Solid South

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The Solid South or the Southern bloc was the electoral voting bloc of the states of the Southern United States for issues that were regarded as particularly important to the interests of Democrats in those states. The Southern bloc existed between the end of the Reconstruction era in 1877 and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. During this period, the Democratic Party overwhelmingly controlled southern state legislatures, and most local, state and federal officeholders in the South were Democrats. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, Southern Democrats disenfranchised blacks in all Southern states, along with a few non-Southern states doing the same as well. This resulted essentially in a one-party system, in which a candidate's victory in Democratic primary elections was tantamount to election to the office itself. White primaries were another means that the Democrats used to consolidate their political power, excluding blacks from voting in primaries.^[1]

The "Solid South" is a loose term referring to the states that made up the voting bloc at any point in time. The Southern region, as currently defined by the Census Bureau, comprises sixteen states: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia, plus Washington, D.C.^[2] The idea of the Solid South shifted over time and did not always necessarily correspond to the census definition.

After Reconstruction, all the former slave states were dominated by the Democratic Party for at least two decades. Delaware, one of the slaveholding border states that had remained in the Union during the Civil War, was considered a reliable state for the Democratic Party,^[3] as was Missouri, classified as a Midwestern state by the U.S. Census Bureau. From the early part of the 20th century on, Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and West Virginia ceased to be reliably Democratic (although West Virginia once again became a reliably Democratic state with the New Deal era).