote (again, in the North). The fourth row shows that once racial policy attitudes have
been controlled, the remaining regional difference in the vote is small and non-significant. Then,
most important, the fifth row shows that the racial policy attitudes*region interaction is positive
and statistically significant, indicating that racial policy attitudes are significantly stronger
predictors of the vote in the South than they are in the North.7 These logistic coefficients can be
transformed into probabilities. Holding demographic controls constant at either their mean values
or at “male” for gender, the impact of moving from the lowest to the highest levels of opposition
to racial policies boosts the likelihood of Republican voting in the South by 63 percentage points,
from 10% to 73%. Outside the South, it boosts the likelihood of voting Republican by only 38
20
percentage points, from 14% to 52%. In other words, opposition to special assistance to blacks
has a significantly larger influence on support for Republican presidential voting in the South
than it does in the North and West.
[Insert Table 4 about here]
In contrast, there are no significant regional differences in the linkages of non-racial
policy attitudes to vote preference. Not surprisingly, opposition to abortion and support for
defense spending both significantly boost support for Republican presidential candidates in the
North and West, as shown in the second and third rows of Table 4. However, the sixth and
seventh rows show that there is no regional difference in the impact of these opinions, and in fact
the small interaction terms actually fall in the reverse direction.
In short, racial issue opinions are more strongly linked to vote choice in the South than in
the North and West, while non-racial issues operate almost identically across region. These
findings contradict what we earlier described as the conventional wisdom about contemporary
party realignment, then. They do so by examining both regional differences and racial issues
more directly than has previous research. The white South is particularly sensitive to racial
issues, and the racial conservatism of Republican elites, and their divergence from Democratic
elites, has given racial issues an important role in realignment.
The New Politics of Religion
As mentioned at the outset, religion has been a second important domain of partisan
realignment. The old denominationally-based model emphasized in the early voting studies
focused on cleavages between the Democratic-leaning Catholics and Jews and the Republican
leanings of white Protestants (e.g., Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet, 1948). More recent
research focusing specifically on religion, has carefully classified the church denominations and
religious beliefs of ordinary voters, grassroots political activists, and active church members (e.g.,
Jelen, 1993; Layman, 1997; Kellstedt et al., 1999; Leege et al., 2002; Bolce and DeMaio, 1999a;
Wuthnow, 1988).8
21
The Christian Right
It has found that those global denominational differences are now considerably less
politically important than cleavages between people with more orthodox and those with more
liberal religious beliefs. The most significant cleavage is between white Protestants described as
“evangelical,” “fundamentalist,” or “born-again” Christians,who tend to believe in the literal truth
of the Bible, and members of “mainline” Protestant denominations and/or those with more liberal
religious beliefs.9 Fundamentalist white Protestants, especially those who are particularly
observant, are the strongest supporters of the Republican party, while liberal Protestants seem to
have shifted toward the Democrats. For example, exit polls in 1988 and 1992 showed that
fundamentalist religious belief was one of the strongest, if not the strongest, predictors of
Republican presidential voting in virtually all the larger states (Jackson and Carsey, 1999; Manza
and Brooks, 1999; also see Bolce and DeMaio, 1999b; Burnham, 1996; Busch, 2000; Green et al.,
1998). The political cleavage driven by Christian fundamentalism has considerable generality: it
seems to have had equally profound effects across presidential voting, congressional voting, and
underlying party identification (Kellstedt et al., 1998). In other words, fundamentalists are
becoming more politically homogeneous and distinctive from other religious factions within and
outside Christianity.10
At first blush, the political activation of evangelical Protestants would seem to be mostly
catalyzed by moral issues such as abortion, and traditional family values concerning parental
rights, prayer in the schools, religious training in the upbringing of children, traditional gender
roles, and opposition to gay and lesbian rights (e.g. Jelen, 1993; Kellstedt et al., 1998; Kohut et
al, 2000; Wilcox, 1996). Traditional party differences on economic issues and the size of
government do not drive the distinctive political preferences of fundamentalists to the same
degree.
Race and the Christian Right
22
For our purposes it is noteworthy that political cleavages between the Christian Right and
their opponents are rarely ascribed to differences of opinion about racial issues.11 Nor do blacks
themselves have much visibility in this literature, even though they are among the strongest
opponents of the Christian Right’s broad conservative political agenda (e.g., Bolce and DeMaio,
1999a; Jelen, 1993; Kellstedt et al., 1998; Layman, 1997; Pastor et al., 1999; Wilcox, 1996).12
However, we are less sure that race is incidental to the surging role of evangelicals in the
Southern Republican party. This argument, we anticipate, will be the most difficult and
controversial for many readers. We come to it for both historical and psychological reasons.
