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Old 02-19-2018, 08:10 PM   #124
detbuch
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Join Date: Feb 2009
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Pete F. View Post
this argument is a little absurd, the Republicans were the party of Lincoln and hated by the south until after the 60s when the Democrats under Kennedy and LBJ moved for voting rights and welfare. At that point the White Democrats of the South went Republican, but not in a day.
LBJ was the one who said this:“I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it,” he said. “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
Here is the relevant section of a Wikipedia article that is fairly neutral on the subject, not as balanced toward Republican influence as it should be, but Wikipedia often slants left on political subjects so this is about as fair as Wikipedia gets:

"After World War II, during the Civil Rights Movement, Democrats in the South initially still voted loyally with their party. After the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the old argument that all whites had to stick together to prevent civil rights legislation lost its force because the legislation had now been passed. More and more whites began to vote Republican, especially in the suburbs and growing cities. Newcomers from the North were mostly Republican; they were now joined by conservatives and wealthy Southern whites, while liberal whites and poor whites, especially in rural areas, remained with the Democratic Party.[1]
The New Deal program of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) generally united the party factions for over three decades, since Southerners, like Northern urban populations, were hit particularly hard and generally benefited from the massive governmental relief program. FDR was adept at holding white Southerners in the coalition[2] while simultaneously beginning the erosion of Black voters away from their then-characteristic Republican preferences. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s catalyzed the end of this Democratic Party coalition of interests by magnetizing Black voters to the Democratic label and simultaneously ending White control of the Democratic Party apparatus.[3] A series of court decisions, rendering primary elections as public instead of private events administered by the parties, essentially freed the Southern region to change more toward the two-party behavior of most of the rest of the nation.
In the presidential elections of 1952 and 1956 Republican nominee Dwight David Eisenhower, a popular World War II general, won several Southern states, thus breaking some white Southerners away from their Democratic Party pattern. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a significant event in converting the Deep South to the Republican Party; in that year most Senatorial Republicans supported the Act (most of the opposition came from Southern Democrats), but the Republican Party nominated for the Presidency Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who had opposed it. From the end of the Civil War to 1960 Democrats had solid control over the southern states in presidential elections, hence the term “Solid South” to describe the states’ Democratic preference. After the passage of this Act, however, their willingness to support Republicans on a presidential level increased demonstrably. Goldwater won many of the “Solid South” states over Democratic candidate Lyndon Johnson, himself a Texan, and with many this Republican support continued and seeped down the ballot to congressional, state, and ultimately local levels. A further significant item of legislation was the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which targeted for preclearance by the U.S. Department of Justice any election-law change in areas where African-American voting participation was lower than the norm (most but not all of these areas were in the South); the effect of the Voting Rights Act on southern elections was profound, including the by-product that some White Southerners perceived it as meddling while Black voters universally appreciated it. The trend toward acceptance of Republican identification among Southern White voters was bolstered in the next two elections by Richard Nixon.
Denouncing the forced busing policy that was used to enforce school desegregation,[4] Richard Nixon courted populist conservative Southern whites with what is called the Southern Strategy, though his speechwriter Jeffrey Hart claimed that his campaign rhetoric was actually a “Border State Strategy” and accused the press of being “very lazy” when they called it a "Southern Strategy".[5] In the 1971 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education ruling, the power of the federal government to enforce forced busing was strengthened when the Supreme Court ruled that the federal courts had the discretion to include busing as a desegregation tool to achieve 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. Of the known Dixiecrats, only three switched parties becoming Republicans: Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms 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 campaign to win the Presidency as a Democrat, but his support among White voters in the South evaporated amid their disappointment that he was not the yearned-for reincarnation of Democratic conservatism besides ongoing economic problems. In 1980 Republican presidential nominee Ronald Reagan won overwhelmingly in most of the South.[b]
Losing the South[edit]
In 1980, the Southern Strategy would see fruition when Ronald Reagan announced that he supported states rights and that welfare abuse justified the need for it.[6] Lee Atwater, who served 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 very offensive and that mentioning "states rights" and reasons for its justification had now become the best way to appeal to southern white voters.[7]

