The Dixiecrat Party largely dissolved after the 1948 election. Senators Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms eventually switched parties and joined the Republicans. Several others remained in the Democratic Party and went on to become prominent Democratic Senators. These former Dixiecrats, turned Senators, went on to serve multiple terms in the service of their respective states. These long careers in the Senate elevated their seniority putting them in positions of power and prestige.
None of these Representatives and Senators who bucked the Democratic party ever suffered punishment from their caucuses by expulsion or demotion of seniority or removal from prized committee chairmanships.
Regardless of the power struggle within the Democratic Party concerning segregation policy, the south remained a strongly Democratic voting block for local, state, and federal Congressional elections. This was not true of Presidential elections.
In the 1960s, the courting of white Southern Democratic voters was the basis of the "southern strategy" of the Republican Party's Presidential Campaigns. Republican Presidential Candidate Barry Goldwater carried the Deep South in 1964, despite losing in a landslide in the rest of the nation to President Lyndon B Johnson of Texas. Johnson surmised that his advocacy behind passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would lose the South for the Democratic party and it did. The only Democratic presidential candidate after 1956 to solidly carry the Deep South was President Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election.
Into the twenty-first century, the South has changed from a Democratic monolith to a majority Republican sector of the country with GOP gains in state legislatures. Many of the political ideologies of the Dixiecrats have been so totally adopted by the Republicans that these principles are now considered to be the core values of the modern Republican Party. This change, which began in 1972 with Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy", was followed up by the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the reconquest of the House of Representatives in 1994 by Newt Gingrich, reached its ultimate pinnacle in 2000 with the election of George W. Bush, giving religiously motivated former Dixiecrats total control over all three branches of the federal government. It has also caused significant friction with the few remaining paleo-conservatives in the GOP as they see the Dixiecrat transplants to be openly hostile towards limited-government conservatism and in favor of more authoritarian government.
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