I would argue that there were still a lot of older voters in the 1990's who were the last generation from the Solid South days. Yes, they may have started giving their presidential vote to the Republican ticket. But as long as their local Democrats reflected their conservative outlook, they were happier voting from them than they were for the Republican candidate.
Anyway, the post above yours is accurate. Even in Presidential elections, older Southerners were MUCH more Democratic than younger Southerners into the 2000s (when, ya know, those folks started to die, not switch parties).
How do (either of) you know that older white Southerners were much more likely to vote Democratic than the younger generation? I would be very willing to read some reliable, preferably scholarly, sources on this issue.
The five
McGovern counties in Tennessee (
Stewart,
Houston,
Perry,
Lewis and
Jackson) have seen between forty and fifty percent of their electorates (between three and five thousand voters per county) shift from Democratic to Republican over
the past five elections alone. Surely that must reflect more than attrition of older voters with memories of “Solid South” days in these historically pro-secession white rural counties.
If you read Jonathan Rodden’s
‘The Long Shadow of the Industrial Revolution: Political Geography and the Representation of the Left’ you will see that the presence of strong “insurance” in farming areas against shortages minimizes risk. In contrast, urban areas, especially those within areas possessing large comparative disadvantage in agriculture and increasingly manufacturing, are forced into sharing their high risks and rewards which are simply absent in rural areas, especially those with cheap relatively flat land.
During most of the twentieth century mining and business capital in the United States was able to virtually eliminate this conflict via malapportionment (urban underrepresentation), poll taxes and literacy tests. This virtually eliminated the leftist urban population from political influence, although it was
always feared by the rural population and middle classes. From the 1980s onwards, however, as public grants increased academic access and the urban working class turned to “creative art as politics” (study the songs of AC/DC, 1980s Metallica, 1990s Pantera or N.W.A.) the Democratic Party has had no choice but to cater to these groups, whose voter preferences are quite out of range of most rural areas (excepting majority-minority and ski resort counties). Although the change is gradual as voter loyalties rarely die quickly, it is clear that white rural southerners cannot accept the policy preferences the Democratic Party has to take on to appeal to academics and welfare recipients.
