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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

The solid south flipped in the 1960s. LBJ through force of his will basically betrayed the senate democrats and pushed through significant social legislation. (Voting, civil rights, great society, etc)

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.

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It started flipping in the 1960s, but Southern Democrats hung on to most southern state governments, and many House & Senate seats, until the 1990s. Richard Shelby (a conservative Alabama Senator) only switched parties in 1994, for example.

It _started_ even earlier. In 1948, Strom Thurmond ran for President as a Dixiecrat (Democrat for Racial Segregation), which is one reason why Truman v. Dewey was so close.

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.

Senator Byrd was a KKK grand wizard and lifelong Democrat.

LBJ said terrible things about blacks.

No, it's not simple to reassign blame. There's enough to go around.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160727193022/http://action.naa... 100% in line with the NAACP by the time he died.

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.

Check out the Robert Caro books on LBJ. I’d definitely argue “justice”, with a serious helping of insecurity.

No it didn't. The South was split in 1968, with deep south voting for Wallace, a Democrat, and most other states going to Nixon. Finally, after Ford, in 1976 you had Jimmy Carter, a southern Democrat who carried the south entirely: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/43/El...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=1968+election+by+state&t=brave&ia=...

You don't seem to understand the comment you are referring to. "The Solid South" refers to the block of southern states that voted strongly Democratic from the end of Reconstruction to 1964, when most of those states switched to supporting Goldwater based on his "states rights" rhetoric and opposition to the Civil Rights Act.

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.

No only 5 states voted for Goldwater (the same 5 that voted for Wallace). The South has 13 states, 14 if you count Maryland. Wallace ran as an independent but he lost and then returned as a Democrat governor for Alabama. Again, I repeat myself from elsewhere, the south continued to be strongly Democrat in state elections and Congress until the 90s, with Gore and Clinton representing the last strong showing of the old hegemony (enjoying fairly strong support in the south until 2000).

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...

No, you are missing the point.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

I know there's the southern strategy theory, but it's really just a Democrat talking point. The Democrats continued to dominate state and local politics as well as presidential elections until Ronald Reagan in 1980. Eisenhower carried half of the south in 1956 as a Republican. Kennedy did not win the whole south in 1960. Goldwater won 5 states of the 14 that make up the cultural south, a minority of both delegates and total states. Even Hoover (Republican in 1928) won much of the South: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1928_United_States_president...

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):

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/88-1964/h182

Do you believe the Civil War was fought over state's rights?

I don't know why you claim the Southern Strategy is a Democrat talking point.

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...

Here's Nixon advisor Alexander Lamar talking about the Southern Strategy in a memo in the Nixon presidential library from 1971.

https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/virtuallibr...

No, it's not.

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.

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