Overview

An inside look at why the Republican Party has come to dominate the rural American South Beginning with the Dixiecrat Revolt of 1948 and extending through the 2020 election cycle, political scientists M.V. Hood III and Seth C. McKee trace the process by which rural white southerners transformed from fiercely loyal Democrats to stalwart Republicans. While these rural white southerners were the slowest to affiliate with the Grand Old Party, they are now its staunchest supporters. This transition and the reasons for it are vital to understanding the current electoral landscape of the American South, including states like Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia, all of which have the potential to exert enormous influence over national electoral outcomes. In this first book-length empirically based study focusing on rural southern voters, Hood and McKee examine their changing political behavior, arguing that their Democratic-to-Republican transition is both more recent and more durable than most political observers realize. By analyzing data collected from their own region-wide polling along with a variety of other carefully mined sources, the authors explain why the initial appeal of 1950s Republicanism to upscale white southerners in metropolitan settings took well over a half-century to yield to, and morph into, its culturally conservative variant now championed by rural residents. Hood and McKee contend that it is impossible to understand current American electoral politics without understanding the longer trajectory of voting behavior in rural America and they offer not only a framework but also the data necessary for doing so.

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9781643363028

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"Rural Republican Realignment in the Modern South is anything but an oversimplification. Hood and McKee examine the realignment office by office, year by year, state by state through the lens of intersectional identities: geographic and racial. This strategy creates space for often-overlooked elements of the realignment, such as the [...] ideological differences between urban and rural white Southerners that are masked by similar voting patterns. [It is] a path-blazing study. -- ""Public Opinion Quarterly"" Hood and McKee's analysis replaces the rural-urban split, instead convincingly establishing population density as a better model. [...] This well-written and often entertaining work provides clear-sighted analysis into the transformation of southern party politics. -- ""Choice Reviews"""

"Hood and McKee's analysis replaces the rural-urban split, instead convincingly establishing population density as a better model. [...] This well-written and often entertaining work provides clear-sighted analysis into the transformation of southern party politics. -- ""Choice Reviews"""

Author Information

Seth C. McKee is professor of political science at Oklahoma State University and former editor in chief of Political Research Quarterly.

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