In 2002, Sonny Perdue became the first Republican Governor since Reconstruction. Appeals from Governor-elect Perdue to conservative Democrats led to four State Senators switching allegiance to the Republican party. This event created a Republican majority in the State Senate. In 2004, the Georgia House of Representatives finally held a Republican majority, leading Georgia to become a Republican state. A pattern of Democratic politicians switching to the Republican Party, especially in the South, occurred during the 20th century, starting in the 1950s. Kickstarting this was the failure of the Dixiecrats. This deviating faction of the Democratic Party formed to upset the 1948 presidential election as the National Democratic Party began advocating for policies that white Southern Democrats deemed to threaten segregation and white supremacist ideology. The Dixiecrats believed that they would win all of the white Southern votes. Before this, the South had an overwhelming majority of white Democratic politicians in office, and most people were also Democrats. The 1948 presidential election signaled the end of the one-party South. White Southern Democrats who held Dixiecrat ideologies saw the up-and-coming conservative section of the Republican Party as a more suitable party.
The dissatisfaction southern Democrats had with the national party only grew when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The political decisions made by the Democratic president kickstarted a political shift that would eventually peak in the late 1990s to early 2000s. As time passed, the Democratic Party, once a pro-slavery party, became the party of equal rights. At the same time, the Republican Party, which abolished slavery in the previous century, shifted to a party focused on state's rights, an ideology believing that individual states should have the rights and power to decide what happens in their state and not the federal government. With this, politicians shifted parties, mostly Democrats to the Republican party. Senator Jack Hill was a politician who switched parties. His ideologies, however, did not change. Instead, the party they were affiliated with no longer fit their views, and politicians switched to the one they better aligned with.
This political shift occurred over the 20th century. It emerged slowly at first and took off in the 1950s and 1960s. There were significant political changes nationally, in the South, and in Georgia. African Americans also held considerable political influence in cities like Atlanta. The following timeline discusses why such changes happened or were perceived and how these political changes shaped Georgia into a red state at the start of the twentieth century.