1952- the election that broke the 'solid South'

[pbrower2a]

Of course, 1952 and 1956 were the two Presidential election years in which the Republican nominee won all  three of these states that almost never vote for a Republican nominee for President:

1. Rhode Island (which went for Republicans only in the 49-state landslides of 1972 and 1984)
2. Massachusetts (which went for Reagan in 1980 and 1984 -- but only then)
3. Minnesota (which barely voted for Mondale in 1984 and prevented a 50-state sweep).

It is not clear that Eisenhower was the more 'conservative' nominee. Southern whites probably voted unusually heavily (for a Republican landslide that won so many states) for a politician who got the support of segregationists. Eisenhower was comparatively liberal in effect (by standing with the Supreme Court) on school segregation.

As late as 1948, one notices that Utah went for a Democratic nominee for President in a close election. Beginning in 1952 Utah has been consistently much more R than the US as a whole.

...Virginia went from being a standard Southern state to being a very conservative Northern state in its pattern of voting... until 2008. The state was the only former-Confederate state to vote against Jimmy Carter (suggesting that it was no longer a Southern state)... and it voted against Bill Clinton twice.  But we may be talking about patterns set around the Civil War that became increasingly irrelevant.