Our general theoretical orientation ascribes great inertial power to continuities with the
historical past. Most white Southerners today were born and bred in the South, and are products
of Southern culture, however much certain aspects of that have changed. Historically, churches
were the centerpieces of Southern life, for whites and for blacks, to a greater extent than has been
true elsewhere. Those churches were segregated racially, and remain so today, with some
exceptions. Prior to the civil rights era, the most devout and regular churchgoers among white
Southerners were also those who most supported traditional Jim Crow beliefs (Pettigrew, 1959).
When the Johnson administration, in 1965, began to put pressure on the South to implement the
Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision, many white Southerners joined together to
develop a parallel system of private Christian academies that, being religiously-based
organizations, were beyond the reach of federal desegregation orders. But they provided a central
refuge for the racial status quo, housing opposition to the ending of Jim Crow within religious
belief and institutions. According to one account, the Christian Day School movement generated
literally thousands of such private schools, and by the early 1970's were multiplying at a rate of
nearly one a day (Martin, 1996, p. 169).
In 1975, the IRS revoked tax-exempt status for Bob Jones University, which had
maintained strict racial segregation until 1971, and continued to ban interracial dating. During
the Carter administration, the IRS proposed in 1978 to revoke tax-exempt status for the Christian
23
academies, an event that mobilized an enormous and ultimately successful protest among
evangelical Protestants. The primary issue at stake was the maintenance of de facto segregation,
according to Frank Weyrich, one of its central organizers, although that conclusion must be
speculative because the rhetoric of the protest did not emphasize race (Martin, 1996, p. 173).
Political organizing among Christian fundamentalists then began in earnest. The next
year, Jerry Falwell formed the “Moral Majority” to create a distinctive Christian vote in politics.
Most date the mass mobilization of conservative Christians from that era, though later accelerated
by the candidacy of Pat Robertson in 1988, and later the organization of the Christian Crusade.
Christian fundamentalists today, unlike the more other-worldly pietists of years gone by,
increasingly believe in the appropriateness, and even desirability, of expressing and implementing
their religious convictions in the political arena (Kohut et al., 2000; Kellstedt et al., 1998). As a
result, they have become much more politicized, and are now much more active politically
(Layman, 1997; Manza and Brooks, 1999).
Our psychological reasons for expecting a link between religious and racial conservatism
revolves around the nature of symbolic racism, the most politically prevalent and powerful form
of contemporary racism. It has long been theorized to blend anti-black prejudices with
conservative, traditional American moral values that themselves have no manifest racial content.
It was thought to originate partly in a conservative “moral code” (Sears and Kinder, 1971, p. 66;
also see Kinder and Sears, 1981) or “....the traditional religious and value socialization of secular
American civil Protestantism...” (McConahay and Hough, 1976, pp. 38-9). Later descriptions
cited a number of specific Protestant virtues, such as “...hard work, individualism, thrift,
punctuality, sexual repression, and delay of gratification, as opposed to laziness, seeking of
favoritism and handouts, impulsivity, and so on....” (Sears, 1988, p. 72).13 At the most general
level, symbolic racism does in fact draw upon both antiblack affect and non-racial conservatism
(Henry and Sears, 2002; Sears and Henry, 2003). In terms of more specific traditional values,
24
recent evidence points to significant contributions of individualism and morality, especially the
perception that blacks tend to violate them (Sears and Henry, 2003; Sears et al., 1997).
Such traditional American moral values are especially important to evangelical
Protestants. They favor “playing by the rules,” working hard, obeying the law, insuring that
children obey their parents, living a moral life according to traditional interpretations of the
Bible, and so on. Many feel so strongly about instilling these conservative values in their children
that they fight for more religious training in the public schools, such as prayer in school or the
visible display of the 10 Commandments, or even home school their children to insure adequate
exposure to traditional religious values.
Finally, Christian fundamentalism, like traditional racial conservatism, must be
understood, at least to start with, in terms of its sectional base. Evangelical Protestants dominate
the white South, but are a much smaller minority elsewhere in the country. According to a 1996
survey reported by Kohut and his colleagues (2000, p. 130), 52% of the “committed white
evangelical Protestants” lived in the South, and only 10% in the Northeast, 13% in the West, and
25% in the Midwest (also see Green et al., 1998). Of course it would be incorrect to say that the
white evangelical Protestant phenomenon is exclusively a Southern one. But it is difficult to
assess its political effects without placing its Southern sectional base front and center.14
Fundamentalism and Political Conservatism
Our fourth hypothesis has several parts, then. Southern white evangelicals are more
racially conservative than either white evangelicals elsewhere or other white Southerners. White
evangelicals everywhere are indeed more conservative than non-evangelicals on non-racial
political issues, but region by itself does not provide any additional distinctive contribution to that
difference. Finally, we speculated that such distinctive racial attitudes of Southern white
evangelicals might be especially noteworthy in terms of the symbolic racism belief system.
