Abstract
The 2004 election continued the recent pattern of Republican dominance of the politics of the American South. For the second straight election, George W. Bush carried all 13 southern states and consequently received all of the region’s electoral votes. In 2000 and 2004, Bush won all the southern states despite the fact that a southerner, Al Gore of Tennessee, headed the Democratic ticket in 2000 and North Carolina Senator John Edwards was the Democratic vice presidential choice in 2004. In 2000, Bush’s sweep of the South netted him 163 electoral votes. The reapportionment of House seats following the 2000 census gave the South 168 electoral votes for the 2004 election. The South is by no means the only Republican region of the country, but it is interesting to note that, outside the South, Al Gore won 267 electoral votes compared to 108 for Bush in 2000. In 2004, John Kerry won 252 electoral votes outside the South, while the nonsouthern states captured by Bush provided him with 114 electoral votes. The South put George W. Bush in the White House and it was the South that kept him there.
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Notes
The major historical work on Reconstruction is Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 ( New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1988 ).
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The legal and political mechanisms of black disfranchisement are discussed in a classic work by V. O. Key first published in 1949, Southern Politics in State and Nation ( New York: Random House, 2000 ).
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Grantham, The Life and Death of the Solid South. Also, Earl Black and Merle Black, Politics and Society in the South ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987 ).
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Ibid., and Dan T. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963–1994 ( Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999 ).
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The 2000 presidential election in Florida is analyzed in Steven C. Stauber and William C. Hulbarry, “Florida: Too Close to Call.” In Robert P. Steed and Laurence Moreland, eds., The 2000 Presidential Election in the South: Partisanship and Southern Party Systems in the Twenty-first Century ( Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002 ).
Jeffrey Toobin, Too Close to Call: The 36 Day Battle That Decided the 2000 Election ( New York: Random House, 2002 ).
Mark Stern, “Florida” in Laurence W. Moreland, Robert P. Steed, and Tod A. Baker, eds., The 1984 Presidential Election in the South: Patterns of Southern Party Politics (New York: Praeger, 1986).
Also, William Hulbarry, Anne Kelly, Lewis Bowman, “Florida: The Republican Surge Continues,” in Robert P. Steed, Laurence W. Moreland, and Tod A. Baker, eds., The 1988 Presidential Elections in the South: Continuity Amidst Party Change ( New York: Praeger, 1991 ).
The 1996 election in Florida is analyzed in Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, William E. Hulbary, and Lewis Bowman, “Florida: An Election With Something For Everyone,” in Laurence W. Moreland and Robert P. Steed, eds., The 1996 Presidential Election in the South: Southern Party Politics in the 1990s ( Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997 ).
The evolution of presidential politics in Florida from the 1970s through the 1990s is discussed in Donald W. Beachler, “The Clinton Breakthrough? Presidential Politics in Florida,” Political Chronicle 11 (Spring, 1999 ), 1–12.
Michael Barone and Grant Ujifusa, The Almanac of American Politics, 2004 ( Washington: The National Journal, 2004 ).
James C. Cobb, The Selling of the South: The Southern Crusade for Industrial Development, 1936–1990, Second edition (Urbana-Champaign: The University of Illinois Press, 1993 ).
Gary Jacobson, The Politics of Congressional Elections, Sixth edition ( New York: Longman, 2004 ).
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© 2005 Kevin J. McMahon, David M. Rankin, Donald W. Beachler, and John Kenneth White
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Beachler, D.W. (2005). The South. In: Winning the White House, 2004. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980861_6
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