Union poll tax campaigns could flip conservative Southern electoral outcomes

Evidence

The goal of these efforts was straightforward: to organize black and working-class white voters and get them to the polls to “rid the Democratic Party of conservatives.” The union efforts produced significant results. After one successful poll tax campaign among oil workers in a Texas congressional district—a campaign that led to registration rates “higher than ever known before in the region”—the incumbent Democrat withdrew from his reelection campaign. In Huntsville, Alabama, where the CIO paid poll taxes for four thousand workers in a population of approximately 13,500, the fiercely conservative incumbent Joe Starnes was defeated. — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 217

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Southern Democrats used labor law to block CIO-driven voter realignment — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 211; Conservative incumbents treated restrictive labor law and poll taxes as interchangeable tools — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 218