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potdnewb posted...

jefferson davis the president of the confederacy and a democrat
alexander stephens was the vice president of the confederacy and a democrat
clearly us history is not your forte

As a history major, where history IS my forte, this is disingenuous at best. When looking at the Civil War, you need to look at regional politics and not party politics, as there were also northern Democrats that of course didn't secede from the union. In fact during the 1864 presidential election, northern democrats and republicans had formed the National Union Party, as a way to attract War Democrats, who were very anti-confederate. Southern Democrats in that era, well into the 1960s were very conservative, northern ones were more likely to be more progressive in that era. The Party platform had been a populist one really since the days of Andrew Jackson, but they expanded the scope of that to be more than just "white men" over time.

The Republican Party had formed as a more progressive party, but over time they started to get the stigma of being the pro big business, pro rich party, especially after FDR really positioned the Democrat Party as the party working for the "common man" during the Great Depression. There's a reason the man won 4 straight landslide elections and they literally had to change the Constitution after his presidency. With civil rights being a hot button, dividing issue for the Democrats in the 60s, a lot of Southern Democrats were feeling disenfranchised by LBJ backing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and thus the Republican Southern Strategy began to court those members of the Democrat Party as a new voting base. There's a reason why Strom Thurmond, for example, switched parties in 1964, after famously filibustering the Civil Rights Act of 1957 as a Democrat and campaigned for Barry Goldwater an extremely right wing, anti Civil Rights Republican candidate. , claiming that the Democrat Party had "abandoned the people". While Goldwater failed miserably, that basically set the stage for the "New Right", and Nixon winning in '68, to really seal the party shift.

TL/DR version:

The Democrat Party in the South of the 19th century was a vastly different party than the current one. There's a reason the fucking Klan doesn't vote democrat these days.