Ever since the Civil War, Tennessee’s white citizenry had been divided according to political loyalties established in that war. Unionist regions covering almost all of East Tennessee, Kentucky Pennyroyal-allied Macon County, and the Western Highland Rim counties of Carroll, Henderson, McNairy, Hardin and Wayne[3] voted Republican — generally by landslide margins — as they saw the Democratic Party as the "war party" who had forced them into a war they did not wish to fight.[4] Contrariwise, the rest of Middle and West Tennessee who had supported and driven the state's secession were equally fiercely Democratic as it associated the Republicans with Reconstruction.[5] The Democratic Party was certain of winning statewide elections if united,[6] although unlike the Deep South Republicans would almost always gain thirty to forty percent of the statewide vote from mountain and Highland Rim support even after most blacks were disenfranchised around 1890 by a poll tax[7] and intimidation.
Between 1896 and 1948, the Republicans would win statewide contests three times but only in the second amidst the national anti-Wilson tide of 1920[8] did they receive down-ballot coattails (in that election, winning three congressional seats in addition to the rock-ribbed GOP 1st and 2nd districts).[9] After the beginning of the Great Depression, however, for the next third of a century the Republicans would rarely serioulsy contest statewide offices, despite ongoing dominance of East Tennessee and half a dozen Unionist counties in the middle and west of the state.[10] State GOP leader B. Carroll Reece is widely believed to have had agreements with Democratic leaders E. H. Crump and later Frank G. Clement and Buford Ellington that Republicans would not contest offices statewide or outside their traditional pro-Union areas.[11] Despite this, the capture of a substantial part of the West Tennessee Dixiecrat vote of 1948 allowed Dwight D. Eisenhower to narrowly carry the state for the GOP in both 1952[12] and 1956.
For 1960, the nomination of Irish Catholic John F. Kennedy by the Democratic Party — who had made major gains in the 1958 midterm elections — led to severe questioning of how Tennessee’s heavily fundamentalist electorate would react to Kennedy’s Catholicism.[13]
^Wright, John K. (October 1932). "Voting Habits in the United States: A Note on Two Maps". Geographical Review. 22 (4): 666–672. doi:10.2307/208821. JSTOR208821.
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