permafrost wrote:
Max, the refusal to accept clear historical fact by the right wingers is amazing..
You will never accept it , I know, but one more after about a dozen other explanatioins, this very simple and well known event..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategyIn American politics, the Southern strategy was a Republican Party e*******l strategy to increase political support among white v**ers in the South by appealing to r****m against African Americans.[1][2][3] As the civil rights movement and dismantling of Jim Crow laws in the 1950s and 1960s visibly deepened existing racial tensions in much of the Southern United States, Republican politicians such as p**********l candidate Richard Nixon and Senator Barry Goldwater developed strategies that successfully contributed to the political realignment of many white, conservative v**ers in the South who had traditionally supported the Democratic Party rather than the Republican Party. It also helped to push the Republican Party much more to the right.[4]
Max, the refusal to accept clear historical fact b... (
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In the Senate, Republicans picked up four southern Senate seats in the 1960s and 1970s, while Democrats also picked up four. Democratic incumbents won routinely. If anything, those r****t southern v**ers kept v****g Democrat.
So how did this myth of a sudden "switch" get started?
It's rooted in an equally pernicious myth of the supposedly r****t "Southern Strategy" of Richard Nixon's 1968 p**********l campaign, which was accused of surreptitiously exploiting the innate r****m of white southern v**ers.
Even before that, though, modern-day Democrats point to the 1964 p**********l campaign of Republican Barry Goldwater, who refused to back the 1964 Civil Rights Act as proof that the GOP was actively courting r****t southern v**ers. After all, they argue, Goldwater only won six states--his home state of Arizona and five states in the deep south. His "States' Rights" platform had to be code for a r****t return to a segregated society, right?
Hardly. Goldwater was actually very supportive of civil rights for b***k A******ns, v****g for the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts and even helping to found Arizona's chapter of the NAACP. His opposition to the 1964 Act was not at all rooted in r****m, but rather in a belief that it allowed the federal government to infringe on state sovereignty.
The Lyndon B. Johnson campaign pounced on Goldwater's position and, during the height of the 1964 campaign, ran an ad titled "Confessions of a Republican," which rather nonsensically tied Goldwater to the Ku Klux Klan (which, remember, was a Democratic organization).
The ad helped Johnson win the biggest landslide since 1920 and for the first time showed Democrats that accusing Republicans of being r****t (even with absolutely no evidence to back this up) was a potent political weapon.
It would not be the last time they used it.
Four years later, facing declining popularity ratings and strong primary challenges from Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, Johnson decided not to run for re-e******n. As protests over the Vietnam War and race r**ts following the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. raged in America's streets, Republican Richard Nixon, the former Vice President, launched a campaign based on promises of "restoring law and order."
With the southerner Johnson out of the race and Minnesota native Hubert Humphrey as his opponent, Nixon saw an opportunity to win southern states that Goldwater had, not through r****m, but through aggressive campaigning in an area of the country Republicans had previously written off.
Yet it didn't work. For all of Nixon's supposed appeals to southern r****ts (who still v**ed for Democrats in Senate and House races that same year), he lost almost all of the south to a Democrat--George Wallace, who ran on the American Independent ticket and won five states and 46 e*******l v**es.
It shouldn't have been surprising that Nixon ran competitively in the South, though. He carried 32 states and won 301 e*******l v**es. Four years later, he won every state except Massachusetts. Was it because of his r****m? Had he laid the groundwork for r****t appeals by Republicans for generations to come?
Of course not. The supposedly r****t southern Republicans who v**ed for Nixon in 1972 also v**ed to re-elect Democrat Senators in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Republicans gained only eight southern seats in the House even though their p**********l candidate won a record 520 e*******l v**es.
After Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974, Democrat Jimmy Carter swept the South en route to the presidency in 1976. Did Carter similarly run on r****t themes? Or was he simply a stronger candidate? After Ronald Reagan carried the south in two landslides (including the biggest in U.S. history in 1984) and George H.W. Bush ran similarly strongly in 1988 while promising to be a "third Reagan term," Democrat Bill Clinton split the southern states with Bush in 1992 and with Bob Dole in 1996.
All the while, Democrats kept winning House, Senate, and gubernatorial e******ns. Only in 2000 did southern v**ers return to unanimous E*******l College support for a Republican p**********l candidate.
Since then, the south has v**ed reliably Republican (with the exception of Florida and North Carolina) in every p**********l e******n as it has consistently v**ed for Republicans in Senate, House, and Governor's races.
Yet this shift was a gradual, decades-long t***sition and not a sudden "shift" in response to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. R****m didn't turn the South Republican--if it did, then why did it take 30 years for those r****t v**ers to finally give the GOP a majority of southern House seats? Why did it take r****t v**ers in Georgia 38 years to finally v**e for a Republican governor? And why did only one southern Democrat ever switch to the Republican Party?
The myth of the great Republican-Democrat "switch" summarily falters under the weight of actual historical analysis, and it becomes clear that prolonged e*******l shifts combined with the phenomenal nationwide popularity of Republicans Richard Nixon in 1972 and Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984 were the real reason for the Republican strength in the south.
Reagan in particular introduced the entire nation to conservative policies that it found that it loved, sparking a new generation of Republican v**ers and politicians who still have tremendous influence today.
R****m had nothing to do with it. That is simply a Democratic myth.