Solid South: recent Republican victories in the Arkansas General Assembly completed the South's total transformation to the GOP.

• Author: Francis, Eric
• Position: LEGISLATURES

When the new Arkansas speaker of the House banged the gavel to open the 89th General Assembly, history was made.

It just wasn't the history everyone expected a year earlier. Instead of welcoming the first African-American speaker in the state's history, embers were greeting the first Republican speaker since Reconstruction.

In March 2012, Representative Darrin Williams (D) was chosen speaker-elect, setting Arkansas up to have its first African-American speaker. That is, until voters elected enough Republicans for the party to claim the House and Senate. In the House, Republican Davy Carter won the leadership position after a last-minute bid -that gained the support of only a few Republicans but almost all the Democrats, who considered him to be more moderate than his colleague Representative Terry Rice (R).

A Southern Trend

With the Arkansas House and Senate now in GOP hands, the Republican takeover of state legislative chambers in the formerly solid Democratic South is complete.

"It started with the Florida Senate going from a Democratic majority to a tied chamber in 1992. Ever since then, the South has gradually moved toward the direction of the Republicans," says Tim Storey, an elections analyst for NCSL.

"There wasn't a single Republican chamber in the South 20 years ago; now every one is. That's a tectonic shift in the political landscape."

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"Arkansans are conservatives," Speaker Carter says. The state was last to join its neighbors, not because it doesn't share those same conservative values, Carter says, but because of its most successful political son--what he calls the Bill Clinton influence.

Clinton probably was an influence, says David Lublin, professor of government at American University in Washington, D.C. But previously, Arkansas's Democrats also had benefitted from being able to "minimize differences" between themselves and Republicans, especially in rural areas, says Lublin.

Arkansas's shift to a GOP majority was merely an extension of a broader Southern trend, where the delegations to Congress went Republican first, followed by state legislatures, says Merle Black, professor of politics and government at Emory University in Atlanta.

"This is kind of a trickle-down thing," says Black. "The realignment started with presidential politics back in the '50s, and it takes a long time to come down to the levels of state legislatures. Local politics is where your inherited party loyalty means more than...