Why did the Democrats Lose the South? Bringing New Data to an Old Debate

A long-standing debate in political economy is whether voters are driven primarily by economic self-interest or by less pecuniary motives such as ethnocentrism. Using newly available data, we reexamine one of the largest partisan shifts in a modern democracy: Southern whites’ exodus from the Democratic Party, concentrated in the 1960s. Combining high-frequency survey data and textual newspaper analysis, we show that defection among racially conservative whites explains all of the large decline in white Southern Democratic identification between 1958 and 1980. Racial attitudes also predict whites’ partisan shifts earlier in the century. Relative to recent work, we find a much larger role for racial views and essentially no role for income growth or (nonrace-related) policy preferences in explaining why Democrats “lost” the South. JEL codes: D72, H23, J15, N92 ∗We thank Frank Newport and Jeff Jones for answering our questions about the Gallup data. We are grateful to Alberto Alesina, Daron Acemoglu, Bill Collins, Marvin Danielson, Claudia Goldin, Matt Gentzkow, Alex Mas, Adrian Matray, Suresh Naidu, Jesse Shapiro, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Gavin Wright and seminar participants at the University of Chicago, Middlebury, NBER Summer Institute’s Political Economy Workshop, the National Tax Association, NYU, Pomona, Princeton, Stanford SITE, University of Toronto, UBC, UCLA and Yale’s CSAP Summer conference, particularly discussants Georgia Kernell, Nolan McCarthy and Maya Sen for valuable comments and feedback. Khurram Ali, Jimmy Charité, Joséphine Gantois, Keith Gladstone, Meredith Levine, Chitra Marti, Simon Quach, Jenny Shen, Timothy Toh and Tammy Tseng provided truly exceptional research assistance. Kuziemko: Princeton and NBER ([email protected]). Washington: Yale and NBER ([email protected]). Any remaining errors are our own.