Over the last 60 years, Republicans began making inroads, to the point where Southern states became solidly red on the presidential level, but homegrown, conservative Democrats continued to prevail on the state and local levels. Still, it was only a matter of time until the political realignment began to trickle down, if you will. One by one, governorships and legislatures throughout the South began to move into the Republican column, beginning in earnest in the 1990s, even as President Bill Clinton was winning a last series of presidential victories in Southern states like Kentucky.

The final cracks in the Democrats’ eroding Southern dam began showing in 2008. In a national landslide for Democrats, Tennessee’s state legislature flipped to the GOP. In the coming years, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi would follow suit. By 2014, every legislature in every onetime Confederate state was under Republican control, as well as the entire legislature in onetime Democratic stronghold West Virginia and the state Senate in Kentucky, with Democratic governors surviving only in Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia, the latter of which has been so altered by in-migration from the northeast that its standing as a Southern state is very much in doubt.

Read the article “Kentucky Marks the End of the Democratic Party in the South” on observer.com.