ABSTRACT
Following hard on the heels of the Watergate scandal, President Richard Nixon’s resignation, and the end of the Vietnam War, Jimmy Carter’s election to the presidency in 1976 punctuated the closing of an era in American political history (see Figure 2.1). For the first time in 128 years, the American people had elected a president from the Deep South, and even more amazingly, he had carried the day in part by winning the votes of millions of black Americans. To many observers, Carter’s election signaled the arrival of a long-awaited New South, a region ready to reenter the American political mainstream after more than a century of isolation and alienation. In the decades that followed, the South’s politics would often fall far short of the promise perceived in 1976, leaving many to despair as the supposed new departure in southern politics took on characteristics of intolerance and demagoguery once associated with the Solid South of the pre-civil rights era. But the sense of change was real nonetheless, a reality grounded in the shift from Democratic to Republican dominance, from black disfranchisement to universal suffrage, and from southern to Sunbelt regionalism.
