The Building of a Republican Regional Base in the South The Elephant Crosses the Mason-Dixon Line

Abstract

Changes in party identification are examined from 1952 to 1988, with a special emphasis on the findings from the 1988 CPS Super Tuesday Study. It is found that in 1988 Republicans clearly outnumbered Democrats among southern whites for the first time ever. Demographic patterns of partisanship in 1988 are compared to those from the 1950s. Most important is the relationship which now exists between age and party identification. Republicans now have a 29 percent lead over the Democrats among southern whites under 30 years of age. While firm black support of the Democratic party should prevent the South from becoming as solidly Republican as it once was Democratic, there is good reason to expect further Republican gains in the South throughout the remainder of the twentieth century. The 1988 election of George Bush marked the second time in a row that the South voted 4 percent above the national average for the Republican presidential ticket. Just as the Democrats started every presidential campaign during the New Deal with the head start of having the South locked up, it now appears that the Republicans enjoy the strategic benefits of having a strong regional base. If the Republicans can count on winning most of the South's electoral votes, as well as those of the Mountain West (see Galderisi et al. 1987), they need only concentrate on winning a few of the largest states to win a presidential election. Documenting how the Democratic South became the Republican South is therefore crucial to understanding how the Republicans, once accustomed to losing presidential elections, have now become the steady favorite. MARTIN P. WATTENBERG iS professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine. The data presented in this article are from the American National Election Studies, 1952-88, and were provided by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and