Waiting for RINO Tom and/or Oldiesfreak to come in and "educate" all of us ignorant Democrats, liberals and Southerners about our own history. Any minute now.
Sure thing. The majority of those Republicans were considered standard conservatives of their day, a prime example being Sen. Dirksen of my home state who arguably played the most influential role in the bill's passage. I'll give our OP the credit he deserves for not throwing the "fact" out there that those Republicans were "liberals." Additionally, I find it frustrating that armchair historians constantly point to defections of people like Strom Thurmond to the GOP as this indisputable evidence that ever the passage of the CRA the two parties just became these ridiculously different entities, yet somehow the fact that all but one of those Southern Democratic Senators remained with the party their entire careers (for God's sake, one was the Congressional leader in 2009!) is "irrelevant" (just like, apparently, the fact that the GOP was responsible for the margin of victory with the CRA). I wouldn't be simplistic enough to present this as a simple cause-and-effect analysis, but the fact remains that there is a direct relationship between integration becoming more accepted in the South and Democrats losing power in the region to the GOP. To act like a "reinforcement" of anti-civil rights Republicans offered themselves as replacements for Dixiecrats is just simply untrue.
No one is saying that the CRA didn't open up politics in the South. Segregationist voters obviously no longer had a national party willing to cater to segregationist thought (they really hadn't for quite a while), but that realization clearly didn't cause them to no longer send Democrats to DC for 30 freakin' years or anything. Post-1964, Southerners had the choice between sending back largely "socially conservative" Democrats who more or less voted with their Northern counterparts on economic issues or a deeply conservative Republican candidate ... they made their preference known - well, that is, until enough of them died off and Republicans could finally win elections outside of the South's emerging suburbs.
And for the love of God, do not lump me in with Oldiesfreak. I have never presented the GOP as this fiercely pro-civil rights party during that era. Congressional Republicans largely only supported civil rights measures that would affect only Dixie (aka not their mostly suburban Northern consitituents). The GOP watered down every major civil rights bill during the '50s and '60s to an acceptable point for small business owners and suburban parents who had no problem at scoffing at the backwards South but weren't dying to have a bunch of Black people move in next door ... but while not noble, that's a different animal than Southern Democrats who straight-up opposed the idea of civil rights in nature.
The Dixiecrats didn't switch parties, they died. And when they were finally out of the way, a new generation of Southerners didn't see much appeal in a Democratic Party that had changed its cultural tone and whose main arguments were "well, remember FDR! The South has always been Democratic!", and while that worked better than its GOP counterpart of "Black people, vote for us because Reconstruction!", it was bound to fail eventually.
