The Long Realignment

The Sixth Party System announces itself in 1968 with a three-way race: Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey separated by seven-tenths of a point, and George Wallace carrying five Southern states and 46 electoral votes on open resistance to civil rights. Wallace's counties — the Black Belt and the hill South — are the hinge of the era: Democratic for a century, they would be Republican within a generation, and the almanac's county trajectories trace the journey one courthouse at a time.

The realignment was long because it moved at two speeds. At the presidential level it was fast: Nixon's 1972 landslide took 49 states, and the county-summed Democratic share fell to 38 percent of the two-party vote, the party's postwar floor. But down-ballot loyalties lagged for decades, and one Southern Democrat interrupted the trend entirely — Jimmy Carter swept nearly the whole South in 1976, the last Democratic nominee to do so. Ronald Reagan's two victories (44 states, then 49) and George H. W. Bush's in 1988 completed the presidential capture: by decade's end the phrase 'Republican lock' on the electoral college was conventional wisdom.

The lock lasted exactly one election cycle. Bill Clinton picked it in 1992 by moving the fight to the suburbs, and Ross Perot delivered the era's second great disruption: 18.9 percent of the vote, the largest third-party share since 1912, drawn almost evenly from everywhere — the 1992 county map's third-party view shows his vote spread across every region, a protest without a section.

The era ends in Florida. The 2000 election came down to 537 votes and a Supreme Court order; George W. Bush won the electoral college 271 to 266 (one Gore elector abstained) while losing the popular vote — the first split verdict since 1888, and a preview of the era to come. By 2004, the sorting was complete: the parties had traded their old heartlands, ideology and party finally aligned, and the number of genuinely contested states had begun the shrinking that defines the present.