The recent death of 96-year-old Greenville businessman Clarke Reed is a reminder of how dramatic the growth of the Republican Party in Mississippi has been.
Reed was one of the GOP pioneers in this state, which had almost totally shunned the Party of Lincoln following the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Well into the 1960s, Mississippi remained the land of Yellow Dog Democrats, those who were so anti-Republican that they supposedly would vote for a yellow dog before they would vote for any Republican. The monolith that was the Democratic Party crossed both economic and racial lines, even though it was mostly white Democrats who were trying to keep Blacks from voting.
In a retrospective he wrote this week on Reed, former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour recalled how few in number and even less in influence Republicans were in 1968, the year Richard Nixon won the presidency but took only 14% of the vote in Mississippi.
“At the time,” Barbour wrote, “Mississippi had no GOP state elected officials, no GOP federal elected officials, no GOP legislators, no GOP county elected officials and only three GOP mayors in the whole state ... .”
Less than 60 years later, the scale has been completely reversed. Republicans are now the political monolith. They hold all eight statewide offices, five of six congressional seats, and supermajorities in both houses of the state Legislature. The state is so firmly Republican that Democratic presidential candidates don’t even bother to campaign here, knowing it’s a waste of time and money.
Reed first and later Barbour were both instrumental in that transformation. Reed served as the state GOP chairman from 1966 to 1976, when the party made its first major breakthroughs, starting with the election of Thad Cochran and Trent Lott to Congress. Barbour, who started working for the party in his early 20s, would rise in the national GOP ranks before becoming Mississippi’s second Republican governor in 2004. From that position he engineered a steady defection of conservative Democratic lawmakers to the GOP.
Not even Reed could have imagined how dominant his party would become. It is a remarkable story, but not one without its downsides.
Most of the GOP growth has been fueled by a mass exodus of whites from the Democratic Party, leaving this state with a political identity that runs as much along racial lines as ideological ones.
Also, the same hubris that infected the Democrats when they dominated has crossed parties to the Republican side. Because the GOP numerical advantage is so great, legislative proposals that come from Republicans need no Democratic support in order to gain passage. Legislation that requires no compromise is often legislation that goes too far.
Reed and other GOP pioneers were not expecting political domination when they were building the party almost from nothing. They were just trying to create a viable two-party system for Mississippi, knowing that would produce better governing and better lawmaking.
It turns out that they were too good at what they did.
