The Democratic Party used to be the party of the south/segregation. What year (or decade) is the point where the two parties flipped places on this issue?
The solid south types saw the writing on the wall and started breaking away. The “Southern Strategy” as implemented by Nixon and perfected by Reagan basically started as a collaboration of conservative southerners (“rehab Democrats”) and western resource extraction interests. Eventually they took over the GOP and you have the circus that we see today.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=1968+election+by+state&t=brave&ia=...
That "flip" happened in 64, and while it was far from complete (note Wallace was NOT the Democratic candidate in 68, he basically started a 3rd party rooted in racism that won the deep south), that's when the switch started.
Also, the myth that the "solid south" began cracking in 1964 can easily be dispelled by looking at the 1960 election, Kennedy v. Nixon, with Kennedy carrying 8 states in the South (w/ Byrd picking up 2).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_United_States_president...
Or the 1956 election, where Eisenhower took half the South and the rest of the country: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1956_United_States_president...
The "flip" everyone is talking about isn't voting patterns, it is on policy.
The question was "The Democratic Party used to be the party of the south/segregation. What year (or decade) is the point where the two parties flipped places on this issue?"
The policy changed happened in 1964 with the Republican Goldwater campaign:
In the 1964 presidential election, Goldwater ran a conservative campaign that broadly opposed strong action by the federal government. Although he had supported all previous federal civil rights legislation, Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act and championed this opposition during the campaign. He believed that this act was an intrusion of the federal government into the affairs of state; and second, that the Act interfered with the rights of private persons to do business, or not, with whomever they chose, even if the choice is based on racial discrimination.
Goldwater's position appealed to white Southern Democrats and Goldwater was the first Republican presidential candidate since Reconstruction to win the electoral votes of the Deep South states (Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina). Outside the South, Goldwater's negative vote on the Civil Rights Act proved devastating to his campaign. The only other state he won was his home one of Arizona and he suffered a landslide defeat. A Lyndon B. Johnson ad called "Confessions of a Republican", which ran in Northern and Western states, associated Goldwater with the Ku Klux Klan. At the same time, Johnson's campaign in the Deep South publicized Goldwater's support for pre-1964 civil rights legislation.[1]
Prior to that the Republican party was mostly supportive of the Civil Rights Act, and afterwards it wasn't. The opposite was true in the Democratic party.
This myth that 1964 was some magical year where southern politics flipped is completely made up. In 1976, Jimmy Carter completely swept the South.
Wallace, who split the Democrat vote in 1968 by running as an independent, went back to become a Democrat governor of Alabama. Vast majority of the south had Democrat leadership and congressional representation until the 90s, post Reagan. Clinton and Gore, both southern.
Georgia, had Democrats for governor until 2003: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_governors_of_Georgia
Florida, mostly Democrat governors until 1999: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_governors_of_Florida
Alabama blue until 1987: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_governors_of_Alabama
Mississippi blue until 1992: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_governors_of_Mississ...
I can go on and on... Republican party never opposed the CRA. Goldwater was an outsider, a libertarian leaning Republican. "He lobbied for homosexuals to be able to serve openly in the military, opposed the Clinton administration's plan for health care reform, and supported abortion rights and the legalization of medicinal marijuana."
Goldwater opposed CRA on principle but the majority of the Republican party voted for it, with 136 for and 36 against (in fact, more Dems voted against than Repubs):
Republicans have talked about it publicly since at least 1970[1][2], and here's a book from 1971 talking about it too: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2748017?seq=1
Here's a Princeton History processor with a thread showing how real it was: https://twitter.com/KevinMKruse/status/1115712024015712262
I have no argument that Democrats kept winning elections in the South. As I said in the post you are replying to "The "flip" everyone is talking about isn't voting patterns, it is on policy."
[1] https://www.newspapers.com/clip/18000851/southern-strategy/
[2] https://www.newspapers.com/clip/30432238/the-lawton-constitu...
https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/virtuallibr...
It's been adopted as a core part of the broader conservative movement for a long time. Conservatives were at one point of sort of red headed stepchild in the mainstream, "Chamber of Commerce" or Eisenhower GOP. I grew up on a farm listening to Rush Limbaugh all summer in the 90s, they talked about it constantly. Reagan was the big hero, Goldwater and to a lesser extent Nixon were the minor heroes of the past. As the WW2 generation started retiring and dying, the next cohorts of GOP folks were more conservative than traditional republican.
At the same time, alot of the old-style conservative democrats started shifting as the old political machines started breaking down. The stereotype union, Irish, Italian and Polish guys (cops, construction, etc), fed a steady diet of talk radio in the truck, started going more republican.
