question: Republican Party in Civil War was Northern States, why is so much of their support base now in Southern States
comment: The change started in the late 1940s when Truman (a Democrat) desegregated the military. Then they became the party leading the Civil Rights movement under Johnson (also a Democrat) in the 1960s. Nixon and the Republicans decided to appeal to the southern conservatives who still opposed integration and equal rights. And at the same time there was a lot of population movement with black people in the south moving to the north for better job opportunities in factories.
passages: The biggest exception to this trend has been the state of Virginia. It got an earlier start in the trend towards the Republican Party than the rest of the region. It voted Republican for president in eleven of the twelve elections between 1952 and 1996, while no other Southern state did so more than nine times (that state, Florida, is the other potential exception to the trend, but to a significantly lesser extent). Moreover, it had a Republican Governor more often than not between 1970 and 2002, and Republicans held at least half the seats in the Virginia congressional delegation from 1968 to 1990 (although the Democrats had a narrow minority throughout the 1990s), while with single-term exceptions (Alabama from 1965–1967, Tennessee from 1973–1975, and South Carolina from 1981–1983) and the exception of Florida (which had its delegation turn majority-Republican in 1989) Democrats held at least half the seats in the delegations of the rest of the Southern states until the Republican Revolution of 1994. However, thanks in large part to massive population growth in Northern Virginia and the orientation of that population with the political ideologies of the solidly Democratic Northeast, the Democratic party has won nearly every major statewide race since 2005, with the single exception being the Governor's race in 2009.
   Many of the states' rights Democrats were attracted to the 1964 presidential campaign of conservative Republican Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Goldwater was notably more conservative than previous Republican nominees, such as President Eisenhower. Goldwater's principal opponent in the primary election, Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, was widely seen as representing the more moderate, pro-Civil Rights Act, Northern wing of the party (see Rockefeller Republican and Goldwater Republican).
   In the Deep South (South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas), Democratic dominance was overwhelming, with 80%–90% of the vote, and only a tiny number of Republican state legislators or local officials. Mississippi and South Carolina were the most extreme cases – between 1900 and 1944, only in 1928 when the three subcoastal Mississippi counties of Pearl River, Stone and George went for Hoover did the Democrats lose even one of these two states' counties in any presidential election. In the remaining states, the German-American Texas counties of Gillespie and Kendall, and a number of counties in Appalachian parts of Arkansas, Alabama and Georgia would vote Republican in presidential elections through this period. In the Upper South (Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia), Republicans retained a significant presence mainly in these remote Appalachian regions which supported the Union during the Civil War, even winning occasional governorships and often drawing over 40% in presidential votes.
   By the 1920s, as memories of the Civil War faded, the Solid South cracked slightly. For instance, a Republican was elected U.S. Representative from Texas in 1920, serving until 1932. The Republican national landslides in 1920 and 1928 had some effects. In the 1920 elections, Tennessee elected a Republican governor, elected Republicans to five of the state's ten U.S. House seats and became the first former Confederate state to vote for the Republican candidate for U.S. President since Reconstruction. However, with the Democratic national landslide of 1932, the South again became solidly Democrat.
   [Robert E.] Lee and [Thomas Jonathan] Jackson did not fully comprehend what they were fighting. Had this really been a 'Civil' War, rather than a secession, they would and could have easily seized Washington after Manassas and hanged our first Communist President and the other war criminals.
  
  Stang continues: 
  
  So, again, the Republican Party did not "go wrong." It was rotten from the start. It has never been anything but red. The characterization of Republican states as "red states" is quite appropriate.
   Section::::Geographic balance.
  
  Geographic balance has played an important part of politics since the beginning. Before the civil war, a northern candidate was almost always paired with a southern running mate or vice versa. Since the civil war, this level of geographical balancing is less critical, but still plays a big role. In modern times, voters in the south, midwest, and Rocky mountain region of America are less inclined to support northeasterners and Californians without some sort of geographic balance and vice versa.
