Dixiecrat
The States' Rights Democratic Party, usually known as the Dixiecrat Party, was a short-lived splinter group that broke from the Democratic Party in 1948. The Dixecrats were a group of Southern Democrats who opposed integration and wanted to retain Jim Crow laws and racial segregation. The popular name of the party originated from "Dixie", which is a term used to describe the South.
The party was formed after a walkout of Southern delegates, led by Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, from the 1948 Democratic National Convention. The walkout was prompted by a controversial speech by Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota urging the party to adopt an anti-segregationist platform, based on the shared experience of black and white Americans during World War II. After the announcement by President Harry Truman that his platform would advocate the passage of civil rights laws, Thurmond helped organize the walkout delegates into a separate party, whose platform was ostensibly concerned with states' rights..
Thurmond subsequently ran for President on the Dixiecrat ticket in the 1948 election, and carried the previously solid Democratic states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina, receiving 1,169,021 popular votes and 39 electorial votes. The split in the Democratic party in the 1948 election was seen as virtually guaranteeing a victory by the Republican nominee, Thomas E. Dewey of New York, yet Truman won re-election in an upset.
The "Dixiecrat" Party largely dissolved after the 1948 election. Thurmond later joined the Republican Party. Nevertheless, the split in the Democratic party was permanent, eventually resulting in the loss of the South as a Democratic stronghold after 1956. In the 1960s, the courting of formerly Democratic white Southern voters was the basis of the "southern strategy" by Richard Nixon. Republican Barry Goldwater carried the Deep South in 1964, despite losing in a landslide in the rest of the nation to Lyndon Johnson of Texas. The only Democratic presidential candidate after 1956 to carry solidly the Deep South was Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election.