To test this we pooled the National Election Studies surveys from 1986 to 2000 that
contained the same four symbolic racism items. We divided the white subsample into three
25
religious groups: evangelical Protestants, mainstream Protestants, and all others.15 The mean
levels of symbolic racism are shown for each religious group in the South, and outside the South,
at the top of Figure 7. In the old Confederacy, evangelical Protestants are indeed far higher in
symbolic racism than are non-Protestants, with mainline Protestants falling in between. Indeed,
of all white Americans, Southern evangelical Protestants stand out as by far the highest in such
racial conservatism. By contrast, religion is not associated closely with symbolic racism in the
North. The interaction of region and religion is statistically significant (p < .001).
[Insert Figure 7 about here]
This analysis is useful for our purposes because it shows the great strength of the
difference between Southern evangelicals and others. The reliability of the finding is enhanced as
a result of its being based on six NES surveys. But it includes no controls on other relevant
factors. As a result we repeated the same comparison but using regression analysis, and controls
on relevant demographic factors (Sears and Valentino, 2001). Evangelicals continued to be
higher in symbolic racism than non-Protestants in the old Confederacy, despite controls on other
relevant demographics. But there is no such difference in the North and West (the evangelical x
region interaction is significant, at p < .001, as is the mainstream x region interaction, at p < .05).
This again testifies to the unique level of negative racial attitudes among Southern white
evangelicals.
But perhaps this close link between evangelical Protestantism and racism in the white
South is limited to symbolic racism. As indicated earlier, the concept of symbolic racism
involves both racial animosity and traditional morality, so it might be especially appealing to
Southern evangelicals. But symbolic racism has also been charged with being little more than a
measure of general conservatism, rather than racism. How do we know that these findings reflect
unusual levels of negative racial attitudes among Southern white evangelicals? We have two
ways of showing that.
26
One is that other measures of racial animosity show the same thing. Figure 7 also shows
comparable results for both the stereotype that blacks are “unintelligent” and opposition to federal
assistance for blacks. In each case, the old sectional conflict over African Americans emerges: on
all three measures, Southern whites are significantly more anti-black than Northern whites. More
important for the present argument, Southern evangelicals stand out as having the strongest racial
animus in each case. Each region X religion interaction is statistically significant. One must
conclude that there is something unique about the combination of being a white Southerner and
identifying with evangelical religion that predisposes one to negative attitudes about blacks; none
of those elements by itself seems to be sufficient.
Second, Southern evangelicals look very much like evangelicals outside the South on
non-racial measures of conservatism do not yield uniquely high levels among Southern
evangelicals. Figure 8 repeats the same analyses for four measures of conservatism cited widely
in the literatures on realignment and on the Christian Right: opposition to abortion, anti-gay
affect, support for defense spending, and support for traditional roles for women. In each case
evangelicals are quite clearly more conservative than are either of the other religious groups, with
highly significant religion main effects. But on these non-racial issues, the South is not very
distinctive once regional differences in religion have been taken into account. To be sure, white
Southerners of whatever religious persuasion are unusually supportive of a strong defense, but
there are no other significant regional main effects. None of the special conservatism of Southern
evangelicals that yielded region x religion interactions on racial attitudes yield such interactions
outside the domain of race (the region x religion interaction is significant for abortion, but it is in
the opposite direction from the expected: evangelicals outside the South are actually slightly more
opposed to abortion than Southern evangelicals, and the effect is a small one).
[Insert Figure 8 about here]
Put another way, outside of racial issues, there is nothing distinctive about Southern
evangelicals. The combination of being a white Southerner and identifying with evangelical
27
religion seems to produce the most negative attitudes toward blacks, but has no distinctive effects
outside the historically troubled domain of race.
Race and the Partisan Realignment of Southern White Evangelicals
Now we return to the question of partisan realignment. Our fifth hypothesis was that
symbolic racism would have unusual political force among Southern white evangelicals, and
indeed would explain much of their attraction to the modern Republican party. To test this, we
use the 1992 and 2000 NES datasets (the other NES surveys in the 1990's did not have the
requisite measures).