   Another exception is North Carolina. Despite the fact that the state has voted for Republicans in every presidential election from 1980 until 2008 the governorship (until 2012), legislature (until 2010), as well as most statewide offices, it remains in Democratic control. The North Carolina congressional delegation was heavily Democratic until 2012 when the Republicans had occasion, after the 2010 United States census, to adopt a redistricting plan of their choosing. The incumbent Governor is Roy Cooper, a Democrat.
   As a result, anti-U.S. sentiment among C.S. whites increases, and several reactionary political parties form across the C.S.. One of these fringe groups is the Freedom Party, founded by Anthony Dresser in Richmond, Virginia, sometime after the end of the "Great War" (in our real history, the original early founder of the then-fringe National Socialist German Workers Party Nazi Party of whom the Freedom Party is based off — later ousted by Adolf Hitler — was named Anton Drexler).
   In the Party's infancy, its base consisted of Northern white Protestants and African Americans nationwide. Its first presidential candidate, John C. Frémont, received almost no votes in the South. This trend continued into the 20th century. Following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Southern states became more reliably Republican in presidential politics, while Northeastern states became more reliably Democratic. Studies show that Southern whites shifted to the Republican Party due to racial conservatism.
   The "New South" period is double-edged. After the passage of civil rights legislation, African Americans began to vote in number for the Democratic Party. Many had supported Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson had supported their cause. At the same time, in 1964 several Southern politicians, and states, supported Republican Barry Goldwater for President over the Democratic incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson. In what later became a trend, some switched party affiliations, notably Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Richard Nixon's Southern strategy in the 1968 campaign is thought by many to have vastly accelerated this process. From Nixon's time to the present, the South has generally voted Republican at the presidential level.
   During the Reconstruction era (1863–1877), the Republican Party built up its base across the South and for a while had control in each state except Virginia, but from a national perspective the Republican Party always gave priority to its much better established Northern state operations. The Northern party distrusted the scalawags, found the avaricious carpetbaggers distasteful and lacked respect for the black component of their Republican Party in the South. Richard Abbott says that national Republicans always "stressed building their Northern base rather than extending their party into the South, and whenever the Northern and Southern needs conflicted the latter always lost". In 1868, the GOP spent only 5% of its war chest in the South. Ulysses S. Grant was reelected and the "New York Tribune" advised it was now time for Southern Republicans to "root, hog, or die!" (that is, to take care of themselves).
   BULLET::::- Clinton carried several states that had previously been Republican or swing states in both the Northeast and on the West Coast. Most notably, the largest state California switched from being a reliably Republican state to being consistently Democratic: it has been carried by Democratic candidates ever since. Other states that switched and have remained with the Democrats since include Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, and Vermont. In contrast, despite the fact Clinton came from the South, he only carried four of the former Confederate states: Arkansas (his home state), Louisiana, Tennessee (his vice president's home state) and Georgia, confirming it as a Republican base of support.
   When the Republican Party was first organized in 1854, as an anti-slavery party, it did not compete in southern states such as Alabama. In its first three presidential elections (including 1864, in which Alabama did not participate due to the Civil War), the party did not even distribute ballots in Alabama for its presidential candidate. (At the time, ballots were not printed by the government, but were distributed by parties for their supporters to drop into ballot boxes.) After the Civil War and following Alabama's readmission to the union in 1868, Alabama was a Republican dominated state for much of the Reconstruction period due to a combination of factors including its support from north Alabama unionists, poor white farmers who had never owned slaves, and the newly enfranchised black voters. Republican Ulysses S. Grant carried the state in both the 1868 and 1872 presidential elections.
   In addition to presidential campaigns, subsequent Republican campaigns for the House of Representatives and Senate in the South employed the Southern Strategy. During his 1990 re-election campaign, Jesse Helms attacked his opponent's alleged support of "racial quotas", most notably through an ad in which a white person's hands are seen crumpling a letter indicating that he was denied a job because of the color of his skin.
