72 The two-party system
began to see more and more black Democrats as mayors of important cities,
such as Atlanta and New Orleans, and the election of black Democrats as
members of the House of Representatives from congressional districts with
large black populations. At the national level, blacks were becoming more
and more important in the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party in the
South was becoming more and more schizophrenic.
The reaction of Southern whites, in increasing numbers, was to switch
their allegiance to the Republicans, not simply at the presidential level, but
for other state-wide posts as well. Thus by 2006 seven of the eleven states of
the Deep South had Republican governors and of the twenty-two Senators
from these states eighteen were Republican – a situation inconceivable even
twenty years earlier. At the presidential level the devotion of the South to
the Republicans is even more marked. In the election of 1980 Reagan won
all the Southern states with the exception of Georgia, and in the elections of
1984, 1988, 2000 and 2004 the Republican candidate swept the South gaining
majorities in every one of the states of the Deep South. Only Clinton, himself
a Southerner, was able to make inroads into the South, winning four of the
eleven states in 1992 and 1996. The South has therefore become pivotal in
presidential elections, and was critically important in the election of George
W. Bush in 2000, when the outcome of the election depended on the result in
Florida. George W. Bush also benefited from the support of Christian funda-
mentalist groups, which are very strongly represented in the Southern states.
The danger of this developing situation is that the Democratic Party in the
South becomes increasingly the representative of the black population and
the Republicans the party of the whites.
The reforms that have been proposed in order to try to bring about a more
responsible policy-oriented political system have been intended to strengthen
the position of the president in relation to Congress, and to give to national
party leaders a greater ability to discipline and control the lower echelons
of the party. The centralisation of party finances, the creation of stronger
national party organisations and the subjection of members of Congress to
party discipline are major aims of such reforms. In order to increase the stat-
ure of the president, reformers have proposed that presidential candidates
should be selected by a nation-wide direct primary, while others would like to
see closer links between president and Congress, providing for the election of
the president by Congress, or by a more radical movement towards a Cabinet
system of government. The danger of most of the proposals for reform of
the party system is that they might tend to cause a disintegration of that
system rather than a solidification of it, making the parties less responsible,
and less responsive, than at present. There is always the danger that the
latent multi-party system that lies beneath the deceptively straightforward
two-party system might emerge and take over American politics.