We first replicated the finding familiar from other studies that Southern white
evangelicals do indeed support the Republican party more than do other Southern whites (e.g.,
Kohut et al., 2000; Kellstedt et al., 1998). The first column of Table 5 presents the effects of the
two Protestant dummy variables on party identification for white residents of the old
Confederacy, with demographic controls, It shows that being an evangelical Protestant is strongly
associated with Republican party identification, while being a mainline Protestant is not. This is
a substantively large effect: being Evangelical moves white Southerners about half a point on the
seven-point party identification scale. In the North, both produce significant associations
(column 4). Both are familiar findings: that evangelical Protestants are especially Republican
throughout the nation has been reported numerous times. So has the finding that Catholics, Jews,
and the non-religious are more Democratic than even mainline Protestants in the North.
[Insert Table 5 about here]
The next question is what explains this affinity of evangelicals for the Republicans? We
want a relatively conservative test of our hypothesis that specifically racial conservatism is at
work among the residents of the old Confederate states. So we first test a model that includes
only measures of non-racial conservatism: woman’s role, defense spending, and opposition to
abortion (anti-gay affect was not included in both datasets). There it can be seen that, not at all
surprisingly, non-racial conservatism has a strong effect in producing support for the Republican
28
Party among both Southern and Northern whites (columns 2 and 5). The Republican party is
popular all over the country among those who are conservative on non-racial issues. And
including non-racial conservatism substantially reduces the coefficient for evangelical
Protestantism, especially in the South. So white Southern evangelicals like the Republicans
partly for their conservative stands on non-racial issues.16
Does racial conservatism also explain Southern evangelicals’ support for the
Republicans? The answer would appear to be a definite “yes.” The third column shows that once
racial attitudes are included in the equation, symbolic racism has a strong effect in promoting
Republican party identification in the South. Moreover, the evangelical Protestantism term
dwindles to non-significance. So symbolic racism appears to explain virtually all of the extra
support given by Southern evangelicals to the Republicans in the South that has not already been
explained by other conservative attitudes. And the increment in variance explained is not trivial,
given these simple models.
In the North, by contrast, symbolic racism also has a significant effect, but it does not
come close to erasing the particular affinity of evangelicals to the Republican party. In other
words, racial conservatism is not as central in explaining Republican partisanship in the North.
The old Confederacy continues to be unique in generating great support for a conservative
political party based distinctively on a racial conservatism -- just as it did in the years before the
Civil War, and during the period of aggressive civil rights action in the 1960's.
The realignment of Southern whites to the Republican party, then, may have been led by
evangelical Protestants, because of their greater numbers, their greater racial conservatism, and
because racial conservatism continues to have more political power in the white South than
elsewhere.17 Racism and evangelical Protestantism have, in this view, converged as a political
force that undergirds the movement of white Southerners to the Republican party, and to support
of its candidates at all levels.
29
Timing of the Racially-Based Realignment
The final part of our story concerns the timing of this long sequence of realigning events.
This will ultimately require a longer exposition, but we can sketch out two preliminary findings
here (also see Sears and Valentino, 2003; Sears, Citrin, and Kosterman, 1987).
The late 1960's: Fundamentalists and racial animus
We earlier indicated that the Johnson administration began to place strong pressure upon
segregated school districts in the South to desegregate their schools. That pressure precipitated a
major effort to organize local private school systems under religious auspices -- the so-called
Christian academies. One possible consequence might have been an acceleration of Southern
evangelicals’ distinctly racial conservatism. In other words, backlash against the Johnson
administration’s racial liberalism, and the rise of Christian academies as alternative havens for the
preservation of segregation, might have caused Southern fundamentalists to begin to separate
themselves from other white Southerners in terms of racial animosity.
Figure 9 shows the time series in the only measure of racial prejudice available in the
NES surveys through this period: the difference between liking for whites and liking for blacks,
on the feeling thermometers. As can be seen in Figure 9A, in 1964 the evangelicals and mainline
Protestants in the South had almost exactly equal levels of prejudice. By 1968 evangelicals were
considerably more prejudiced, and that gap did not narrow at any point in the period up to 1980.
Figure 9B shows that the differences between evangelicals and mainline Protestants in that 1968
to 1980 period were small and inconsistent. We see in the mid-1960's, then, the emergence of a
distinctive racial conservatism among Southern white evangelicals.
The Republicans did not exploit this opening until slightly later. The Nixon “Southern
Strategy” began to be implemented following the 1968 campaign, as the Nixon administration
began to observe the success of George Wallace as a third-party candidate. In Table 6 we present
logistic regression equations in which we predict to the presidential vote from a measure of racial
policy opposition available through the 1950's and a measure of church attendance among
30
Protestants. As can be seen, opposition to racial policies begins to turn decisively against the
Democrats in the South in the 1968 election, and religious attendance, in 1972. In contrast,
racism already began to split the parties in the North in 1964, when many Southern racial
conservatives were still Democrats. And religion began to have diminishing effects in the North
after the 1960 campaign of John F. Kennedy, who was the target of anti-Catholic religious
passions among observant Protestants (also see Converse et al., 1963).