   Today, the South is considered a Republican stronghold at the state and federal levels, with Republicans holding majorities in every Southern state after the 2014 elections. Political experts have often cited a Southernization of politics following the fall of the "Solid South".
  
  Section::::History.:Oklahoma.
  
  Oklahoma was not a state during Reconstruction, being admitted to the Union only in 1907. Since that time, its voting patterns has been similar to those of other Southern states, so it may be considered part of the Solid South. 
  
  Section::::History.:West Virginia.
   One of the organizations that became the initial Alabama GOP, the Union League, first came into north Alabama in 1863 as counties fell back under Union control during The Civil War. In early 1867, local Republicans gathered in several different meetings around the state. The first was in Moulton, on January 8 and 9 in Lawrence County, then March meetings in both Huntsville and Decatur, a gathering on March 25 in Montgomery, and then May 1 in Mobile, all for the purpose of organizing an early summer state convention to create a state Republican Party. In a simultaneous meeting with the Union League, the Republican Party of Alabama was initially organized on June 4–5, 1867. That first state convention was held in the capital city of Montgomery in the chambers of the Alabama House of Representatives. That convention was called the Union Republican Convention and consisted of 150 delegates, of whom 100 were black. Alabama Governor Robert M. Patton spoke to the Convention. Francis W. Sykes of Lawrence County was elected as chairman pro tempore, and Judge William Hugh Smith of Randolph County was named permanent chairman of the convention. The convention's delegates were mostly from two groups, the Freedmen's Bureau (which included and/or represented most of Alabama's black citizens) and the Union League which represented about the 1/3 of north Alabama's white citizens who had remained as loyalists in the Civil War or had otherwise opposed secession in 1861.
   Since the 1990s the white majority has continued to shift toward Republican candidates at the state and local levels. This trend culminated in 2014, when the Republicans swept every statewide office in the region midterm elections. As a result, the Republican party came to control all the state legislatures in the region, as well as all House seats that were not representing majority-minority districts.
   In the 1994 mid-term elections, another Southern politician, Newt Gingrich, led the Republican Revolution, ushering in twelve years of GOP control of the House. Gingrich became Speaker of the United States House of Representatives in 1995 and served until his resignation in 1999. Tom DeLay was the most powerful Republican leader in Congress until he was indicted under criminal charges in 2005 and was forced to step aside by Republican rules. Apart from Bob Dole from Kansas (1985–96), the recent Republican Senate Leaders have been Southerners: Howard Baker (1981–1985) of Tennessee, Trent Lott (1996–2003) of Mississippi, Bill Frist (2003–2006) of Tennessee, and Mitch McConnell (2007–present) of Kentucky.
   The GOP is picking up recruits in the South, but in the case of some of them, it ought to charge admission. ... One of the best things that could happen to American politics would be the development of a genuine two-party system in the South, and everything that can properly be done to encourage the growth of Republican strength in that area would be welcomed. It is evident, however, that the acquisition of Mr. Phillips and Mr. Morse constitutes a highly questionable Republican gain. ... If the Republican Party is going to have its banner in the South carried by opponents of constitutional rights for Negroes, it can kiss good-bye to some millions of votes in the West and North.
   Following the collapse of the Republican Party, former President Abraham Lincoln, now an orator, allies with U.S. socialists and leads left-wing Liberal Republicans into their fledgling Socialist Party. Meanwhile, Benjamin Butler leads most of the right-wing Conservative Republicans to the Democrats, which results in pushing the party even further to the right and causing a majority of it to adopt a hard-line foreign policy and the gearing of American society to nationalism and revanchism. Both of these groups are attracting many of the new European immigrants, who comprise the working class in the U.S. industrial cities. Thus the ideology of "Remembrance" is born. With the exodus of its right-most and left-most members, the remaining Republican party fades into obscurity, though it still limps along as a minor regional party representing only the Midwest (which is booming in the late 19th and early 20th centuries). They do not win the presidency or another Congressional majority.
