As Democrats attempt to flip the state for a second presidential election, many don’t know that the Democratic Party once dominated politics in Georgia, though in a very different form. In 1860, after Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected president, the Southern, Democratic-controlled states seceded, leading to the Civil War and the legal end of slavery. In 1964, after years of sustained protest against segregation, Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, lamenting to his press secretary, “We’ve just lost the South for a generation.”