ABSTRACT
Race plays a substantial role in each of the mini-realignments. The Democratic conventions acceptance in 1948 of a liberal civil rights plank was the first event to illustrate the disruptive potential of race: Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrats bolted the party, costing it deep south electoral votes that it had won for a century. The eventual commitment of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to the cause of civil rights produces a second and far more severe split in Roosevelt's Democratic coalition. The role of the new Republican Party in setting off the conflict and in overseeing Reconstruction at its end produced a powerful association with the Democrats among white southerners that lasted for almost a century. Race does continue to play a role in Democratic electoral failure after 1968, but it does so as part of a much more general set of ideologically-related problems.
