As you probably know, Equinox, when President Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act into law, he famously observed that the Democrats would lose the South for at least a generation. The institutional and cultural racism of the former Confederate States would push most of those states' voters to the Republican Party. Subsequently, Richard Nixon and his nefarious advisors developed their "Southern Strategy" to exploit the former Dixiecrats. Ever since, the Republicans have taken advantage of this racism.

Over the intervening years, Republicans controlled most of the South's statehouses and legislatures and among their many regressive policies, they diminished the quality of public education. Under-educated voters are easily manipulated and tend to lack critical thinking skills resulting in people who inexplicably vote against their own interests.

I whole-heartedly agree with you: "Is is time for them to flip!"

Your post is extremely simplistic.

The worst racism I have ever experienced was in Grand Rapids, MI.

My Houston neighborhood is about as diverse as they come, with everyone respecting and even liking each other.

Those of us who live in the south, black and white, have lived together always.

Whenever I see south-bashing on here, I know it's ignorance of the south. Or maybe, just plain ignorance.

We go to school together, we work together, we live next door to each other, we date each other, marry each other, etc, etc., etc.

The Charlotte schools integrated back in the 70's with very little problem. Meanwhile, Bostonians were screaming at school buses full of little black children.

Especially those who are working so hard to reverse the progress made by the voting rights act. That doesn't mean that the citizens themselves are racist, but the formal policies being pushed at the state (and sometimes national) level come across as more overtly racist than you'll generally see in the north or west.

However...

When the current refugee crisis first really gained steam, the good people of my little western PA community were positively giddy at the chance to prove themselves more racist than any movie-stereotypical southern white sheriff, and they certainly exceeded all expectations in this regard.


Racism does indeed remain a plague that infects us all.

So there is a nexus between racism and repukelicanism.

(pssst... lived in Michigan for 27 years... ) Doesn't make it any different of a story.

You lived in Michigan when I met* you, remember?

I'm from South Carolina originally and the worst racism I witnessed was when I moved north of the Mason-Dixon line. Racism has no barriers but those with issues regarding the Southern US always attempt to paint us with the racist brush. To say that racism doesn't exist in the South is naive, to deny racism exist outside of the South is more so.

Respectfully, cwydro, the OP did not ask why the entire United States suffers from social descendent of its "peculiar institution." I responded succinctly as I interpreted the question. Please share your more in-depth thoughts.

screw with them. Your explanation was terse, accurate, and historically informative.

Y'all need to cut the crap out. Many of us are merely participating in discussions.

Whatever the issue, a certain vocal contingent will find a way to spin it into an anti-Clinton rant, no matter how nonsensical or irrelevant.

Not unlike a certain syndrome we've seen among Obama's chronic detractors...

In antebellum days, Southern whites' greatest fear was a slave uprising. This fear, passed down through the generations, may explain their descendants' reluctance to vote for the party that Nixon and successive repukes have managed to paint as the party of black people. (It was no accident that Raygun launched his campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., where three Freedom Riders were murdered. )

I agree with post's "simple" explanation. I agree that racism IS everywhere. I would like to hear a more nuanced explanation as to the reason(s) why the south went from Democratic to Republican. This is not malicious, I am genuinely interested in this subject. Cheers. Have a great day.

However, a "way of life" was "stolen" from a large base of southerners by the likes of Kennedy, Humphery and Johnson. And they have never forgiven the Democratic party for that.

It's accurate. Southern Democrats steeped in systemic racism found themselves disaffected with the Democratic Party after the Civil Rights Act passed. Republicans actively courted these voters by racializing their platform.

No, the south does not have a monopoly on racism, but nowhere else in the United States was such overt racism so integrated into regional culture and tradition. Threatening action against overt racism was, in effect, threatening the very social order of the Southern states.

But it is low hanging fruit for which many a "critic" of the South love to feast upon.

Right at the end of Nixon's Presidency, Nixon called George Wallace and asked "George, are you with me"? To which Wallace responded "No". I believe that Nixon formally resigned that day.

Think about what that phone called meant.

The white racists abandoned the Democratic Party and have not comeback.

I am a Christian, but man, people here in my red part of Virginia are fundamentalist, evangelical "Christians." Everything they think politically is all about their religion and has less to do with race as it has to do with anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-government, anti-anybody but us.

Then come talk to me about racism in the south. They invented redlining so they could suppress their black countrymen. Hell, they implemented the black ghetto system with malice aforethought.

Hell, in San Francisco, they basically just kicked out all the black people and moved them all to Oakland.

tend to vote for Republicans?

