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Twenty-two years after Franklin Roosevelt captured the White House for the
Democrats, the Supreme Court—with all but one of its members appointed by a
Democratic president—issued its 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
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In
doing so, it ignited a firestorm within the Democratic Party as southern Democrats
struggled to understand how a Court packed with so many of their fellow partisans could
issue a decision so hostile to their interests.
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Indeed, as the decision helped spring civil
rights onto the nation’s political agenda, its shockwaves shook the core of the Democratic
Party for more than a generation. Of course, Democrats did capture the White House
again in 1960 and 1964. But in the next nine presidential campaigns, the Democratic
candidate would only win a majority of electoral votes three times, only win a majority of
the popular vote once. And as a display of the party’s shifting coalition, each of the
Democrat’s last three successful nominees hailed from south of the Mason-Dixon line.
Before Lyndon Johnson captured the presidency in his own right in 1964, the last
candidate to fit that description was Tennessee’s James Knox Polk, who won election
nearly a century and a quarter before LBJ. Polk was also the last southern to carry the
Democrat’s banner as the party’s presidential nominee.
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In short, one of the
consequences of the Brown decision—coupled with Democrat’s advocacy of civil
rights—was the rise of the Republican South. Following this transformation, it became
exceedingly difficult for a non-southern Democrat to win the White House for his party.
Indeed, it has not happened since 1960. Before Brown, it was commonplace.
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Thirty-five years after Richard Nixon captured the White House for the GOP and
twenty-three years after Ronald Reagan did the same, the Republican-constructed
Rehnquist Court has yet to issue a decision that has even neared rocking the Republican
Convention