GALIVANTS FERRY - Many species are rare, even threatened, in the swampy marshes along the southeastern coast, and perhaps none is closer to extinction than the "yellow-dog" Democrat of the Old South.

For decades, straight-ticket, conservative white voters who displayed unyielding loyalty to the Democratic Party - they said they'd vote for a yellow dog if the Democrats ran one ? transformed the South into a party stronghold.

The tide began to turn in the 1960s, when the Civil Rights Act alienated some lifelong conservative Democrats and Republican President Nixon courted yellow dogs with his "Southern Strategy." Since the presidential bid of Georgia's Jimmy Carter in 1976, no Democrat has carried the South and the region has become a Republican bastion.

"We are a vanishing breed," says Margaret Jackson, 67, of Manning, a rural area about 45 miles east of Columbia.

Some yellow-dog Democrats can still be found in the South, and they harbor hopes for a next generation as approval ratings for President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress drop, even in the South.

An AP-Ipsos poll in May showed that Bush's job approval in the South had plunged to 35 percent and those polled favor Democrats' control of Congress over Republicans 50 percent to 37 percent.

Democrats have gathered every other year at the Galivants Ferry Stump, which is held at a stop along the tourists' route to Myrtle Beach, to celebrate old-fashioned stump campaigning since 1870.

With banjo music in the background, politicians shake hands, slap backs, give speeches and dig into chicken bog - a steamy mix of rice, sausage and chicken.

"I'd vote for a yellow dog before I'd vote for a Republican," says Wanda Todd, 61, of nearby Myrtle Beach. Like most of South Carolina, the glitzy Grand Strand now leans toward the GOP.

Emory University political scientist Merle Black says straight-ticket, conservative white voters haven't been a force in the Democratic Party for years. "That's long gone," he said.

Black says 2004 exit polls show 18 percent of the voters described themselves as white, conservative Democrats or as white, liberal independents. At best, he said, less than 5 percent of Democratic voters would fit the traditional yellow-dog profile.

At the Galivants Ferry Stump, and other southern outposts, there are visions of a new breed.

In South Carolina, the party has started a Yellow Dog Club to raise badly needed money for 2006 elections.

Yellow dog T-shirts and buttons were a hot item at a recent state Democratic convention.

Lachlan McIntosh, executive director of the South Carolina Democratic Party, says today's yellow-dog Democrats aren't the same as those reared in the segregated South.

"The Republican Party certainly isn't the party of Lincoln today, and the Democratic Party isn't the party of (late Alabama Gov.) George Wallace," McIntosh said.