And government rules about practicing religion and when / how it can be done. These things eventually become memes that people believe and follow for no other reason. The parties are experts at keeping voters in that same state. The whole Death, taxes, vote Republican mindset.

And while there are some cities like Atlanta, Charlotte and Charleston, there isn't enough population there to drive statewide elections like there is in New York, California, Pennsylvania and others.

Take Texas. If you separate the major cities, you get a lot of blue voting. Too bad we let that stretch of I-10 between Houston and San Antonio vote.

of a large city. And we elected her twice!

A lot of them were Democrats until the Civil Rights movement, when they left the Democratic Party because their racism basically took priority over their other political beliefs. In the 1980s we called these people the "Reagan Democrats" but they weren't really Democrats any more. They had realigned with the GOP because the GOP made a very deliberate decision to pander to their racism and peel off their substantial number of votes.

As other posters have pointed out, this phenomenon isn't really confined strictly to the old Confederacy, but the concentration is still highest there.

these Red state voters? Black voters came out to vote for Obama and they were mostly responsible for his election. Good.

But why don't they come out to turn their own states blue? Or do they?

I have been watching for progressive candidates to donate to and have some black candidates in SC and elsewhere. If there are a majority of black voters in these states why are they Red states?

it's the "loser" part of the country (in the sense that it lost the Civil War and has had major chips on its shoulders ever since). A lot of the white people want to identify the hyper masculine, tough guy party, the party of bluster and bravado, to help cover up their feelings of inferiority. So they turn to the Republicans.

the biggest reason is political ignorance.

They are still there.

When the Revolution came, it started in the North. Boston, Philadelphia. Early combat action took place in New England. The southern colonies weren't so keen on revolt. They had a good thing going with cotton and tobacco trade to England and the uncertain future if we broke away from England concerned them. Only a little over half of the colonists actually supported the American Revolution. There was a serious problem of turncoats during our war of Independence. And so the action, as the war drags on moves south as the English were trying to shore up support there. There was enough remaining English support after Independence that England thought they could retake the Colonies.

All of that support came from the conservatives in the Colonies and we still have them today. They are the people who resist change, any change. They are the people who horde, who are selfish, and mistrusting of the "other"

So when the political parties in America formed, the conservatives tended to be in the South and that was, originally, the Democratic Party.

Then came the Republicans, who were the progressive party in Lincoln's time, and the liberals were collected there. After the Civil War, being a Democrat anywhere was toxic so the politially savvy jumped ship to the Republicans to make cash during Reconstruction. That started a pole shift of the liberal and conservative axis in America and by the 1960s that was finished.

The Democrats held on to a few conservatives for a while simply because there are places in the deep South where Lincoln and the Republicans were toxic and nobody would support any "Republican" But that is all gone now.

lots of blackbox voting which was introduced in the mid 60s

look at miss

http://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/28

37.5% black but supposedly always goes repub

so numbers wise that means there are not 14% of whites that would vote with the blacks that support dems...i just do not buy that

show why liberalism benefited everyone, and show how people were being divided against each other
this was the Ann Richards approach
she lost to Rove's sleazy ethnic intimations in 1994

the other route was by the neoliberals--the Clintons--to swing right to capture more votes because the old Dems who didn't leave with the Dixiecrats would still stay on no matter how far right your rhetoric went; economically they surmised that deregulation would produce enough booms and bubbles to keep the whole thing afloat; instead the states and GOP easily slid rightwards, with the Dems trailing right in their footsteps like some corrupt duckling (the left and the base didn't have any big donors, and bankruptcy was always a big fear for the DNC throughout the 90s); so the South ended up irrecoverably almost solid Red except in state parties that turned around a bit

Those three are also a factor.

in the ones who vote every chance they get..

and

too few democrats/progressives who vote to cancel them out

Here in my red part of Virginia, people go to church Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night. There are an incredible number of churches in my county.

Look at 1996 and 1992

Clinton won - Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Kentucky

in 1992 he won Georgia, in 1996 he won Florida

In 1976 Jimmy Carter swept the entire south. In 1980 he pretty much lost everything - except Georgia.

It used to be a very simple electoral strategy - put a southerner on the ticket.

Didn't work so well with John Edwards though.

You know what other region is always red - and deep red at that? The west. For almost a century they have voted Republican in the Presidential election from the Mississippi river west to the coastal states, except Texas. The one exception was LBJ who went all the way, and some of the FDR elections. People tend to not care as much about that though, because there are not nearly as many electoral votes at stake. In a close race, Democrats are gonna cede those states to the Republicans and not bother to campaign there. Same thing with the DCCC. Money is limited so you concentrate on races you can win.