[Insert Table 6 about here]
1984, the Jackson campaign, and white flight
In 1984, after the rise of the Moral Majority, and Ronald Reagan’s first term, Jesse
Jackson ran for president. He had some success in the early primaries, especially in the South.
Our hypothesis is that his success accelerated the flight of nervous racially conservative white
Southern Democrats to the Republican party. Perhaps they also were attracted by his appeals on
other non-racial issues we have discussed above, but the data indicate a timing of the white flight
that is a bit sudden for that.
We are fortunate that in 1984, the “rolling thunder” sample of the NES interviewed small
numbers of cases every day from January through the end of the campaign. Table 17 shows an
approximate parity of North and South through the beginning of October. But from that point
through the beginning of December, movement out of the Democratic party into the Republican
party accelerated. And in the South in became a stampede. By early December a slight
Democratic lead among Southern Democrats had become an overwhelming Republican
advantage of 58% to 34%.
[Insert Table 7 about here]
Our hypothesis is that this panicky exodus was related to the specter of Jesse Jackson’s
popularity among blacks. In Table 8 we present the correlates of party identification in each of
these phases of the campaign, by region. As can be seen there is a sharp increase in the
correlation of evaluation of Jesse Jackson with party identification among white Southerners
31
toward the end of the campaign, compared to either earlier in the campaign or in the North. We
believe along with other commentators (e.g., Black and Black, 2002; Dalleck, 2004) that the
Reagan presidency was a critical element in the realignment of the white South. But we suspect it
had more to do with racial conservatism than those accounts suggest.
[Insert Table 8 about here]
Summary and Conclusions
Over the past several decades, partisanship in the American mass public has undergone a
profound sectional realignment, with Republicans coming to dominate the South, and Democrats,
the Northeast, the upper Midwest, and the Pacific Coast. Our general hypothesis is that this
realignment is associated intimately with the longstanding and still unresolved racial conflicts in
American society, especially in the new South.
We offered three main propositions about how white evangelical Southerners differ from
whites living elsewhere in the country in terms of their racial attitudes and religious convictions,
then. First, the South is distinctive in two ways. White Southerners are more racially
conservative than whites elsewhere in the country, and race is likely to be more salient to white
Southerners than, on average, whites elsewhere, and therefore more psychologically accessible
and easily primed. Second, evangelical Protestants are likely to be distinctive as well, in being
likely to hold more conservative moral values than whites of other faiths. But there would be no
reason to expect a regional difference in this respect, above and beyond the greater concentration
of evangelicals in the South, since what we are arguing is unique about the South is its history of
racial exclusion and animosity. Third, we would expect that these two traditions, of strong racial
prejudice among white Southerners and the dedication of evangelicals everywhere to
conservative moral and religious values, would come together in special force among Southern
white evangelicals, generating especially high levels of racial conservatism. The historic salience
of race in the South might also lead that racial conservatism to be especially powerful in drawing
them toward a conservative Southern Republicanism.
32
Our findings suggest the continuing power of specifically racial conservatism in
producing the mass partisan realignment of the white Southern electorate. As the numerically and
culturally dominant group in the white Southern population, white evangelicals have much to do
with the partisan realignment of the South in the aggregate. The linkages between evangelical
religion and racial animosity seem to be fueling much of the shift toward conservative
Republicanism among white Southerners.
The high level of racial animosity among Southern white evangelicals is particularly
noteworthy given their numerical dominance within the Southern white electorate. As shown in
Table 9, evangelical Protestants constitute almost 50% of the whites in the states of the old
Confederacy, but only 19% of whites living in the North, according to National Election Studies
data collected over the past 15 years.18 In a sense the political culture of Southern whites has
become one in which all others -- mainline Protestants, Catholics, Jews -- are, like blacks,
outnumbered minorities.
[Insert Table 9 about here]
Finally, how central is symbolic racism to our story, relative to other forms of racial
animosity? The theory of symbolic racism holds that it is based on a blend of moral
traditionalism with primitive racial animosities (Sears, 1988). The former would seem to be
stronger among evangelicals than among those of other religious persuasions, ceteris paribus, and
the latter should be stronger among white Southerners than among other Americans, again
everything else being equal. But Figure 3 does show similar effects of religion and region on all
three standard measures of racial prejudice. We have no ready explanation for this parallelism.
We can say two things, however. One is that the origins of symbolic racism in a blend of
individualism and anti-black affect have been investigated fairly carefully, and verified (Sears
and Henry, 2002). However less is known about its hypothesized roots in other, more moralistic,
forms of traditional values. Second, symbolic racism consistently shows stronger political effects
than other measures of racial animosity (e.g., Sears et al., 1997). So even if white Southern
33
evangelicals show the strongest racial animosity on all standard measures of it, that
distinctiveness is likely to have more political consequence through the vehicle of symbolic
racism than through older, more traditional forms of racial prejudice.
