Jophiel wrote:
gbaji wrote:
No. I'm saying that as the principles of civil rights became more prevalent in the South, and as the principles of segregation became less acceptable, the voters tended away from the party that supported segregation and to the party that supported civil rights
Oooohhhh... so your argument is that the white man was somehow held down in Alabama by racist Democratic policies. And, when freed of those policies (somehow via the CRA?) he started voting Republican while the black community flocked to the segregationist platform.
Um... No. WTF? I'm saying that after WW2, the makeup in the south changed dramatically as economic prosperity brought more people into the area, making segregation less popular among whites over time. In the 50s and 60s, this tipped the conflict over and the electorate moved away from the party that had previously maintained power via support for segregation and Jim Crow, to the party that was against those things.
You really have no clue how the civil rights period went, do you? I suppose you think that it was 100% about black folks marching and singing "we shall overcome", to an entirely racist pro-segregation white crowd, and nothing changed opinion wise before or since? That's... insane. The reality is that white opinions about segregation had been changing in the south for a couple decades. The folks holding things up were the old guard, mostly old white Democrats, who held political power and resisted change.
The voters moved to the GOP because the GOP wasn't the party of racists. The idea that the percentage of white racists in the south never changed, and they all just moved to the GOP, and that's why they started winning in the south is just plain wrong. It's nonsensical. The voters changed from a majority that supported segregation and thus running on a segregation platform was the route to power (ie: the Democrats), to a non-segregation platform (actually an economic platform that really didn't have anything to do with race at all).
The point you and many liberals just can't seem to get through your heads is that race ceased to be a winning platform issue in the south like 50 years ago. The GOP has *never* run on that platform, vague claims of coded messages and "southern strategies" aside. Voters moved to the GOP because the GOP was *not* the party of racism. I'm just not sure how many different ways I can say this.
You're cherry picking one year and one election and missing the broader pattern. In that
one year it's possible that racists in the south, in a last gasp effort to hold power, and thinking that Goldwater was a racist himself, voted for him on what was otherwise a weak platform. But that's the outlier. It's not reflected in the congressional races. And it's not reflected in the 1968 presidential election, nor those after that point. The pattern was that the peripheral south states went GOP first, and the deep south states last.
I'm looking at the pattern over time. You're looking at one election. That's not enough to see a pattern. Go look at the same map for the previous 5 elections and the 5 after that. Then you'll see a different pattern.