In 1952, Robert Taft wanted to run for President using the "southern strategy" to woo disaffected Democratic voters, but Eisenhower decided to run, and that put an end to that strategy until Nixon was more successful in 1968.
Basically, the south became squishy on Democratic Party once northern Democratic Mayors (and FDR) realized that African-Americans were a strong labor voice and a powerful voting block. "The Party of Lincoln" (GOP) had been ignoring African-Americans since TR was in the White House.
LBJ said terrible things about blacks.
No, it's not simple to reassign blame. There's enough to go around.
It is unbelievably naive to reduce Robert Byrd to that classification, or dare I say wilfully ignorant. He also wasn't a Grand Wizard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__BaztE3EII Obama wouldn't have said this if he was a racist to his deathbed.
LBJ is a more complicated question. He was a man of his time, but he is also a key figure in bludgeoning the civil rights act through congress. Whether he did so out of a desire for justice or power, we'll never know.
They started flipping with the New Deal Coalition, which gave the Democratic Party a new but not yet unifying working class national agenda.
The splitting off of the segregationist States Rights Democratic Party (“Dixiecrats”) in the late 1940s was a response to this and the Democratic Party’s support for Civil Rights at the time.
The major turning point, though, was Johnson's support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the subsequent Republican effort to exploit that known as the Southern Strategy. The Dixiecrats hadn't lasted as a breakaway group; the Republicans in the 1940s and into the 1960s had a strong base of support for Civil Rights too, and there wasn't anywhere better than the Democratic Party for white racists to go. But when the Republicans actively courted them, that changed.
The phase of political realignment that started in the 1960s (which was itself an extension of the one starting in the 1940s) completed around 1994-1995, as the last of the Southern conservative Democrats (those further right than the center-right neoliberal faction like Clinton) in office jumped ship to the Republican Party.
> The degree of Republican support for the two bills actually exceeded the degree of Democratic support, and it's also fair to say that Republicans took leading roles in both measures
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2010/may/25/michael-st...
Not only is the party switch theory rather absurd (suggesting that Republicans were exploiting Johnson's support for a bill supported by over 80% of Republicans), it's also counterfactual. In fact, all but three prominent Southern Democrats remained Democrats. Al Gore's father was one of them, as was Robert Byrd, and the leader of them all, George Wallace, who won his last election in 1982, running as a Democrat for governor of Alabama.
Yes, that's why the major turning point is Johnson's support for the bill and the subsequent exploitation of disaffection within the party with that support by Republicans in the Southern Strategy.
> Not only is the party switch theory rather absurd
It's not a theory. The Southern Strategy starting at least with Nixon’s targeting Southern racists with the well-worn code words of the movement in the 1968 Presidential election is a well-documented fact. The body of anti-civil-rights, especially Southern, Democrats (both in the electorate and, even more clearly on an individual basis, in elected office) moving to the Republican Party over the period of 1964~1995 is a documented fact. That some of the leading wave of those (like Strom Thurmond) who left before 1968 were instrumental in the 1968 Southern Strategy is a documented fact.
> In fact, all but three prominent Southern Democrats remained Democrats
The list of noteworthy Southern Democrats figures, or even just incumbent officeholders, that switched party from 1964 to 1995 is much longer than 3. [0]
I mean, when you see a taking head in the media today arguing that slavery was beneficial to blacks (as you do), they aren't Democrats. When you see someone arguing (or ruling from the bench) against the Voting Rights Act of 1965, they aren't Democrats. When you see former Democrat and former KKK leader and still proud racist David Duke endorsing a major party candidates for President (or running for office himself), it's not for or as a Democrat. The switch of the parties on this issue isn't a mere theory, it's one of the clearest and most readily directly observable facts in American politics.
[0] It's not specific to Southern Democrats or Denocratic >> Republican switchers, but this page has a section for the latter and enough descriptive detail to use to identify the former in that list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_party_switchers_in_t...
And when you see someone in the media saying "You ain't black" or calling a black man "Uncle Tom", it's always a Democrat talking about a black Republican. Pretending that there are no racist Democrats is just ignoring the obvious.
And that list you linked is long, but it's not a list of prominent Southern Democrats. Many of the people on that list never even held office as a Democrat. If you'd care to list the people who actually won office as a Democrat supporting segregation or opposing civil rights, then switched parties, I'd be grateful. I only know of three.
Edit: In fact checking my own post, I discovered I was wrong. David Duke did win an election once, for a state House seat, running against a real Republican, despite the opposition of every major Republican leader, including President Bush and former President Reagan, and Chairman Lee Atwater, who said:
> David Duke is not a Republican. We repudiate him in his views and we are taking immediate steps to see that he is disenfranchised from our party.
