1932 presidential election — Franklin D. Roosevelt
In 1936, African-Americans were added to the coalition (African-Americans had
previously been denied the vote or voted Republican). For instance, Pittsburgh,
which was a Republican stronghold from the Civil War up to this point, suddenly
became a Democratic stronghold, and has elected a Democratic mayor to office in
every election since this time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realigning_election#Realigning_elections_in_United_States_history
For political scientists, 1964 was primarily an issue-based realignment. The
classic study of the 1964 election, by Carmines and Stimson (1989), shows how the
polarization of activists and elites on race-related issues sent clear signals to
the general public about the historic change in each party's position on Civil
Rights. Notably, while only 50% of African-Americans self-identified as Democrats
in the 1960 National Election Study, 82% did in 1964, and the numbers are higher
in the 21st century. The clearest indicator of the importance of this election,
was that Deep Southern states, such as Mississippi, voted Republican in 1964. In
contrast, much of the traditional Republican strongholds of the Northeast and
Upper Midwest voted Democratic. Vermont and Maine, which stood alone voting
against FDR in 1936, voted for LBJ in 1964.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realigning_election#Possible_modern_realigning_elections_in_the_United_States
The South, which had started to vote increasingly Republican beginning in the
1930s, continued that trend, becoming the stronghold of the Republican party by
the 1990s.[32] Political scientists Richard Johnston and Byron Schafer have ar-
gued that this development was based more on economics than on race.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964#Political_repercussions
1964 - the inspiration
In 1964, Barry Goldwater accomplished a task that, until then, had been seen as
physically impossible -- he won five states in the Deep South for the Republican
Party, which had been seen for the past hundred years as the party of Abraham
Lincoln and the defeat of the Confederacy. He was able to do this because of his
voting record against civil rights legislation versus the incumbent, Lyndon John-
son, who was in favor of civil rights. The South had, until that point, been a
solidly Democratic voting bloc, often called the "Solid South." Nixon, taking
note of this, campaigned on subtle race and states rights themes in 1968 and 1972
in an attempt to keep the Deep South in the Republican column.
That white Southerners could be persuaded to vote Republican in presidential
races by the 1960s is attributable to the greater power of race than class by
that time. For the first half of the 20th century, white Protestant voters in the
South tended to be quite populist on economic issues, forming an important part
of the "New Deal coalition" and supporting government infrastructure projects
like the Tennessee Valley Authority. However, they were quite conservative on
race and other social issues. For decades, class was more important than race be-
cause of the greater poverty in the South, but with growing affluence after World
War II, race began to be more important than class. The Civil Rights Movement
that began in the 1950s and gained momentum in the 1960s put race in sharper per-
spective, while other cultural changes in the 1960s (the sexual revolution, the
counterculture, the New Left) also drove white religious conservatives away from
the Democratic Party.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Southern_strategy#1964_-_the_inspiration