   Southern demography also began to change. From 1910 through 1970, about 6.5 million black Southerners moved to urban areas in other parts of the country in the Great Migration, and demographics began to change Southern states in other ways. Florida began to expand rapidly, with retirees and other migrants from other regions becoming a majority of the population. Many of these new residents brought their Republican voting habits with them, diluting traditional Southern hostility to the Republicans. The Republican Party began to make gains in the South, building on other cultural conflicts as well. By the mid-1960s, changes had come in many of the southern states. Former Dixiecrat Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina changed parties in 1964; Texas elected a Republican Senator in 1961; Florida and Arkansas elected Republican governors in 1966. In the upper South, where Republicans had always been a small presence, Republicans gained a few House and Senate seats.
   Although Republicans gradually began doing better in presidential elections in the South starting in 1952, Republicans did not finish taking over Southern politics at the nonpresidential level until the elections of November 2010. Today, the South is dominated by Republicans at both the state and presidential level. Republicans control all 22 of the other legislative bodies in the former Confederacy, and all but one in a border state. Between the defeats of Georgia Representative John Barrow, Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor and Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu in 2014 and the election of Alabama Senator Doug Jones in 2017, there were no white Democratic members of Congress from the Deep South. Until November 2010, Democrats had a majority in the Alabama, North Carolina, Texas, Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana Legislatures, a majority in the Kentucky House of Representatives and Virginia Senate, a near majority of the Tennessee House of Representatives, and a majority of the U.S. House delegations from Arkansas, North Carolina, Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia, as well as near-even splits of the Georgia and Alabama U.S. House delegations. 
   In 1969, Kevin Phillips argued in "The Emerging Republican Majority" that support from Southern whites and growth in the South, among other factors, were driving an enduring Republican electoral realignment. Today, the South is again generally solid in state elections, and mostly solid in presidential contests, but now for the Republicans. Exit polls in 2004 showed that George W. Bush led John Kerry 70% to 30% among whites, who constituted 71% of Southern voters.
   However, in the 1970s and 1980s the increasingly conservative Republican Party gradually overtook the Democrats in the southeast. The Democrats' support in the formerly Solid South had been eroded during the vast cultural, political and economic upheaval that surrounded the 1960s. By the 1990s, the Republican Party had completed the transition into the southeast's dominant political party, despite typically having fewer members due to the prevalence of Republican voting generational Democrats. In New England, the opposite trend took place; the former Republican strongholds of Maine and Vermont became solidly Democratic, as did formerly Republican areas of New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut.
   With the collapse of the Republican Party in nearly all parts of the South, the region became known as the “Solid South”, and the Democratic Party after 1900 moved to a system of primaries to select their candidates. Victory in a primary was tantamount to election. From the late 1870s to the 1960s, only rarely was a state or national Southern politician a Republican, apart from a few Appalachian mountain districts. Republicans, however, continued to control parts of the Appalachian Mountains and compete for power in the Border States. Apart from a few states (such as the Byrd Machine in Virginia, the Crump Machine in Memphis), and a few other local organizations, the Democratic Party itself was very lightly organized. It managed primaries but party officials had little other role. To be successful a politician built his own network of friends, neighbors and allies. Reelection was the norm, and the result from 1910 to the late 20th century was that Southern Democrats in Congress had accumulated seniority, and automatically took the chairmanships of all committees. By the 1940s the Supreme Court began to find disfranchisement measures like the “grandfather clause” and the white primary unconstitutional. Southern legislatures quickly passed other measures to keep blacks disfranchised, even after suffrage was extended more widely to poor whites. Because white Democrats controlled all the Southern seats in Congress they had outsize power in Congress and could sidetrack or filibuster efforts by Northerners to pass legislation against lynching, for example.
  