FEMA Camp Administrator
Cathcon
Atlas Star
Posts: 27,377
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« Reply #2 on: June 28, 2012, 04:13:35 PM » |
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Blacks began voting Democrat for some very good reasons. One, they were on the lower part of the economic chain and the New Deal and later Great Society could be seen as aimed at helping that. Two, yes, Johnson passed some large Civil Rights Acts. (And if any of this is racist, please correct me.)
Let's flash back to 1960. Kennedy had positioned himself as the candidate of Northern Liberals (despite his bad civil rights record, choice of a southerner, etc. This entire coalition of minorities--Catholics, Jews, Immigrants, Blacks--was his design and previously FDR's. But whatever, moving on). There were some very large complaints within the GOP that Republicans weren't doing enough to court the black vote. These were expressed throughout the campaign, and sort of solidified with the whole MLK in jail thing. A couple days before the election, Nixon was given a choice as to where to end his campaign. He could have chosen a Northern location and worked to cater to urban African-Americans. Instead, as I recall, he chose South Carolina. Come 1961, John Tower is elected to replace LBJ. He is a conservative, pro-states rights former Democrat.
Previously, of course, Republicans had managed to take states like Texas and Virginia for the first time since 1968, and the first time before that since Reconstruction. Something was going on.
1962 rolls around. For the first time since Reconstruction, Republicans began heavily hitting the South. They almost unseat a big-name Democratic Senator in the Deep South by running a heavily pro-states rights, arch-Conservative type candidate against him. Come 1964, they nominate Goldwater. While Goldwater was no racist and had a good Civil Rights record, he still held his beliefs in things such as the constitution and viewed certain recent acts as unconstitutional. While people such as George Romney pushed for a bigger push on Civil Rights on the platform and on the ticket, Goldwaterites resisted such attempts. In the general election, Republicans lose every state but for Goldwater's Arizona and a few deep south states. This is something that would be utterly unimaginable a few years ago, and maps were much more likely to be of the opposite color.
Here we are at 1972. Nixon's already chosen Spiro T. Agnew, a moderate southerner from a middle state for VP four years before. Now, he's facing a quite liberal opponent in the form of George McGovern. His adminstration's already resisted de-segregation attempts. Now, not only are rich Texas oilmen contributing to his campaign (in the form of Democrats for Nixon), Southerners are defecting en masse as they have been for the past eight years. For the first time ever, Republicans win every single state in the South. Unbelievable only a few elections ago.
Of course, it took until the Reagan era for it to completely shift. After all, Carter for a short time reclaimed the South for the Democrats. But nevertheless, the GOP realized that southern conservatives (whom Taft had already teamed up with earlier against the New Deal) were being continually alienated by the Democrats' insistence on nominating Northern Liberals, saw that the could and would vote Republican if the really needed to (1964) and sought to permanently draw them into the folds. It didn't help either that the majority of blacks were already lost to the Democrats since the 30's, or that the South represented an entire region of electoral possibilities while Blacks were merely a demographic.
While I might have liked the GOP to consistently tread on the side of being "The Party of Lincoln", fact was liberal Democrats were more aggressive and ambitious, and the GOP saw what was a huge chance at making inroads into a previously impenetrable region and they took it.
As for the idea of Southern moderates instead of Southern conservatives, I can see where you're coming from with your mentions of Spiro T. Agnew (elected against a pro-segregation Democrat in 1966), but the fact still stands that the GOP reaped a treasure trove of possibilities from the South, and they were all too happy to take it.
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