The South has long held a special place in our imagination. It also holds a special place in the Republican Party, and this southernized version of the Republican Party holds a special place in national politics. Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields demonstrate in their fine The Long Southern Strategy just how the party of Lincoln became the party of the South. Their book permits us to better understand how the southern-oriented views of identifiers of that party blended with those of the North to create a truly national political opinion, in ways in which a northern and southern Democratic majority never did.

Slavery was (and in important ways still is) central to all of this. The Constitution was shaped, in part, by the belief that southern states would not join the Republic if it ended slavery. In the early Republic, informal coalitions slowly hardened into a North–South divide. Henry Clay became the “Great Compromiser” because of his ability to reconcile differences between North and South, both in the nation and in his Whig Party alike, helping hold the Union together for as long as it did. Democrats for their part chose more formal rules to ensure sectional alliance, adopting a two-thirds majority rule for selecting their presidential nominee, thereby assuring the South of a veto.

The roughly east–west division between the Whigs and Democrats, giving both northerners and southerners a position in each party, gave way with the Republican Party victory in 1860 based exclusively on northern electoral votes. After the Civil War, it was no surprise that the white South would not vote for the party of Lincoln, but so-called Redemption, bringing white southern Democrats back to state power, led to a variety of attempts to fashion as close a return to antebellum South as possible.

They were able to come all too close to this goal through Jim Crow-ism. Jim Crow rested on two components. The most consequential, of course, was refashioning a slave-like economy and culture to undergird a lily-white polity. Buttressing white political dominance, however, required, as the second component, institutional assurances of exactly one viable political party. This southern Democratic Party proved pivotal in the national government too, especially in the Congress, from the Great Depression into the 1990s by balancing between outcomes due to a Democratic majority when voting with their northern peers or a conservative coalition when voting with Republicans. Through the 1940s, this strategy did not matter greatly, because the southern congressional wing was larger than its northern namesake. By the 1960s, with unified Democratic control of government and a northern wing now forming a majority in its congressional party, it did.

The Long Southern Strategy starts about here, with the long-term forces unleashed by the ending of Jim Crow. The book’s great strength is to present a picture of how the Republican Party was forged in the South. We are by now quite familiar with the story of the long decline of the Democratic Party in the South—but just how the southern strategy of Goldwater, Nixon, and Reagan succeeded has been but partially told until now. As Maxwell and Shields show, it was not just that the GOP’s nominees appealed to the South in their campaigns. Rather it was a rich, complicated mix of political elites shaping strategies that, step by step, created the social, economic, and political institutions and context to translate Republican presidential appeals into a southern Republican organization able to break the one-party South and then, at last, to forge a plurality of Republican identification among white southerners.

Three elements, the authors argue, converged to shape the context in which it was possible to build a southern Republican Party. One, of course, was race and integration. And it is through race that the southern Democratic Party held onto its power the longest, from the southern Democratic congressional authorship of the “Southern Manifesto” in 1956 through to the reliance on incumbency advantage, permitting southern Democrats to retain their seats in Congress into the 1990s. But Phyllis Schlafly wedged open a conservatism that would eventually prove able to build a Republican following in the South with her A Choice Not an Echo (1964), giving motto and sustenance to Goldwater’s campaign that appealed, and thus underlaid, a viable Republican southern strategy.

Schlafly also led in the second element, “antifeminism” (or, as the authors claim, simply sexism), first by opposing abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade. How her Eagle Forum helped blend opposition to the feminist movement, to abortion, and to the Equal Rights Amendment with the other parts of the organizational triad is a centerpiece of the account. But, according to the authors, it is the third leg of the triad, the rise of the religious right, that did much of the heavy lifting of the merging of these social and cultural organizations of the South with the nascent Republican Party. This convergence of organizational forces is told through very careful archival and secondary analyses. Their most original data come at the last step in their argument.

If southern elites used race, sex, and religion to shape the organizational context for breaking the hold of the old southern Democratic Party politically, they succeeded only because such seeds found fertile ground in the South’s public. Maxwell and Shields use data from a variety of sources, but most originally and creatively through Blair Center polls up through 2016. Each element of racial resentment, modern sexism, and their own Christian Fundamentalism scales contributes to an increasing likelihood of identifying as a Republican among whites, especially those geographically in the South or among those identifying as southern. But it is the combination of all three elements that made the transformation so powerful.

Note that it is party identification, in particular, that matters to their story. Southerners by geography had long shown a predilection to vote Republican. In 1952, for example, Eisenhower carried Florida, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, and Virginia and won more than 45% of the popular vote in Kentucky, Louisiana, North Carolina, and South Carolina. It was the strength of the southern Democratic Party organization that kept that substantial Republican presidential vote for decades from being transformed into actual Republican identification.

This story requires both a Democratic and a Republican chapter. The first is the oft-told tale of Democratic dominance, a dominance maintained most of all by thwarting ambitious young men and women from running as Republicans for most offices. The other is the newly told tale here by Maxwell and Shields, of how southern elites moved in a post–civil rights movement, post–Jim Crow era from that one-party state to a seriously competitive two-party system and then even to a one-party-leaning polity. Race, sex, and religion were central features of the ability of the white upper class to hold political power in the South, and it was the transformation of race, sex, and religion through new organizations and eventually to new appeals to ordinary southerners that made it possible to create the modern Republican Party in and of the South.