Quasi-Partisan Conflict in a One-Party Legislative System: The Florida Senate, 1947–1961

A standard approach to American politics, national, state, or local, distinguishes the two-party and one-party systems, with a range of modifications in between. Florida has long been described as a one-party state, part of the “solid south.” Since Reconstruction days, and until very recently, the Republican party there has had virtually no state and local organization, virtually no public office seekers nor office holders, virtually no registered voters, and virtually no supporters at the polls. In recent years this state of affairs has been in perceptible change. Traditionally Democratic Florida went Republican in the last three presidential elections. Indeed, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman are the only Democratic presidential nominees to have won Florida's electoral support since 1924. In the past decade there has been a marked increase in registered Republican voters, in Republican candidates and votes for them; and the state and local Republican organizations have expanded and otherwise appeared to be viable. These political changes seem to be related to other changes—industrialization, urbanization, growing wealth and a population explosion whose principal cause has been immigration from other states, mostly northern.