After Jimmy Carter Won the Presidency, Democrats Lost the South

Mr. Carter witnessed a shift from what had been a solidly Democratic South to one that Republicans, supported by white voters and particularly evangelicals, came to dominate.

On the day he was sworn in as governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, an ambitious white peanut farmer from rural Sumter County, announced that “the time for racial discrimination is over.” The declaration landed like the carefully calculated bomb it was intended to be in the South of 1971 — and landed Mr. Carter on the cover of Time magazine, along with the blurb, “Dixie whistles a different tune.”

But in his ensuing half-century of public life, Mr. Carter, the one-term Democratic president who died Sunday at 100, would be forced to listen rather helplessly as Republicans mostly called the tune in his native South, supported by white voters who were uncomfortable with the Democrats’ embrace of racial inclusion and abortion rights, and were attracted to the small-government, low-tax promises of the party of Ronald Reagan.

Indeed, after Mr. Carter’s ascension to the White House, the states of the old Confederacy would go on to become, with a few exceptions, a crucial base of support for Republican presidential candidates. Much of that support came from Mr. Carter’s fellow Southern evangelicals, who turned sharply away from him and the Democrats during his presidential term. They became one of the most loyal Republican voting blocs and remain so to this day.

That was part of a shift that had begun in the early 1960s, as Republicans found a way to chip and then blast away at what had been a solidly Democratic South since the end of Reconstruction. Southerners’ fealty to the party had been based on their appreciation for Roosevelt’s New Deal, and their bitterness over the 19th century Republicanism of Lincoln that helped erode the region’s strict racial hierarchies.

Yet Mr. Carter also helped to create a model for Democratic success in a South that has become increasingly Republican‚ a model that remains workable to varying degrees today. The election of 1976 was one of a number of times that a Democratic candidate has emerged with just the right balance of rhetoric and policy promises, uniting just enough white Southern progressives and white moderates in a successful coalition with Black and other minority voters.

Mr. Carter’s home state has provided some of the best recent examples, including President Joseph R. Biden’s razor-thin victory in Georgia in November 2020 and the subsequent elections of Democratic Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.