VALDOSTA — Signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act into law, President Lyndon B. Johnson reportedly said, “There goes the South for a generation.”

As a Democrat, Johnson was referring to his party losing power in the South. Forty-four years later, this prediction still holds true throughout the South generally, and in Lowndes County specifically, regarding presidential elections.

If a recent online readers poll in The Valdosta Daily Times is any indication, the trend will continue this year. Asked “… who will receive your presidential vote,” 68.8 percent of 500 readers chose GOP candidate John McCain with 33.2 percent selecting Democrat Barack Obama. If past Lowndes County presidential elections are any indication, these numbers will likely reflect the real percentages after all of the votes are cast and counted Nov. 4.

In 2004, Lowndes County voters gave GOP President George W. Bush 18,981 votes to 12,516 votes for Democrat John Kerry. The poll and the last election reflect a trend that has been in effect in Lowndes County since Johnson’s prediction 44 years ago.

Since 1964, Lowndes County has given the majority of its support to Republican contenders in the past 11 presidential elections. There have only been two exceptions: Democratic Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter’s successful presidential bid in 1976 and Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s failed third-party bid in 1968, a year when GOP candidate Richard Nixon also received more Lowndes County votes than Democrat Hubert Humphrey.

In most of these elections, the majority of Lowndes County’s votes went to the men who won the White House: Nixon (1972); Carter (1976); Ronald Reagan (1980 and 1984); George H.W. Bush (1988); and George W. Bush (2000 and 2004).

But if the majority of Americans had voted like Lowndes County on other occasions in the past 40 years, the United States would have likely seen Barry Goldwater become president in 1964, instead of President Lyndon Baines Johnson; the U.S. would have elected American Independent Party’s George Wallace president (1968), instead of Nixon’s election to a first term; a second term for George H.W. Bush (1992) and the rise of GOP

candidate Bob Dole to the Oval Office (1996), instead of President Bill Clinton, who was elected in both elections of the ’90s.

Given the region and the state’s turn this decade to the GOP (from Sonny Perdue, the first GOP Georgia governor since Reconstruction, to Georgia Republicans in Congress and the state General Assembly), the Republicans’ ability of attracting the most Lowndes County votes in the presidential races shouldn’t be surprising. Yet, the majority of these presidential races occurred in years when South Georgia, indeed, all of the South, was considered Democratic bastions. Often, from 1964 until the early 1990s, many Lowndes County races (such as county commission, sheriff, etc.) were decided during the primary because there were no Republican candidates. They were all Democrats, even though the region voted consistently for the Republican presidential candidate. Even today, while the state has moved to the GOP, Lowndes County’s legislative delegation remains Democratic.

Contradictions

Before 1964, Lowndes County fell into the category of “yellow dog Democrat,” meaning that a voter would vote only for Democrats no matter who was running. In 1952 and 1956, for examples, Lowndes County would have twice sent Democrat Adlai Stevenson to the White House. Lowndes gave Stevenson a vast number of votes over World War II hero and two-term GOP President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Before the 1960s, if the candidate was Democrat, Lowndes County voted for him.

Yet, by 1960, Democrat John F. Kennedy barely drew more local votes than GOP candidate Richard Nixon, who received the highest number of votes for a Republican candidate in Lowndes County history up until that time, according to a November 1960 issue of The Valdosta Daily Times.

JFK’s narrow victory, probably because of his Catholicism, in a one-time Democratic stronghold foreshadowed the political contradictions in Lowndes County — contradictions that became a political song of the South.