34
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39
Figure 1. Democratic Vote: 1856 by 2000
80
Democratic Vote Percent in 1856
70
AR
TX
AL
MS VA
GA
NC
60
KY
FL
MO
LA TN
DE
50
MD
40
ME
RI
NY
30
MA
VT
Region
20
Confederacy
North
10
30
40
50
60
Democratic Vote Percent in 2000
40
70
Table 1.
Average Pearson’s Correlation between Democratic Presidential Vote in 2000 and Selected Prior
Periods.
Period
Years
r
# of Elections
Storm Clouds
(1828-1844)
-0.41
5
Antebellum
(1848-1860)
-0.59
4
Transition
(1972-1876)
-0.13
2
Black Invisibility
(1880-1956)
-0.18
20
Republican
Dominance
(1880-1928)
-0.23
13
New Deal
(1932-1944)
-0.19
4
Postwar Era
(1948-1956)
0.05
3
(1960)
0.48
1
(1964-1972)
0.65
3
Transition
Civil Rights Era
Note: Entries are the correlations of the presidential vote for the
Democratic candidate in each state in the 2000 election by that vote
in earlier presidential elections, averaged over the prior years as
specified. For example the entry for the Postwar Era is the average
correlation of 2000 X 1948, 2000 X 1952, and 2000 X 1956: r = .05.
The number of states equals the number of states that cast votes in
the presidential election in both 2000 and the comparison year,
ranging from 22 states in 1828 to 51 in 2000 (D.C.’s vote is entered
separately).
41
Table 2
Pearson’s Correlations of Democratic Presidential Vote in Recent
Elections by Previous Periods of Partisan Polarization over Race.
Years
1856
1976
Antebellum Era
(1848-1860)
.28
1964
.38
Civil Rights Era
(1964-1972)
.30
1980
.18
.29
.28
.15
1984
-.50
-.56
.67
.49
1988
-.53
-.65
.76
.62
1992
-.28
-.25
.56
.42
1996
-.60
-.70
.68
.55
2000
-.59
-.68
.65
.54
Note: In first and third columns, the entries for the two eras are mean
correlations for all years in the period. In the second and fourth
columns, the entries are the correlations for the years 1856 and 1964,
respectively, by Democratic vote in each recent election.
42
.17
Figure 2. The Impact of Symbolic Racism on Party Identification, by Year and
Region, controlling for Ideology.
2.5
B
2
B
The association
between Symbolic
Racism on Party
Identification
1.5
B
B
B
1
0.5
J
J
J
J
J
J
0
-0.5
-1
B
1986
1988
1990
B
1992
South
1994
J
1996
1998
2000
North
Entries are unstandardized B's from OLS regression analyses with 7-point party
identification scale as the dependent variable. Controls in each model are: Education, age,
gender, and ideology. Symbolic racism is coded 0-1, so coefficients represent the change in
the 7-point party identification scale that would result from moving from the lowest to
the highest level of symbolic racism.
43
44
Table 3. The Impact of Religious Identification on Symbolic Racism
among Whites, across Region.
Former Confederacy
B
Nort
h+
Wes
t
Beta
B
Beta
Constant
.74
.77
Evangelical Protestant
.06***
.18
.01
.03
Mainline Protestant
.03**
.08
.01
.02
Age
-.0001
-.01
.0003
.02
Gender
-.003
-.01
-.02***
-.06
Education
-.02***
-.22
-.03***
-.27
Income
.02***
.09
.03***
.05
R Squared
.07
.07
N
1722
4525
Note: Excluded category, captured by the constant, consists of
Catholic, non-religious, Jews, and Non traditional orthodox, and
non-Jewish Non-Christian. Symbolic racism is scored on a 0 to 1
scale, with higher values representing higher levels of racism. *
p<.05; ** p<.01; *** p<.001, two-tailed.
Source: NES 1986, 1988, 1990, 1992, 1994, 2000.
45
Figure 4. Mean Non-Racial Attitudes across Religious Identification and Region. National Election Studies 1986-2000.
