racial balance. Some southern Democrats became Republicans at the national level, while remaining with their old party in state and local politics throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Several prominent conservative Democrats switched parties to become Republicans, including Strom Thurmond, John Connally and Mills E. Godwin Jr. In the 1974 Milliken v. Bradley decision, however, the ability to use forced busing as a political tactic was greatly diminished when the U.S. Supreme Court placed an important limitation on Swann and ruled that students could only be bused across district lines if evidence of de jure segregation across multiple school districts existed. In 1976, former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter won every Southern state except Oklahoma and Virginia in his successful presidential campaign as a Democrat. In 1980 Republican presidential nominee Ronald Reagan won every southern state except for Georgia, although Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee were all decided by less than 3%. 1981–2009 In 1980, Republican presidential nominee Ronald Reagan announced that he supported states' rights. Lee Atwater, who served as Reagan's chief strategist in the Southern states, claimed that by 1968, a vast majority of southern whites had learned to accept that racial slurs like "nigger" were offensive and that mentioning "states rights" and reasons for its justification had now become the best way to appeal to southern white voters. Following Reagan's success at the national level, the Republican Party moved sharply to the right, with the shrinkage of the liberal Rockefeller Republican element that had emphasized their support for civil rights. Economic and cultural conservatism (especially regarding abortion and school prayer) became more important in the South, with its large religious right element, such as Southern Baptists. The South gradually became fertile ground for the Republican Party. Following the Civil Rights movement, the large black vote in the South held steady more or less but favored overwhelmingly the Democratic Party. Even as the Southern Democratic party came to increasingly depend on the support of African-American voters, well-established white Democratic incumbents still held sway in most Southern states. Starting in 1964, although the Southern states split their support between parties in most presidential elections, conservative Democrats controlled nearly every Southern state legislature until the mid-1990s. Not until 2011 did the Republicans capture a majority of Southern state legislatures, and have continued to hold power over Southern politics for the most part since. On the eve of the