“The Parties Switched.” “No They Didn’t.” Nice Try, Both of You.

The take

There are two versions of this, and each side only tells half.

From the left: Republicans freed the slaves, “but they were NOT these Republicans.” That was the headline of a 2020 CNN piece by political scientist Andra Gillespie, arguing the modern parties have swapped places and today’s GOP is the party of the South. (History News Network)

From the right: the “big switch” is a myth. In his 2016 film Hillary’s America, Dinesh D’Souza argued that fewer than 1% of the Southern Democrats who opposed civil rights followed Strom Thurmond into the GOP, and the rest stayed Democrats until they left politics. (National Review)

The receipts: what the left skips

The Republican Party was founded to stop slavery. It formed on July 6, 1854, in Jackson, Michigan, in opposition to the spread of slavery into the territories. (History Today)

Democrats voted against ending it. When the House passed the 13th Amendment on January 31, 1865, the vote was 119 to 56. Every Republican voted yes. Every no vote came from a Democrat, though a handful of Democrats crossed over and their votes were needed to reach two-thirds. (Mr. Lincoln and Freedom)

The Klan fought for the Democrats’ cause. The Reconstruction Klan began in 1866 as a vehicle for white Southern resistance to Republican Reconstruction, and its goal of restoring white supremacy was achieved through Democratic wins in Southern legislatures in the 1870s. Historian Eric Foner called it “a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party.” (PolitiFact)

Segregation was a Democratic project. The 1956 Southern Manifesto against school integration was signed by 100 members of Congress: 96 Democrats and 4 Republicans. (NPR) On the 1964 Civil Rights Act, 80% of House Republicans voted yes versus 61% of House Democrats, and House Southern Democrats voted 11 yes, 92 no. (PolitiFact)

The politicians mostly stayed put. Strom Thurmond’s switch to the GOP in September 1964 is the famous one. (US Senate) George Wallace left the Democrats only briefly, running as a third-party candidate in 1968 rather than joining the GOP, and older white Southern Democrats mostly stayed Democrats into the 1980s and early ’90s. (Areo)

The change took a generation. From 1874 until 1994, Republicans never held a majority of the South’s House seats. (Wilson Quarterly) That’s thirty years after the Civil Rights Act, not overnight.

The receipts: what the right skips

Black voters switched. They had been loyal to the party of Lincoln, but in 1936 about three-fourths voted for Franklin Roosevelt. (UMBC Center for History Education) In 1964, Lyndon Johnson won 94% of the Black vote. (Wikipedia)

White Southern voters switched too. In 1964 Barry Goldwater, who voted against the Civil Rights Act arguing it was unconstitutional, carried only his home state of Arizona plus Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina. Georgia had never voted Republican before. Mississippi and Alabama hadn’t since 1872. (Wikipedia)

The Republicans’ own chairman admitted it. At the NAACP convention in July 2005, RNC chairman Ken Mehlman said some Republicans had been “trying to benefit politically from racial polarization,” and added: “I am here today as the Republican Chairman to tell you we were wrong.” (Ken Mehlman)

“The Klan was the Democrats’ military arm” goes too far. PolitiFact rated the claim that the Klan was founded as the Democratic Party’s military arm False: serving a party’s interests isn’t the same as being part of it. (PolitiFact)

Where it’s still a real debate

Why the white South moved is genuinely argued over. In The End of Southern Exceptionalism (2006), political scientists Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston argued that class mattered more than race: the Republican rise was driven by a growing white middle class open to small-government arguments, and polling showed the GOP gaining faster among affluent white Southerners. Reviewing the book, Ronald Brownstein credited its rigor but said it overstated the case: decades of campaigns signaled sympathy to white Southerners resisting civil rights, and the authors’ own data showed Republicans doing best among Southerners most opposed to government action on racial equality. (The American Prospect)

The verdict (opinion)

The parties didn’t trade politicians. They traded voters, slowly, over about thirty years.

So the right is correct that Democrats were the party of slavery, the Klan’s cause and segregation, and that the segregationist politicians themselves mostly stayed Democrats. The left is correct that the voters behind them moved to the Republicans, and that some Republicans went looking for them. Their own chairman said so.

Democrats don’t get to pretend that history belongs to someone else. Republicans don’t get to keep Lincoln and skip the Southern strategy. Nobody gets only the good half.

Nice try.