0.68
4A. Opposition to Abortion
0.64
Mean
Opposition to
Abortion (0-1)
0.6
J
B
0.56
0.6
0.56
0.52
B
J
0.48
B
J
0.44
0.4
Evangelical
0.68
0.64
B
J
B
J
JB
North + West
J
B
Evangelical
Mainline
Anova results Region
Religious Id
Region * Religious Id
F
.49
345.62***
7.57*
Other
F
.25
38.66***
1.22
4D. Support for Traditional Woman's Role
0.56
0.52
B
J
Former Confederacy
0.32
Other
Former Confederacy
Woman's role is 0.48
in the home (0-1) 0.44
0.4
B
J
0.52
0.48
North + West
4C. Support for Spending on Defense
0.6
0.56
0.36
Mainline
Anova results Region
Religious Id
Region * Religious Id
Mean Support
for Defense
Spending (0-1)
0.52
Mean Feeling
0.48
Thermometer
toward
0.44
Homosexuals (0-1) 0.4
Former Confederacy
4B. Affect toward Homosexuals
North + West
North + West
JB
0.36
0.44
0.32
0.4
J
B
JB
Mainline
Other
Former Confederacy
0.28
Evangelical
Anova results
Region
Religious Id
Mainline
-
Region * Religious Id
Other
F
100.27***
37.27***
.15
46
Evangelical
Anova results Region
Religious Id
Region * Religious Id
F
.15
84.29***
1.18
Table 4. The Impact of Racial Attitudes and Religion on Partisanship, Across Region. NES 1992, 2000.
Dependent variable is
Party Identification
(1-7; hi=Rep)
Evangelical Prot. (0,1)
Mainline Prot. (0,1)
Former Confederacy
Demographic
+ Non-racial
model
attitudes
.64***
.36*
.22
.30
.18
.20
North + West
Demographic
+ Non-racial
model
attitudes
.86***
.64***
.73***
.79***
.57***
.81***
Age (years)
Female (0,1)
Education (1-5)
Income (1-3)
-.012**
-.36*
.17***
.13
-.018***
-.21
.25***
.10
-.017***
-.15
.29***
.16
-.006*
-.30***
.03
.24***
-.008**
-.18*
.09***
.25***
-.010***
-.21*
.12***
.21***
Woman’s role (0-1)
Defense Spending (0-1)
Opp. to Abortion (0-1)
----
1.27***
1.73***
.97***
1.36***
1.51***
.93***
----
1.22***
.84***
.99***
1.10***
.64**
.95***
Symbolic Racism (0-1)
Black stereotype (0-1)
---
---
2.03***
.48
---
---
1.57***
.12
+ Racial
attitudes
Constant
3.16
1.22
-.66
2.94
1.50
R Squared
.07
.15
.19
.05
.12
N
844
785
681
2224
2258
Entries are unstandardized B’s from an OLS regression analysis. The dependent variable is the standard 7 point party
identification scale, with higher values corresponding to Republican attachment. Excluded group is “other,” including
Catholics, Jews, non-religious, non-traditional orthodox, and non-Jewish/non-Protestants.
47
+ Racial attitudes
.62
.13
1798
Table 5.
Percent of Population belonging to Various Religious Groups.
Former
Confederacy
North + West
Difference
All States
Evangelical
Protestant
49%
(1445)
19%
(1416)
30%
27%
(2861)
Mainline Protestant
23%
(691)
31%
(2353)
-8%
29%
(3044)
Catholic
15%
(456)
31%
(2392)
-16%
27%
(2848)
Other
13%
(388)
19%
(1477)
-6%
18%
(1865)
Regional Total
100%
(2980)
100%
(7638)
Note: Entries are percentage falling above the population median in
symbolic racism. Cell N’s in parentheses. Columns do not add to
100% due to rounding. “Other” consists of Jews, non-religious, nonChristian non-Jewish, and non-traditional Orthodox.
Source: Pooled National Election Studies: 1986, 1988,1990, 1992,
1994, 2000.
48
101%
(10618)
49
Endnotes
1. We would like to express our appreciation to Sharmaine V. Cheleden and Christopher
Tarman for their contributions to various aspects of this project. We would also like to
recognize the contribution of David Leege in developing new measures of religiosity for the
National Election Studies. This project would not have been possible had we not been able to
use those measures. Chris Achen, Martin Gilens, Vincent Hutchings, and John R. Petrocik
provided valuable feedback at various points in the theoretical development and analysis. Pat
Luevano helped us understand the process whereby David Leege’s research was operationalized
in the NES Cumulative Study religion codes.
50
2. Throughout this paper, we will refer to the South interchangeably with the eleven former Confederate
states: Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia,
Arkansas, and Tennessee.
3. This is not to claim that either North or South was unanimous on the subject of slavery at that time;
much support for it existed in the North, and it was not fully supported in the South. But those who
advocated abolition, however gradual, were quickly dispatched to the sidelines at the writing of both the
Declaration of Independence and Constitution (see, for example, Ellis, 1999; Klincknor & Smith, 1999).
