QUOTE : How did the South become so uniformly Democratic? Basically the Democrats used racist ideas and practices to establish a lasting political hegemony there. So racism wasn’t incidental; it was an essential part of the Democratic Party’s strategy. The Democrats won the South by appealing not just to the former planter class but also to poor whites. How did they do this? The great postbellum invention of the Democratic Party was the institution of white supremacy. After the war, writes historian George Fredrickson, “The one thing that held the Democratic Party together was a commitment to maintaining white supremacy.”5 White supremacy is an elaborate ideological structure for justifying racism, in the same way that the “positive good” school was an elaborate ideological justification for slavery.