Although, like all former Confederate states, North Carolina would during its “Redemption” develop a politics based upon Jim Crow laws, disfranchisement of its African-American population and dominance of the Democratic Party, the Republican Party possessed sufficient historic Unionist white support from the mountains and northwestern Piedmont to gain a stable one-third of the statewide vote total in general elections even after blacks lost the right to vote.[1] After the failure of Theodore Roosevelt to reconcile with the South, new nominee Taft would in October become the first Republican candidate to tour the South.[2] Aided by opposition by developing manufacturers to Bryan's populism,[2] and by his willingness to accept black disfranchisement[3] alongside a completely “lily-white” state GOP that even excluded blacks from membership[4] Taft gained substantially upon Theodore Roosevelt's performance in 1904, especially in previously Democratic western and Piedmont counties. He was the first Republican to ever carry Cabarrus County and Catawba County – which would become solidly Republican after World War I and among thirteen Tar Heel counties to back Barry Goldwater over Lyndon Johnson – and also Jackson County.[5]
1 2 Tindall, George B.; ‘Southern Strategy: A Historical Perspective’; North Carolina Historical Review; vol. 48, no. 2 (April 1971), pp. 126-141
↑ de Santis, Vincent P.; ‘Republican Efforts to “Crack” the Democratic South’; The Review of Politics, vol. 14, no. 2 (April 1952), pp. 244-264
↑ Heersink, Boris; Jenkins, Jeffery A. (2020). Republican Party Politics and the American South, 1865–1968. Cambridge University Press. pp.48–50, 239–243. ISBN9781316663950.
↑ Menendez, Albert J.; The Geography of Presidential Elections in the United States, 1868-2004, pp. 265-271 ISBN0786422173
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