4
Our primary goal is to explain aggregate regional differences over time, not develop models explaining
the maximum variance in vote choice or opinion. Hence the usual concerns about low R-squareds do not
pertain here. Multicollinearity is also of little concern here, as region (South vs. other) and time are
uncorrelated (Pearson’s r = .04).
5. The symbolic racism scale is composed of four items.....
6. It might be objected that this control is insufficient because a single-item ideology item is less reliable
than the multi-item symbolic racism scale, and measurement error therefore renders the ideology control
incomplete. This argument is plausible a priori but in practice unlikely to explain the effects we report.
Symbolic racism normally has far stronger effects than ideology on racial policy preferences than does
ideology when both are included in the same equation (e.g., Sears et al., 1997). But when both are
measured with multi-item scales, symbolic racism is actually somewhat less reliable (e.g., Sears et al.,
1997, found an average Cronbach’s alpha of .72 for symbolic racism across four surveys with an average
of five items each, and an average alpha of .83 for three-item ideology and party identification scales).
The gross disparity in effects is not likely to be explained by this small difference in reliability.
7
We combined the two racial policy items into a single scale items to save space, and on
the basis of extensive evidence that they work in parallel (e.g., Sears et al. 1997). When
analyzed separately, both produce significant and nearly identical interaction effects.
8. A few of the more important book-length products in this extensive area of research include Kohut,
Green, Ketter, & Toth, 2000; Green, Rozell, & Wilcox, 2000; Rozell & Wilcox, 1995; Wilcox, 1996; Leege
& Kellstedt, 1993; Green et al., 1996; Jelen, 1991).
9. The databases we rely on do not have sufficient numbers of cases to allow us to make sharp distinctions
among these terms, so we use them more or less interchangeably.
10. Similar cleavages have been found among Catholics and Jews, as well as among black Protestants,
but their political impact is less (e.g., Kohut et al., 2000). This line of research has also touched on the
rise of intense anti-fundamentalist attitudes, but that is beyond the scope of this paper (Bolce & DeMaio,
1999a, 1999b).
51
11. Although see Bolce and DeMaio (1999b), who explore the role of symbolic racism in whites’
attitudes toward fundamentalists.
12. Kohut and his colleagues (2000), however, report a complex pattern of similarities and differences
between white and black evangelicals. For example, they find that they differ sharply on issues related to
race. At the same time, blacks do not oppose the narrower moral agendas of fundamentalist Christians as
strenuously (see Kohut et al., 2000). However, the complexities of racial differences in the political impact
of religion go beyond the scope of this paper.
13. The importance of values in the theory is illustrated by the fact that Kinder and Sanders (1996)
switched to the term, “racial resentment” on the grounds that “symbolic racism” did not convey the
central role of the violation of values in the theory, leaving the theory open to the misinterpretation that
symbolic racism was just racism and that values merely provided an epiphenomenal justification for racial
animosity.
14. For an important exception, that focuses specifically on the realignment to the Republicans of
committed Southern evangelicals, see Green, Kellstedt, Smidt, and Guth (1998).
15. We have borrowed our religious classification from that developed for the National Election Studies
by David Leege. We have done so deliberately in order to insure that the religious classification, which is
central to our data analysis, is neutral with respect to our own hypotheses. The refinement most useful for
our purposes is what Leege et al. refer to as “religious tradition” in their pilot report, which establishes the
distinction between “mainline” and “evangelical” Protestants in each of the National Election Studies
beginning in 1990. Through a series of branching questions, Leege et al.’s new measure is able to
identify those respondents who identify with evangelical or fundamentalist denominations within the
larger Protestant families such as Lutherans, Pentacostal, Baptist, Episcopal, etc. Leege et al. test validity
of the distinction between evangelicals and mainline Protestants extensively in their pilot study report.
For example, 82% of those classified as evangelical Protestant based on denomination alone identified
themselves as Born Again, compared to only 27% of non-evangelical Protestants. In addition, 69% of
evangelical Protestants claimed that the bible is the literal word of God, while only 31% of nonevangelicals expressed this belief. Finally, evangelicals were far more likely to self-identify as
evangelical than were mainline Protestants (67% compared to 34%). We believe this classification is the
most valid one available, but any who are interested in the finer workings of the measure are encouraged
to review it in the Pilot Study Report of 1990.
16. We are taking at face value the non-racial character of these issue attitudes.
17. At the extreme right wing, Christian identity is closely linked to white identity, support for
the KKK, and violent antagonism toward Jews and peoples of color is manifested in support for
“white bastions” in the Northwest. Indeed the Christian Identity movement is explicitly racebased (Bermanzohn, 1998). We would not claim that this reflects the views of the mainstream in
any section of the country, but it does provide models for this linkage.
52