Coalitions today had Nixon won 1960 and push through CRA and VRA?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

The realignment of the low country South to the GOP still happens. Race was a catalyst for this to occur, but at the end of the day they just were not a good fit for the Democratic Party and had merely been tacked onto the Dem coalition because of Civil War era political divides. This happens more slowly probably, but at the end of the day economic growth and development of the suburbs and the creation of a large number of white collar and middle class voting base makes the continuation of the Solid South impossible, so Conservative Low country drifts towards the Republicans.

Without the Dems getting credit for the CRA though, Republicans keep better numbers with African-Americans though Democrats still dominate among them, meanwhile Democrats maintain a tighter hold over the poorer up-country South.

The major overlooked shift in the 1960s is the shift that happened within the North itself and the trading of upscale WASPs for middle class Irish, Italians and Germans. The seeds of this shift were planted in the 30s and 40s and the first signs of it were with the election of 1940, so this arguably continues. Nixon-Kennedy temporarily reverses these trends but with Kennedy out of the picture, this realignment possibly accelerates. The liberalization of rural Yankee whites and their estrangement from the GOP is another legacy of the impact of the New Deal, academia and the growth in power of their demographic rivals within the GOP. This might slow or accelerate depending on various factors.

The bottom line is that the CRA was just one of many factors in an ongoing realignment (contrary to the more extreme party flip theorists who assert that the world began in 1964) that commenced with the New Deal, and simply changing who does it and how that effects things doesn't impact the other factors necessarily and thus its difficult to assess the impact without knowledge of how those other factors play out. 

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

The 1960 election trend map is actually a great example of this, especially when combined with the



1952 trend map mins Thurmond 48's banner states (SC, GA, AL, MS, and LA)



the 1948 swing map



and the 1944 swing map



as well as graphs of GOP vote share from specific states, like Alabama, where the Dem vote share fell in every election from 1940 to 1960

In fact, this is a bit of a broader point, but portrayals of Dems losing Southern voters because of the 1964 Civil Rights Act miss that the truth is almost entirely the opposite: Dems passed the 64 CRA because they were already losing Southern voters, and needed to look elsewhere for support.

I generally agree with this analysis.

Its also the same for the Republicans, who looked to the South, because post 1932 were losing ground in the heavily unionized and industrial states.