Southern Primary

Throughout much of the time after the primary came into widespread use in the early twentieth century, the Democratic Party primaries were the only elections that counted in the South. The party so dominated the region that to win its nomination was in effect to win the election.

But that changed in recent years as the Republican Party gained strength in the South and indeed came to dominate the area much as the Democrats once did. At the beginning of the twenty-first century Republicans outnumbered Democrats in the southern statehouses and congressional delegations, and their numbers included the president and several top leaders in the House and Senate.

Nevertheless, the southern primary holds a special place in U.S. political history and deserves separate discussion in any examination of primaries and how they work. Also, because they were so lopsided politically, the southern primaries spawned a regional addition to the nominating process: the runoff primary.

In a 1949 study of politics in the region, political scientist V.O. Key Jr. concluded, “In fact, the Democratic primary is no nominating method at all. The primary is the election.” The area of his study comprised the eleven states—all members of the Civil War Confederacy—traditionally known as the Old South: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.

Through World War II and the postwar years, the Democratic primary predominated in the South. Of the 114 gubernatorial elections held there between 1919 and 1948, the Democratic nominee won 113 times. The exception was Tennessee's election of a Republican governor in the Harding presidential landslide of 1920. In the same period, the Democratic nominee won 131 of 132 southern Senate elections, the only exception being a special election in Arkansas in 1937 when the Democratic nominee lost to an independent Democrat.

The first popularly elected Republican U.S. senator from the South, John G. Tower of Texas, won a special election in 1961. Thereafter, Republicans gradually won Senate seats in all southern states except Louisiana. Likewise, Republicans picked up governorships slowly after 1949, their first victories in the South coming in Arkansas and Florida in 1966.

As recently as 1994 Republicans were still a distinct minority in southern state and congressional offices. They were outnumbered eight to three in governorships, twelve to ten in Senate seats, and seventy-seven to forty-eight in U.S. House seats. The Democratic primaries continued to be the deciding election in most southern states.

The Democrats' numerical strength in the South, however, did not ensure a liberal Congress. Although elected under the Democratic label, southern House and Senate members tended to vote more like conservative Republicans. They often sided with Republicans to form the so-called conservative coalition on crucial floor votes in Congress. When it came together as a majority of Republicans and a majority of southern Democrats, the conservative coalition often had a high success rate against northern Democrats.

The Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 dramatically increased the coalition's victory rate to as high as 100 percent while at the same time diminishing the coalition's importance. On many of the coalition votes, the southern Democrats' support was superfluous because the majority Republicans would have won anyway. Some political scientists dismissed the usefulness of continuing to analyze the coalition's performance. “It's a concept designed to measure a phenomenon that's no longer there,” said one.

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