The authors raise two critical points: first, that we need to explain the factors behind the earlier Republican gains in the growth states that are now yielding to Democratic gains. Second, that we overstate at times “the degree to which racial hierarchy has retreated from the center of southern politics.”

On the first point, the areas of the South that first elected Republicans tended to have larger numbers of atypical southerners. Those areas were of two types. There were the traditional mountain Republicans in areas that had few slaves, opposed secession, and therefore did not support the southern cause in the Civil War. These areas provided Republican enclaves in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas. Early GOP successes, therefore, first came in areas having a larger share of the population not enamored with the Lost Cause.

The other areas were urban centers that attracted northerners and shifted the political balance. In the mid-twentieth century the GOP gained footholds in some growth areas of Democratic-dominated southern states. Consider for example the elections of Republican representatives in Dallas (Rep. Bruce Alger); St. Petersburg (Rep. William Cramer); Atlanta (Rep. Fletcher Thompson); and Columbia, South Carolina (Rep. Floyd Spence). Some of the early leaders of the GOP in the South, if they did not come from mountain Republican stock, had moved to the region from other parts of the country.

Another indication of the atypical nature of early Republican leaders was the election of governors who had fashioned biracial coalitions and governed as moderates or progressives. Examples included native New Yorker Winthrop Rockefeller, elected as governor of Arkansas in 1966; mountain-valley Republican Linwood Holton, elected governor of Virginia in 1969; and mountain Republican James Holshouser, elected governor of North Carolina in 1972. During this period there was a base of mountain Republicans to which could be added new elements—recent nonsouthern arrivals and newly enfranchised African Americans. In Florida, for example, the early GOP relied heavily on in-migrants.

Later, in the 1970s–2000s, given the tendency of suburbanites to vote Republican, suburban growth and affluence in much of the South began to swell the ranks of Republican voters in the region. That coupled with the rise of the White Evangelical-dominated religious right movement created for a while an unusual coalition of political forces that shifted the once-solid Democratic South to a Republican-dominated region.

On the second point, it was not our intention to claim that race and its associated problems have ceased to be a factor in southern politics. However, race has ceased to be the central driving force of the region’s politics, as it was when V. O. Key wrote his classic text in the mid-twentieth century. As race has receded somewhat as a factor in southern politics, it has assumed greater significance in other parts of the nation. Notable examples are the urban riots of the 1960s, the riots in the aftermath of the Rodney King beating by police, and most recently the Black Lives Matter movement in response to multiple tragic incidents of police brutality against African Americans.

Thus, the South has become more like the rest of the nation both in terms of its politics and race relations. The region may at this point be more distinctive with respect to its politics than regarding race. The South is more Republican than the nation, and but for the GOP strength in the South, Democrats would have won the presidency in 2000 and 2016, and the GOP dominance of Congress during the last quarter-century would have been of shorter duration—so short that it would not appear to have been dominance at all.

During the era covered by Bateman and coauthors, the South was distinctive both with regard to race and partisanship. Today it is on the latter dimension that the South is less like other regions. Thus, our books pair well together in their focus on demographics. The South was, among all regions, the least affected by immigrants during the massive late nineteenth-century wave of immigration, as their book clearly shows. This absence shaped the politics of the region much more than other regions, making the South distinctive. Today the new South, particularly in the growth states, is being shaped profoundly by immigration. This raises the question of whether the South’s political distinctness from the rest of the country will endure.