With race less important, economic and cultural conservatism (especially regarding abortion) became more important in the South, with its large religious right element, such as Southern Baptists.[8] The South became fertile ground for the GOP, which was becoming more conservative as it shed its liberal "Rockefeller Republican" faction. The large black vote in the South was solid for liberal Democrats. Well-established Democratic incumbents, however, still held sway over voters in many states, especially in Deep South. Although Republicans won most presidential elections in Southern states starting in 1964, Democrats controlled nearly every Southern state legislature until the mid-1990s and had a moderate (although not huge) number of members in state legislatures until 2010. In fact, until 2002, Democrats still had much control over Southern politics. It wasn't until the 1990s that Democratic control began to implode, starting with the elections of 1994, in which Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress, through the rest of the decade. By the mid-1990s, however, the political value of the race card was evaporating and many Republicans began to court African Americans by playing on their vast dedication to Christian conservatism.[9]
Republicans first dominated presidential elections in the South, then controlled Southern gubernatorial and U.S. Congress elections, then took control of elections to several state legislatures and came to be competitive in or even to control local offices in the South. Southern Democrats of today who vote for the Democratic ticket are mostly urban liberals. Rural residents tend to vote for the Republican ticket, although there are sizable numbers of Conservative Democrats who cross party lines and vote Republican in national elections.[10]
Dr. Ralph Northam, a Democrat and the 2017 Democratic nominee for Governor of Virginia has admitted that he voted for George W. Bush in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections.[11] Despite this admission, Northam, a former state Senator who has served as Lieutenant Governor of Virginia since 2014 easily defeated the more progressive candidate, former Congressman Tom Perriello, by 55.9 percent to 44.1 percent to win the Democratic nomination.[12]
A huge portion of Representatives, Senators, and voters who were referred to as Reagan Democrats in the 1980s were conservative Southern Democrats. An Interesting exception has been Arkansas, whose state legislature has continued to be majority Democrat (having, however, given its electoral votes to the GOP in the past three Presidential elections, except in 1992 and 1996 when "favorite son" Bill Clinton was the candidate and won each time) until 2012, when Arkansas voters selected a 21–14 Republican majority in the Arkansas Senate.
Another exception is North Carolina. Despite the fact that the state has voted for Republicans in every presidential election from 1980 until 2008 the governorship (until 2012), legislature (until 2010), as well as most statewide offices, it remains in Democratic control. The North Carolina congressional delegation was heavily Democratic until 2012 when the Republicans had occasion, after the 2010 United States census, to adopt a redistricting plan of their choosing. The current Governor is Roy Cooper, a Democrat.
In 1992, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton was elected President. Unlike Carter, however, Clinton was only able to win the southern states of Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia. While running for President, Clinton promised to "end welfare as we have come to know it" while in office.[13] In 1996, Clinton would fulfill his campaign promise and the longtime GOP goal of major welfare reform came into fruition. After two welfare reform bills sponsored by the GOP-controlled Congress were successfully vetoed by the President,[14] a compromise was eventually reached and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act was signed into law on August 22, 1996.[13]
During Clinton's Presidency, the southern strategy shifted towards the so-called cultural war, which saw major political battles between the Religious Right and the secular Left. Southern Democrats still did and do see much support on the local level, however, and many of them are not nearly so liberal as the Democratic party as a whole. Southern general elections in which the Democrat is to the right of the Republican are still not entirely unheard of.[15]
Chapman notes a split vote among many conservative Southern Democrats in the 1970s and 1980s who supported local and statewide conservative Democrats while simultaneously voting for Republican presidential candidates.[16] This tendency of many Southern whites to vote for the Republican presidential candidate but Democrats from other offices lasted until the 2010 midterm elections. In the November 2008 elections, Democrats won 3/4 the U.S. House delegation from Mississippi, 3/4th of the U.S. House delegation from Arkansas, 5/9th of the U.S. House delegation from Tennessee, and achieved near parity in the U.S. House Delegation from Georgia and Alabama. Nearly all white Democrats in the South lost reelection in 2010, however. In the November 2010 elections, Democrats won only one U.S House seat in Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas and two out of nine House seats in Tennessee. The Democrats later lost its one Arkansas seat in 2012. Following the November 2010 elections, there was only one white Democratic representative in the Deep South (John Barrow of Georgia), and he lost reelection in 2014. Democrats lost control of the North Carolina and Alabama legislatures in 2010, the Louisiana and Mississippi legislatures in 2011 and the Arkansas legislature in 2012. In 2014, the last damage occurred when Democrats lost 4 U.S. senate seats in the South (in West Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Louisiana) that they had previously held. In 2015, Democrat John Bel Edwards, was elected governor of Louisiana. In 2017, Democrat Doug Jones was elected Senator from Alabama, breaking the Democratic losing streak in Alabama"
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