Politics Of South Carolina
Prior to the 1960s, the state Democratic Party was firmly in control of the government of South Carolina at all levels. The state Republican Party was little more than a country club group organized to reap the benefits when a Republican was in the White House. Most voters in South Carolina were Yellow dog Democrats, but Governor Strom Thurmond's run for President as a States' Rights Democrat in 1948 opened up the possibility of voting for a party other than the national Democratic Party. The Republican Party did not gain relevancy in the state until Strom Thurmond, as a United States Senator, switched parties in 1964 from Democrat to Republican. From 1964 to present, the Republican Party has gradually gained strength and by the 1990s it became the dominant party of the state.
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“The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.”
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