# The Dems held the House for 40 years, how did that happen?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-dems-held-the-house-for-40-years-how-did-that-happen/699786>\
**Category:** Politics & Elections\
**Created:** [September 28, 2014, 4:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-dems-held-the-house-for-40-years-how-did-that-happen/699786 "2014-09-28T16:50:58Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 5

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**Author:** ![adaher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dec6dc/32.png) [@adaher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adaher)\
**Post date:** [March 22, 2015, 3:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-dems-held-the-house-for-40-years-how-did-that-happen/699786/81 "2015-03-22T03:16:23Z")

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> [@Wesley\_Clark](#):
>
> They held it for 4 years, 2007-2010.
> 
> I’m sure the question has been answered, but the answer is white people in the south used to be overwhelmingly democrat, now they are overwhelmingly republican. LBJ and the civil rights act handed the south over to the GOP, just as he predicted it would.
> 
> However I have no idea why it took so long for the transition to occur. In presidential elections the southern whites had abandoned the democrat party by 1968. Democrats still had power in the south on smaller elections until the 90s.

Because the standard theory is only a smidgen true. The real reason is that with both parties on the same page on segregation, the issue was off the table. So the next 20-30 years were spent trying to woo southern voters on other issues, like crime, education, welfare, abortion, prayer in schools, guns, flag burning…

and actually, Bill Clinton won a lot of southern states. The period of the South being dominant for the GOP at the Presidential level lasted all of one election: 2004. Democrats were still able to be competitive by running candidates who had southern views on the issues.

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