Yes, rightwing conservative Democrats. All that changed with LBJ and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Goldwater[R] carried the South in 1964, in protest of civil rights.
Read your history.
Yeah they all magically switched parties in 1964....goddamn dope
Exactly
And you really believe anyone believes that shit....LOL. You people are deluded ....and ignorant
The monopoly that the Democratic Party held over most of the South first showed major signs of breaking apart in
1948, when many Southern Democrats, dissatisfied with the policies of
desegregation enacted during the administration of Democratic President
Harry Truman, created the
States Rights Democratic Party, which nominated South Carolina Governor
Strom Thurmond for president and Mississippi Governor
Fielding L. Wright for vice president. The “Dixiecrats” managed to win many Southern states, but collapsed as a party soon after the election, with effectively all members returning to the Democratic Party.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat from the Southern state of Texas, led many Southern Democrats to vote for Barry Goldwater at the national level. In the ensuing years, the increasing conservatism of the Republican Party compared to the liberalism of the Democratic Party (especially on social and cultural issues) led many more conservative white Democrats in the South to vote Republican. However, many continued to vote for Democrats at the state and local levels ,especially before 1994. After 2010, Republicans had gained a solid advantage over Democrats at all levels of politics in most Southern states.
Southern Democrats - Wikipedia
Jimmy Carter would like to have a word with you about that.
See that year label -- "1976"?
Have any idea what was going on just prior to that --- say, August of 1974?
Tell ya what, if you want to see the pattern check the next election. And the one after that, and the one after that.
Fun facts: A dozen years prior to your map, George Wallace, a Democrat from right smack dab in the middle of that blue area, offered to switch parties to be Barry Goldwater's running mate. That was the same year Strom Thurmond
did switch parties --- which at the time in the white South was unthinkable -- after his hissyfit about the Civil Rights Act didn't pan out. Those were a couple of the biggest final cracks, prior to which both Thurmond and Wallace had bolted the Democrats to run against them in previous years.
Thurmond's previous hissyfit/bolt on the same complaint goes back to 1948, and was itself an echo of a previous Southern walkout all the way back in 1860, when not even Thurmond was born yet. His Dixiecrats actually kicked Truman the Democratic nominee off the ballot in part of the South and replaced his name.
And then when Thurmond's 1948 POTUS bid also didn't pan out, which was the reference that doomed Trent Lott (another Democrat who switched), he ran for Senate and the Democratic Party kicked him off the ballot, and he had to run as a write-in, which he won.
Context, m'boy. Everything comes from somewhere. Southern conservatism simmered for well over a century, and occasionally bubbled over into political party schisms, eventual mass party migration, and at one point, civil war. The same conservatism that, when it lost that war, contrived the Klan (and at least two dozen similar vigilante groups) to continue that war socially after it was over militarily. The same conservatism that, to the same end, came up with Jim Crow and separate water fountains and the whole Lost Cause propaganda, the artifacts of which are only now coming under fire, and even now, after all of this, that same campaign
continues to be waged with "leave that statue alone, you're erasing history" and mobs with Tiki torches crying "You will not replace us".
See the pattern. Political parties shift with the winds but geographical ideologies don't. Because they're rooted in culture, and those roots go far deeper. The Strom Thurmonds and Trent Lotts and Jesse Helmses can change parties all they like, but changing culture, that's a whole 'nother ball game.
