For over sixty years Virginia had had the most restricted electorate in the United States due to a cumulative poll tax and literacy tests.[2] Virginia would be almost entirely controlled by the conservative Democratic Byrd Organization for four decades,[3] although during the Organization's last twenty years of controlling the state it would direct many Virginia voters away from the national Democratic Party due to opposition to black civil rights and to the fiscal liberalism of the New Deal.[4] After the Twenty-Fourth Amendment and Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections the state's electorate would substantially expand since the lower classes were no longer burdened by poll taxes. At the same time, the postwar Republican trend of the Northeast-aligned Washington D.C. and Richmond suburbs, which had begun as early as 1944, would accelerate[5] and become intensified by the mobilisation of working-class Piedmont whites against a national Democratic Party strongly associated with black interests.[6]
^Kousser, J. Morgan. The Shaping of Southern Politics Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910. Yale University Press. pp. 178–181. ISBN0-300-01696-4.
^Key, Valdimer Orlando (1949). Southern Politics in State and Nation. pp. 20–25.
^Ely, James W. The crisis of conservative Virginia: the Byrd organization and the politics of massive resistance. p. 16. ISBN0870491881.
^Atkinson, Frank B. (2006). The Dynamic Dominion: Realignment and the Rise of Two-party Competition in Virginia, 1945-1980. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN9780742552098.
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