Contemporary Republican dominance in the American South is not without precedent; indeed, the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln controlled the governments of the defeated Confederate states in the aftermath of the Civil War and during Reconstruction (though the duration of GOP control varied). A coalition of emancipated male slaves enfranchised by the Fifteenth Amendment, free men of color, northern whites who had migrated to the South, and some poor white southern men under the protection of Union troops voted Republicans into power. However, the Democratic Party in the South, depleted by the temporary disenfranchisement of white Confederate elites, reestablished its political authority by both legal and violent means as national interest in Reconstruction waned and military occupation of the region ceased in 1876. The ability of these white elites to dominate what in many states were outsized black populations and to skirt federal laws and constitutional provisions has garnered seemingly limitless scholarly attention. Yet political scientists, with a few notable exceptions (including Hanes Walton Jr., to whom subsequent scholarship on this topic owes a great deal of credit), have not focused their attention on what became of the Republican Party in the South. Boris Heersink and Jeffery A. Jenkins do exactly that in Republican Party Politics in the American South, 1865–1968, to our great benefit.

The reason for this lack of scholarly attention is primarily twofold. Data regarding the unraveling of the GOP’s Reconstruction coalition are scant, particularly at the state level, and the obvious decline in support for Republican presidential candidates in southern states after Reconstruction was attributed to state laws that stripped or significantly curtailed the newly acquired voting rights of Black Americans. Heersink and Jenkins, however, reveal a much more complicated and contested Republican Party decline that varied greatly across the region. To do so, they examine southern delegates to the GOP National Convention, anchoring this new and important narrative in an original dataset of more than 8,000 delegates by race and state of residency. As they note, only Louisiana records include the race of these delegates, so the authors used census data and historic newspapers in a herculean effort to identify the racial composition of each state’s delegation for more than one century of presidential contests.

Republican Party Politics in the American South, however, is not solely a work of historical recovery. In part I of the book, Heersink and Jenkins pinpoint two critical components of Republican Party survival in the South after Jim Crow disenfranchisement decimated the voting power of Black southerners. First, suppression of southern Black voters catalyzed a debate within the GOP regarding state representation at the Republican National Convention (RNC). Repeatedly, non-South Republicans argued that southern states should not have equitable delegate apportionment—which gave southern Republicans a substantial voice in choosing the party’s presidential nominee—because the vast majority of Republicans (African Americans) in many southern states could no longer vote in the general election. Yet, as the authors convincingly and painstakingly show, those efforts failed because, in tight nominating contests, party leaders could “buy” the support of southern RNC delegates via patronage. This status as “persuadable” delegates gave southern Republicans national power—at least at the convention—long after the region returned to its one-party status under the reestablished Democratic Party.

Second, this power, albeit narrow, sparked contests within the state and county party organizations over delegate selection that often fell along racial lines. In part II, Heersink and Jenkins describe how these contests played out in each of the 11 states of the former Confederacy. They loosely classify the southern states into the following three categories based on the outcomes of these state party battles: (1) states where “Lily-White” factions, as they were called, assumed control of the state GOP and pushed out Black Republicans (VA, TX, NC, and AL); (2) states where Lily-White factions assumed control, diluting the power of Black Republicans in the state but not pushing them out entirely (AR, LA, FL, TN); and (3) states where “Black and Tan” interracial coalitions maintained control and Black Republicans in the state remained in positions of power and leadership well into the twentieth century (SC, GA, MS). The authors forecast clearly that this categorization is loose in that these outcomes, which serve as the basis for classification, were reached for different reasons, at different points in the post-Reconstruction timeline, and for different purposes, often having to do with local characters and events. To the authors’ great credit, these state microhistories, very much in the tradition of V. O. Key Jr., provide the detailed nuance too often lost in the kind of generalizing that is often used to assess regional trends.

One significant oversight—which is too common in political histories and analyses of the South—is any mention of the impact of the Nineteenth Amendment, which doubled the size of the white electorate in the South in that it enfranchised most white women, whereas Black women remained oppressed by Jim Crow voting restrictions. In southern states with large African American populations, such as many in the Deep South, expanding the franchise to white women increased the power of the Democratic Party. Though there are little data on white women’s turnout numbers, the sheer scope of how women’s suffrage changed the demographics of the electorate warrants consideration, particularly when white women voters in the South turned out to be a major part of the contemporary realignment of the region with the GOP. Whether consideration of the effects of women’s suffrage changes the narrative or only enhances what we already know of southern politics remains to be seen, because it is so rarely incorporated.

Finally, beyond the aforementioned categorization of states, the authors do attempt to chart a general trend across the region, which is presented as the central argument of the book (though the book makes several important contributions even without this particular argument). Despite charting the great variation between southern states, Heersink and Jenkins argue that in the post-Reconstruction South, the “whiter” the state Republican Party became, the more support the national GOP received at the ballot box. The authors use the percentage of state delegates to the Republican National Convention who were not Black (based on the total number of delegates for whom race could be identified) as their measure for the whiteness of the state party. They present models showing the significant and positive relationship between their whiteness variable and vote for the GOP presidential nominee in the South as a whole across multiple election cycles after Black disenfranchisement.

One hesitates to critique variables created from historical records because of the severe limitations of having any kind of data at all that can be used to test such a relationship. Perhaps future work could investigate whether the racial composition of the eight delegates who represented Florida, for example, at the 1896 RNC proved to be a true reflection of the racial composition of the party within the state. Moreover, does the fact that African Americans comprised the majority of Mississippi’s RNC delegation in all but two election cycles from 1884–1952 speak to the strength of the Black Republicans in the state or to the strength of white supremacy in Mississippi to ensure that white voters remained loyal to the Democratic Party, thereby diluting racial competition for RNC delegate seats? Did the “whiteness” of the southern state Republican Parties in the early twentieth century strengthen the GOP in the South? Or did the strength of some of the state Republican Parties increase white demand for leadership roles over Black Republicans, particularly after Jim Crow voting laws rendered Black male southerners voteless?

The authors’ ambitious efforts to clarify the causality of GOP strength in the South is as convincing as such an argument can be based on the data at hand: the historic data that they compiled. Racial composition of RNC delegations is, of course, only one measure of the whiteness of state parties, but it is a measure that scholars would not have without the significant legwork done by Heersink and Jenkins. Yet another key strength of the book is that the authors show why all of this matters in the big picture: increased GOP success in some southern states drew the attention of Republican presidential hopefuls, who then actively campaigned in the region decades before the modern Republican Party’s “Operation Dixie” undertaken by 1964 nominee Barry Goldwater. That alone is a valuable contribution made by Heersink and Jenkins.

The very best books connect seemingly isolated dots on the political landscape and recover nuanced and valuable data that have been overlooked. Such books often feel like they raise more questions than they answer, but that is because they have made the reader see the political landscape in a different light entirely. The desire for more answers is only a measure of the curiosity that a book ignites. Republican Party Politics in the American South, 1865–1968 should launch dozens of new studies by scholars of southern politics, should be taught in college classrooms, and should change the way we frame the history of the GOP in the region.