Bush won almost half of them in 2004
Uhh..... no, don't think so, not even close.
Nixon and the Southern Strategy (and Reagan) were certainly opportunistic in going after the racist vote abandoned by the DP, but black shift to the DP started back with FDR (as far as electoral count) and reached a denouement with LBJ (as far as party membership).
We did this in another thread recently. I'll look it up.
Bush won 44% of Hispanics in 2004. I wasn't talking about blacks.
Oops -- sorry, my misread.
Here's that post I was looking for about the timeline:
The black vote started demonstrably going Democratic in FDR's first election (1932), and saw significant spikes in 1948 and 1964... 1932 of course was a huge vote for FDR as a quest for relief against the ravages of the Depression, appealing to the poor, the unemployed, the lower classes --- those most affected by the economic collapse. Add to this that the DP had taken on the Populist movement with the turn of the century while the RP had been shifting to the interests of corporations and the rich, and that the "Progressive" era policies both parties flirted with were largely embraced in Roosevelt's New Deal, and these are the seeds of the DP attracting minorities and the poor in general, including blacks, Jews, Catholics and immigrants.
While these may have been attractions to the DP for these constituencies, probably two factors acted as repulsion away from the RP: first, its association with the rich and hyper-rich around the turn of the century, and later, the association with the "Moral Majority". Both of these are polarizing dynamics that establish a meritocratic hierarchy. People don't go where they don't feel welcome.
It wasn't until 1948 though that most blacks self-identifed as "Democrats":
-- 1948 would be when Harry Truman had integrated the military and the DP convention made so much noise about "civil rights" including a stirring speech by Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey, that an entire contingent from the South walked out, started their own short-lived party, ran a candidate and very nearly cost Truman the election.
From the
source of these charts:
Even after that, Republican nominees continued to get a large slice of the black vote for several elections. Dwight D. Eisenhower got 39 percent in 1956, and Richard Nixon got 32 percent in his narrow loss to John F. Kennedy in 1960.
But then President Lyndon B. Johnson pushed through the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 (outlawing segregation in public places) and his eventual Republican opponent, Sen. Barry Goldwater, opposed it. Johnson got 94 percent of the black vote that year, still a record for any presidential election.
Nixon appears in 1968; you'll notice the shift is well before that.
While I don't disagree with the thrust of the thread, the Southern Strategy was more about glomming on to the white conservative South as a political constituency than about dismissing blacks, actively or passively. Blacks had already left before that.