JACKSON, Miss. - When Senator Thad Cochran initially won his seat in 1978, he became the first Republican elected to the Senate from Mississippi since Reconstruction, a signal moment in what was then an overwhelmingly Democratic state.
There were competing Democratic factions in the Mississippi of that era, one loyal to the old-line segregationist Democrat whom Mr. Cochran succeeded, Senator James O. Eastland, and the other aligned with Senator John C. Stennis, who was also a segregationist but more genteel than Mr. Eastland.
This year, with Mr. Cochran seeking a seventh term and trying to fend off an aggressive challenge from his right in Tuesday's primary, Mississippi is again dominated by one party with rival blocs - except it is Republicans who now enjoy near-total political control.
Mr. Cochran's face-off with State Senator Chris McDaniel is the purest distillation this year of the nationwide Tea Party-establishment battle in the Republican Party, but it is also a vivid illustration of how, yet again, one-party rule is shaping politics in the Deep South.
As the Democrats' regional fortunes have waned and Republicans have taken over statehouses and congressional delegations, the cultural and ideological divisions of the so-called Dixiecrats are now found under a different party banner. With the Republican nomination tantamount to victory in the general election, incumbents are increasingly facing primaries, the contests are growing more heated, and interest groups are taking sides in a way that underscores the primacy of the nominating process.
'Any time you have a dominant system, you begin to develop the competition inside the system, which is actually quite a tribute to how far the Republicans have come - they're now big enough they can actually fight one another,' said the former House speaker Newt Gingrich, an architect of the modern Republican Party in Georgia.
A tribute to success, maybe. But supporters of Mr. Cochran and Senator Lindsey Graham, the establishment-aligned South Carolinian who is facing a primary challenge next week, are not celebrating. Neither are Alabama Republican leaders, who, just four years after taking over the Statehouse, are watching 27 legislators grapple with primaries on Tuesday.
The Alabama races have received far less attention than the Senate primaries in Mississippi and South Carolina, but the battle for power in Montgomery, the state capital, may be the best indicator of the complete political realignment in the Deep South. The Alabama Education Association, for decades a pillar of the state's Democratic coalition, is spending millions in the Republican legislative primaries, a remarkable concession about where they think general elections are now won or lost.
'We realize in the political climate we live in that there are areas of our state where a Democrat is not going to win,' said Anita Gibson, the group's president. 'So we have found we need to be reaching across the aisle and making friends where we can. We're trying to find pro-public-education candidates regardless of what political party they are affiliated with.'
Republican leaders in Alabama have complained about cross-party meddling in their primaries, but it is just as much an indication of where public policy is shaped in the region.
Southern Republican primaries have also become forums for what the party establishment sees as purity tests and what the right believes are opportunities to hold leaders accountable for their fealty, or lack thereof, to conservative principles.
Mr. McDaniel's main campaign argument against Mr. Cochran, 76, is that the incumbent has been too willing to work with Democrats and not aggressive enough in opposing President Obama. 'Mississippi is the most conservative state in the republic, it deserves the most conservative senator in the republic,' Mr. McDaniel, 41, said Saturday at a rally on the Gulf Coast.
Mr. Cochran's brand of Republicanism predates the South's political realignment, and his approach is more in keeping with what was the traditional bipartisan creed in the mostly impoverished region: Use longevity and influence in Washington to lure the most federal dollars to the state. 'The longer I've been there, the more I appreciate the seniority system,' Mr. Cochran said with a smile after a rally in Jackson on Monday. 'It has benefited our state in a lot of ways.'
Mr. Cochran's argument that he should be returned to the Senate because of all the money he has brought home - with the implicit promise of more to come - is an echo of the plea that long-serving Southern Democrats once made when they faced young rivals in primaries.
In 1972, Democratic upstarts in Louisiana and Arkansas ran against incumbent senators who, like Mr. Cochran, were barons of the check-writing Appropriations Committee. The challengers, David Pryor in Arkansas and J. Bennett Johnston Jr. in Louisiana, both ran as moderates, suggesting that the conservative stalwarts were out of step with the party.
'It's generational but also ideological, in the sense that they really have two different worldviews,' said Jay Barth, a political science professor at Hendrix College in Conway, Ark., comparing today's primaries with those decades ago. (In Louisiana in 1972, the incumbent Allen J. Ellender died during the primary campaign, and in Arkansas, Senator John L. McClellan defeated Mr. Pryor, but only after being pushed to a runoff.)
Then, as now, there is also a sense that, regardless of the results, the incumbents represent an era that has passed.
'I think he's done a lot of good for Mississippi,' said State Senator Michael Watson, a supporter of Mr. McDaniel's, referring to Mr. Cochran. 'But I think the atmosphere right now is more conservative, so I think that's what's leaning in Chris's favor.'
Republicans here and elsewhere in the South do not think the factions will disappear with the defeat or retirement of the earlier generation of politicians.
'As long as this purity thing goes on, yeah, it'll keep happening,' said Clarke Reed, who was chairman of the Mississippi Republican Party in its infancy in the 1970s.
The larger concern among many Republican strategists is that the infighting distracts from a bigger challenge to come: the shifting political allegiances caused by migration from other parts of the country and by immigrants. These demographic changes have already altered politics in Virginia and North Carolina.
'Our party is in a good spot in South Carolina and most parts of the South for about 10 years, but we need to build a party for the future, and the future is a more diverse South,' said Mr. Graham, who, like Mr. Cochran, has been attacked from the right.
Yet in an era when politics is increasingly nationalized, and polarized, there is a hunger from some partisans for more confrontational and ideological officeholders. It has pushed the Republican Party here to the right, worrying some that if Mr. McDaniel is the nominee, the Democrats will have an opening to snatch the seat with a coalition of African-American Democrats and disaffected Cochran supporters.
'There's a real possibility that a Democrat could compete in this state, should Senator Cochran not be our nominee,' said Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves, a Cochran supporter.
There would be ample historical parallels to such a possibility: Mr. Cochran won his Senate election in 1978 with just 45 percent of the vote, taking advantage of a Democratic split involving the party's white nominee and an African-American who ran as a third-party candidate.
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