Why did the Democrats Lose the South? Bringing New Data to an Old Debate PRELIMINARY DRAFT. PLEASE DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION. COMMENTS WELCOME

Did Southern whites leave the Democratic Party over Civil Rights or because economic development and other secular changes in the region made the party’s platform increasingly unattractive to them? Answering this central question in American political economy has been hampered by lack of micro-data on racial attitudes from both before and after the Civil Rights era. Our contribution is to uncover and employ such measures, drawn from Gallup surveys dating back to 1958. From 1958 to 1961, conservative racial views strongly predict Democratic identification among Southern whites, a correlation that disappears after Democrats introduce sweeping Civil Rights legislation in 1963. Gallup’s monthly presidential approval surveys allow us to more finely link variation in white support for Kennedy (and Eisenhower before him) to episodes where newspapers linked his name to Civil Rights initiatives (and allows us to eliminate other policy initiatives and current events as drivers of white Southern dealignment from the Democrats). We conclude that the entire 17 percentage-point decline in relative white Southern Democratic identification between 1958 and 1980, and 75% of the 20 percentage-point decline from 1958 to 2000, is explained by racial attitudes, with little if any role for income growth or other observable secular changes.