Speaking for my fellow Southerners....we don’t count Wilson. He was a New Jerseyite as far as we’re concerned. Yes we know he was born and raised in Virginia but he left and his views were much more in line with New Jersey where he lived for many years and worked and first was elected to political office.
LBJ, Carter and Clinton were all Democrats from the 60s on. By that time the party had drifted way to the Left. LBJ implemented really big expensive social programs and post LBJ, the more hawkish wing of the Democratic Party was completely destroyed. There was absolutely nothing left that would appeal to Southerners. Frankly, I’m surprised it took until 1992 for the South to finally send more Republicans to Congress. Old habits are hard to break I guess.
Well, I’m one as well, and I do count Wilson as one. He was born right there in Staunton, Virginia, his parents were Confederates, he saw Gen. Lee face-to-face, he was raised in the South. He didn’t leave the South for the North until he was about 27. He could just have easily remained in academia in the South as opposed to New Jersey with the same political outlook.
New Jersey was a Republican state at the time he won the Governorship in 1910, only that President Taft was contending with a midterm anti-GOP backlash, which Wilson benefitted from (it didn’t last long, even as he was winning the Presidency for the second time in 1916, NJ’s Governorship went back to the GOP).
It’s curious to note that in some areas of the South in the 1920s, especially with the die-off of the Civil War veterans and first generation of youngsters brought up to loathe the Republican Party, the party started to become viable (which blows away the fictitious “Southern Strategy” crap of Nixon’s). My state of TN voted for Warren Harding in 1920, 5 out of the 10 Congressional seats went Republican and we elected a Republican Governor. Republicans were making breakthroughs in parts of the South throughout the 1920s, including winning or coming close to in the 1928 elections (although part of that had to do with the Dem candidate being Catholic, but it also had to do with perceptions of being a big city liberal, which didn’t play well in the South).
Had the Depression not occurred as it did in 1929, it’s likely the South would’ve continued to move towards the GOP to vote more like the rest of the nation. It was only because of the Depression that GOP gains were curtailed for another 20+ years or so.
You’re right about old habits (especially voting) tending to die hard. The urban areas were the first in the South to move to the GOP in the ‘50s, then the suburbs by the ‘70s, with the rural areas generally the last (which, by that time, the urban areas with changing demographics moved back to the Democrats). The Democrats held on to our (TN) state legislature via gerrymandering exclusively on the strength of the rural areas. Once the GOP broke the lock, the rural areas moved hard to the GOP. Aside from a few seats here and there, virtually every rural district that is White is now Republican.