There are more than the three “prominent Southern Democrats” you claimed on the list. Heck, there's more than that in each the early 1964-1970 phase of the Civil Rights driven realignment, and the final 1994-1995 wave, which was product of the culturally regressive wing of the party losing influence after the emerging center-right wing rose to dominance by supporting basically conservative economics while abandoning regressive culture war positions, especially on race, marginalizing both the left (who has no other major party to run to) and the solid right (whom the Republicans courted actively and welcomed with open arms).
First, we have to discard the idea that there was a specific year, or even decade, that the two parties "flipped". The history of politics is absurdly complex and involves lots of different players and there are rarely any discrete points in history you can point to and say, "this is precisely where this big ideological shift happened". It would be a lot like asking, "what year did tea party politics take over the Republican party?"
We also need to address the dog whistle in the air: modern Republicans love saying that they are the party of Lincoln and that it was Democrats that fought for slavery. They count on people having heard of this shift happening but not being well enough versed in it to understand where the lie is hidden.
Let's start with Andrew Jackson. He started as a member of the Democratic-Republican party but he pushed hard for an ideology that would become known as Jacksonian democracy [1]. This alienated a lot of fellow members of the Democratic-Republican party, and they joined forces with the remnants of the Federalists and a handful of others and formed the Whig party. The Democratic-Republican party became the Democratic party, led by Jackson. Neither the Whig party nor the Democratic party had views which exactly parallel any of today's popular political ideologies.
After the Mexican war, the loose coalition of Whigs started to fracture over the issue of slavery. A bunch of smaller groups, including former Whigs, joined together to form the Republican party, which opposed the expansion of slavery. Meanwhile, in the lead-up to the Civil War, the Democrats started to split into northern Democrats and southern Democrats ("Dixiecrats"). At this time, slavery is the leading political issue of the day, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Lincoln runs as a Republican and wins. There's a Civil War, and Reconstruction begins. The northern Democrats had held a wishy-washy position on slavery, and as a result, they lost all political power. Industrialist political influences in the north became represented by the victorious Republican party, while the Democratic party held on to power in the south.
This is the part where people see a "pro-slavery Democratic south" and an "anti-slavery Republican north", but neither of these parties at the time are all that similar to their modern antithesis. The Republican party at this time has a conservative group and a progressive group, and they fight frequently over things like concentration of wealth (sound familiar?). Southern Democrats meanwhile focused most of their political efforts on fighting any and every expansion of civil rights for former slaves.
Conservative Republicans won the presidency with McKinley, but Teddy Roosevelt, a progressive, was his VP. McKinley gets assassinated, Roosevelt takes office, and proceeds to enact a bunch of progressive reforms. [2] This ultimately results in a lot of friction between Roosevelt and conservative Republicans and that leads to an internal fight, with Taft leading the conservatives and Roosevelt forming the Progressive party.
Along comes Woodrow Wilson. (Bear with me, we're getting there.) Wilson, a Democrat, has been frustrated by his party's inability to tackle any issues other than civil rights. He manages to gather enough political influence to take control of the Democratic party, getting it out of the hands of the Dixiecrats. [3]
The infighting in the Republican party meanwhile leaves southern blacks unprotected, so they get really unhappy with both parties. All of this comes to a head post-Depression when FDR comes along. He's a very egalitarian, populist, post-Wilsom Democrat, and he captures a lot of political power.
So the situation now is this: there is a broken Republican party in the north, with progressive Republicans and conservative Republicans, and there is a progressive Democratic party, and there are a bunch of unhappy Dixiecrats -- the "Southern Democrats". FDR manages to pick up a bunch of the progressive Republicans along with black voters, and then Truman comes along and continues FDR's racially progressive policies, so this is when black voters begin to vote as Democrats.
The Southern Democrats were nearly shut out of national politics altogether at this point, while northern conservative Republicans were kept on life support until Nixon. There's a Nixon-Goldwater fight over the Republican party, but Nixon is an absurdly shrewd politician, and over the course of several years, he's able to build an FDR-like coalition of multiple groups under the Republican banner, including the northern conservatives and the former Dixiecrats, who were thrilled to get some political power again.
Nixon though was still an old-guard Republican and he would barely recognize today's Republican party. But, from here, the remaining dots are easy to connect.
This was the shortest summary of 150 years of messy politics that I could come up with. I'm skipping over a lot of important details and there are probably some points here that can be argued by those better-versed in this stretch of history.
But the important part is that these two modern parties have not existed as constant political entities, and so they didn't "switch sides". They were just labels for loosely-associated smaller political and demographic groups, and those groups changed allegiances depending on the biggest political issues of the day.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacksonian_democracy
[2]: The excellent u/Samuel_Gompers with a lot more detail on this: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nolzz/why_w...
[3]: u/Samuel_Gompers again, https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yczua/can_so...