The Solid South

According to the official website of the Democratic party, history began in 1920. 

"You'll see why we're proud to be Democrats," announces the party history page. And there are notable achievements listed, from social security to civil rights to Obamacare, but nothing more than a century old. 

What is missing is the Democratic party of the old South. 

This was the white supremacist Democratic party which opposed the abolition of slavery, and built a century of political dominance in the South on denying black people the right to vote. 

This was the Democratic party which once had such a grip on the South that even John F. Kennedy, a liberal Catholic from Massachusetts, could build a winning presidential campaign on the old Confederacy.

This was the Solid South. But today, white Southern Democrats are all but extinct. The South is almost as solid for Republicans as it used to be for Democrats. 

The parties have switched places. How did it happen?

The answer, not surprisingly, lies in racial politics.

At the end of the Civil War in 1865, the South lay crippled and defeated. Its vanquisher was a Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who had fought the war to save the Union. 

Lincoln and the triumphant Republicans seized the moment to abolish slavery, the cause which had led the eleven Confederate states to secede, and the cornerstone of the Southern economy. 

Days after the South's surrender, Lincoln was shot dead by a Southern loyalist.  

Defeated and humiliated, the South rejoined the Union, but its hatred for Republicans passed through generations. 

That left Democrats in charge in the South. Taking up the cause of embittered Southerners, they set about denying freed slaves the right to vote, which eager post-war Republicans had tried to enforce.

Southern states, under Democratic control, used various tricks to subvert the law. They included expensive poll taxes, which black voters could not afford; ambiguous literacy tests, marked by white officials; cumbersome residency rules, which black tenant farmers would struggle to meet; and grandfather clauses to exempt white voters from such obstructions.

It is because of those tactics that voting laws are such a sensitive subject today.

Democrats gave white Southerners what they wanted, in the form of segregation and a white monopoly on voting. When the Ku Klux Klan terrorised blacks, Democratic officials looked the other way, at best. In return, white voters gave Democrats their unbending loyalty. 

In the Southern memory of the war, the South had fought for states' rights, not for the principle of slavery. Republicans had been the aggressors. 

As if the memory of the war were not bad enough, Republicans were seen by Southerners as the tool of Northern business elites, supporting tariffs and a monetary system which weakened Southern farmers. While the North with its factories and railroads became an industrial powerhouse, the South plodded on in rural mediocrity. 

Between 1880 and 1948, there were 198 presidential contests in the South. Republicans won only six. 

Still, the Democratic party was an awkward alliance. In addition to the stalwart South, it belonged primarily to populist farmers in the West and urban machines in the North, which often relied on support from immigrant communities.

Franklin Roosevelt, president from 1933 to 1945, was strong enough to keep the strange companions together. 

Southern voters profited from Roosevelt's New Deal, which offered them social security payments and help in the face of the Great Depression. 

Southern Democrats, who ran Congress, forced the president to exclude black Americans from several New Deal programmes. Roosevelt was no white supremacist, but he was never a crusader for civil rights, either.

In his greatest landslide victory of 1936, Roosevelt won 99% of the vote in South Carolina and 97% in Mississippi. 

The Cold War exposed the cracks more sharply than ever.

How could America, which now defined itself against Soviet communism as a beacon of liberty, deny it to its own people? 

How, after shaming the people of occupied Germany with horrific images of the Holocaust, could the US continue to divide its own citizens by race? 

Harry Truman, who succeeded Roosevelt, recognised the problem. When he ordered the end of segregation in the military, four Southern states voted against him in protest. Their slogan was states' rights.

As civil rights gained momentum, through such high-profile campaigners as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, the South's ancestral loyalty began to fade.

By the 1950s, few were alive who remembered the Civil War. 

As military and space installations grew up in the South, workers arriving from the North diluted the old Southern dominance. 

Some of the further-flung parts of the South, such as the Texas panhandle and the Appalachian parts of Virginia, settled into conservative, anti-Communist Republican dominance in the 1950s. 

Southern Democrats were dutiful enough in 1960 to put the Catholic John F. Kennedy in the White House. But it was Lyndon Johnson, who took office on Kennedy's death, who struck the fatal blow to the Solid South.

Taking up Kennedy's cause, Johnson steered the Civil Rights Act through Congress in 1964. The following year, his Voting Rights Act crushed the South's racist voting laws.

As black people took up their chance to vote, white Southerners deserted the Democrats with equal resolve. Perhaps it had taken one of their own, Johnson, to dare to challenge them. 

Even as Johnson won re-election in a landslide, he lost five Southern states to Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee who had opposed the Civil Rights Act. Georgia chose a Republican for president for the first time ever. 

George Wallace, an old-school Democrat and governor of Alabama, made one last effort to turn back the waves. 

Wallace had once stood in a university door to stop black students enrolling there, leading President Kennedy to send in the National Guard. In his inaugural address as governor, Wallace promised to stand for "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever".

As head of a renegade ticket in 1968, Wallace hoped to deny either side a majority, in order to force Democrats (or, if necessary Republicans) to end desegregation in exchange for the presidency. Wallace won five Southern states; it was not enough.

Republicans had seen their chance to fell the Solid South, and seized it.

With a loaded vocabulary - states' rights, a label which now belonged to them and meant a weaker civil rights agenda; law and order, meaning harsh punishments for black criminals and drug users - Republicans cast themselves as the new guardians of white values in the South.

Richard Nixon won the presidency on that platform in 1968. Four years later, almost 70% of voters in the former Confederacy supported his re-election. 

The South's defection changed both parties.

The Republicans, once a party of skilled workers, business types and Yankee liberals, have moved to the right on social issues. Liberal Republicans are as endangered a species as conservative Democrats.

The Democratic party, meanwhile, freed from the burden of keeping its unlikely alliance together, has become more full-throatedly liberal.

A century of political habits took some time to vanish entirely. Bill Clinton, a former governor of Arkansas, performed respectably in the South when he won the presidency. As recently as 2010, unlikely as it sounds, Democrats controlled state legislatures in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi.

The modern, cosmopolitan Democrats, however, taking up such causes as gay marriage, climate change and Black Lives Matter, have nothing in common with the old South. 

In Georgia in 2016, three-quarters of white voters went for Donald Trump, according to exit polls. Some 89% of black voters supported Hillary Clinton. 

White Democrats in the Deep South used to run Congress. In 2014, the last one, John Barrow of Georgia, lost his seat.

Democrats have long hoped that time is on their side.

The South is growing, drawing workers, students and pensioners from the more liberal Northeast and producing larger, more cosmopolitan areas of the type Democrats have dominated in recent years. 

Atlanta is a thriving, metropolitan city. Hispanic (mostly Cuban-American) voters in Florida have become more reliably Democratic. 

Barack Obama twice won Florida and Virginia and scraped a victory in North Carolina in 2008, adding large ethnic minority turnout to the affluent, liberal parts of those states: the parts which look least like the old South.

Still, the 2016 election was a setback. Every Southern state except Virginia supported Mr Trump. Hillary Clinton did reduce the Republican majority in Georgia and Texas, but for no gain in electoral votes. 

Mr Trump may be no moral values champion, but he spoke to a feeling that white Americans had been marginalised in their own country. 

Real two-party competition in the South has been rare. Although Republicans do not pile up the absurd majorities that Democrats used to, thanks to a loyal minority of black voters, there is no way for Democrats to win as long as they perform so dismally among white voters. 

But if the South's record proves anything, it is that even the firmest political allegiances can change in a hurry.