The History Of American Presidental Elections

An exhaustive look at the history of US elections begs the question: what caused the American South to become so jarringly red in the latter half of the 20th century?

Some claim that when the Civil Rights Movement took the country by storm in the 1960s, desegregation, the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act by Democratic administrations left a formerly blue-blooded, slaveholding South feeling “betrayed” by their own party. Sniffing out their vulnerability, Republicans reached out to these incensed southern Democrats and–relatively quickly–drew them to their side of the aisle. This process is dubbed the “Southern strategy”, and as you can tell not much has changed since.