Will voters turn Georgia blue again? As Democrats attempt to flip the state for a second presidential election, many don’t know that the Democratic Party once dominated politics in Georgia, though in a very different form. For most of the 20th century, much of the South embraced the party, whose ideological identity—like that of its foil, the Republicans—was forged by the deepest conflicts in American history. It was progressive Republicans who pushed for an end to slavery, while Democrats espoused a conservative commitment to the status quo. But over the last 100 years, the nation’s two major political parties have effectively swapped sides. Here’s how it happened. Founded in 1828, the Democratic Party formed around a commitment to states’ rights and resistance to federal government oversight. The Republicans, who partied up in 1854, largely backed a strong federal government as a force for economic growth. Both grew in power by taking bold, divergent stances on the most important issue of the day: slavery. “We may argue today that fundamental cleavages [between the parties] exist around multiple policies, whether it’s immigration or abortion rights,” says Professor William A. Darity Jr., an economist and social scientist at Duke University. “But I think in the 1860s, it’s unequivocally clear that slavery was the fundamental cleavage—one that’s reflected in the fact that we had a civil war.” Republicans opposed slavery, arguing that free labor was key to a thriving economy; Democrats held it should be left to the states, or even legalized nationwide. In 1860, after Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected president, the Southern, Democratic-controlled states seceded, leading to the Civil War and the legal end of slavery. When the war ended, the Republican-led government set to work rebuilding the country and creating a plan for 3.5 million newly freed Black Americans. But the period known as Reconstruction was quickly thwarted: In 1865, President Lincoln was assassinated and replaced by his vice president, Andrew Johnson, a Democrat with racist beliefs who worked to undermine Congress’s plans. “That’s really the beginning [of the political shift], because the Republican Party at the time did not exercise sufficient power to quash Andrew Johnson,” Darity says. “He short-circuits the effort to distribute 40-acre land grants to the formerly enslaved . . . and he pardons virtually all of the Confederate leaders, so there is no retribution for their acts of traitorship.” In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican, agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South in exchange for victory in a bitterly contested election. That deal sounded the death knell for Reconstruction, along with efforts to achieve racial equality in the South. In deference to its Southern White voter base, the Democratic Party quickly embraced Jim Crow segregation. Black Americans, meanwhile, voted overwhelmingly for Republicans, and ran for office as Republicans themselves: Historian Eric Foner has found that of the 2,000 Black elected officials in office during that era, only 15 were Democrats. But things shifted by the 1930s, when Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt vastly expanded the social safety net during the Great Depression. The New Deal appealed to working-class and minority voters and kick-started the Democrats’ evolution toward progressivism. “It was the Roosevelt era in which a real transition took place in terms of Black voters,” Darity explains. “A shift from the Republicans to the New Deal coalition, even though the New Deal was structured in a way that excluded Black Americans to a large extent.” When Roosevelt won a landslide reelection victory in 1936, Darity says, around 75 percent of Black voters backed him. But it was the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s that really thrust the donkeys and elephants into an identity crisis that would define them for decades to come. In 1964, after years of sustained protest against segregation, Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, lamenting to his press secretary, “We’ve just lost the South for a generation.” A few years later, Republican presidential hopeful Richard Nixon saw an opportunity to garner support from White Southerners and positioned himself as a champion of law and order as part of his so-called “Southern strategy.” “[That message] appeals not only to White Southerners, who are like, ‘Yeah, let’s bust heads,’ but also to suburban White Northerners,” says Hasan Kwame Jeffries, a history professor at The Ohio State University. Republicans increasingly embraced fiscal and social conservatism, and in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan pushed for tougher sentencing standards for drug offenders and other nonviolent criminals, which disproportionately affected people of color and drove them further away from the GOP. “By the early 1990s, the complete party shift had finally occurred,” Jeffries says: Republicans had become the conservatives, and Democrats the progressives. This article appears in our November 2024 issue. The post The great American political party switcheroo appeared first on Atlanta Magazine.