When did the parties switch platforms?

[RINO Tom]

2010, of course (when the Southern legislatures fell)!

Seriously, though, I know those guys were just DINOs.  When they REALLY switched was the 2000s.  You see, Bill Clinton (a Democrat) talked about an end to the era of big government.  He also like deregulated something or something like that, and he had a Southern accent and won West Virginia (and WV votes Republican now, so that means the Democrats of the '90s were the Republicans of today).  Then, in the 2000s, George W. Bush (a Republican) swept onto the scene, and he expanded government (he was a liberal for this) and also passed No Child Left Behind.  Plus the debt.  Democrats attacked him for this (making them the conservatives of that time period).

[RINO Tom]

Never.  Their platforms may have changed some over the years, but the switch wasn't as radical as liberals like to pretend it was.  That's just an excuse they make to keep repeating the lie that the racist Democrats joined the GOP after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act.

Mississippi:

https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?year=1960&fips=28&off=0&elect=0&f=0

https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?year=1964&fips=28&f=0&off=0&elect=0

Alabama:

https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?year=1960&fips=1&off=0&elect=0&f=0

https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?year=1964&fips=1&off=0&elect=0&f=0

Georgia:

https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?year=1960&off=0&elect=0&fips=13&f=0

https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?year=1964&fips=13&off=0&elect=0&f=0

South Carolina:

https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?year=1960&fips=45&off=0&elect=0&f=0

https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?year=1960&fips=45&off=0&elect=0&f=0

Louisiana:

https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?year=1960&fips=22&off=0&elect=0&f=0

https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?year=1964&fips=22&off=0&elect=0&f=0

Yes, that was ONE election.  After 1964, most of the segregationists went right back to the Democrats.

Four of these states swung toward Wallace, one for Nixon, zero for Humphrey. All voted for Nixon in 1972. Carter is the only post-CRA Democrat to win any of these voters back, and even then not incredibly.

Clinton won Louisiana in 1992 and 1996. Georgia also went to Clinton in 1992 and was close in 1996 although Dole won it.

Yes, but only because of black support. Granted, a good chunk of whites in these states clearly voted for Clinton, but the vast of white Southerners voted Republican after 1964 except for Wallace and too a lesser extent Carter.

In 1976, Carter won 46% of the "White South" (compared to Ford's 52%).  Considering that Carter won every Southern state except for Virginia (one of the bigger Southern states) and barely won Texas and Florida (two other big Southern states with a lot of Northern transplants at the time), I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that Southern Whites in the Deep South most certainly voted for Carter, especially when you look at his victory margins and how many people voted in each state (I rounded the numbers in the parentheses but used the exact numbers, available on Wikipedia, for the calculations):

JIMMY CARTER SOUTHERN MARGINS

BORDER SOUTH
VA: +1.34% Ford (1.70 million total)
OK: +1.21% Ford (1.09 million total)
TX: +3.17% Carter (4.07 million total)
FL: +5.28% Carter (3.15 million total)
KY: +7.19% Carter (1.17 million total)
NC: +11.05% Carter (1.68 million total)
TN: +13.00% Carter (1.48 million total)
WV: +16.04% Carter (750,000 total)

That'd put Carter at winning just over 52% of the votes in the Border South.

DEEP SOUTH
MS: +1.88% Carter (769,000 total)
LA: +5.78% Carter (1.28 million total)
SC: +13.04% Carter (802,000 total)
AL: +13.11% Carter (1.18 million total)
AR: +30.01% Carter (769,000 total)
GA: +33.78% Carter (1.47 million total)

That'd put Carter at winning almost 58% of the vote in the Deep South ... I don't think you do that in the 1970s without winning the White vote, or at least coming damn close considering the turnout disparity that still existed between Whites and Blacks in that decade.  Carter did significantly better in the Deep South than in the Border South, and given that the biggest Deep South state gave him over 65% of the vote and that four gave him over 55% of the vote, I think it's safe to say Carter did just fine among Deep South Whites, 12 years after the Civil Rights Act was signed.

All the CRA did was OPEN UP politics in the South; White Southerners now had to choose between two parties that - at least outwardly - supported civil rights.  Both parties (despite popular misconception) continued to make overtures toward racist Whites in the South for years after the Civil Rights Act, and Republicans started to do better as the South became less agrarian (notice how Carter still won the rural, White counties in 1980 yet managed to lose most Southern states to Reagan, thanks to GOP inroads in the growing suburbs...).  It wasn't this magical moment when all these old racist Southern Democrats were like, "I think I'll be a Republican now, even though their party voted more in favor of this than anyone else!"  That's as ridiculous as union voters becoming Republicans because of Obama's support for the TPP.

[RINO Tom]

Never. As for Wallace voters, the only two I ever knew were Democratic until 2004 and too senile to vote after that.

Despite what this forum would like to hear, that is probably how most "old school Dixiecrats" probably voted ... what is so appealing to them about a Connecticut, WASPy, dynasty family member of the Party of Lincoln who's clearly pretending to be a cowboy?  LOL.  These folks almost certainly voted for Clinton, and given they were probably already in their 60s by the time Reagan was running, I doubt they voted for the California Republican either.

Now I will say, if any true Dixiecrats were still alive, I bet they would have crossed party lines for the first time in order to prevent a Black man from being elected ... but most are dead.

[RINO Tom]

Never. As for Wallace voters, the only two I ever knew were Democratic until 2004 and too senile to vote after that.

Despite what this forum would like to hear, that is probably how most "old school Dixiecrats" probably voted ... what is so appealing to them about a Connecticut, WASPy, dynasty family member of the Party of Lincoln who's clearly pretending to be a cowboy?  LOL.  These folks almost certainly voted for Clinton, and given they were probably already in their 60s by the time Reagan was running, I doubt they voted for the California Republican either.

Now I will say, if any true Dixiecrats were still alive, I bet they would have crossed party lines for the first time in order to prevent a Black man from being elected ... but most are dead.

Storm Thurmond? Richard Shelby? Fob James? Zell Miller? Buddy Roemer? The biggest racist ever to serve in the Senate, Jesse Helms? How about Trent Lott, Mills Godwin, Nathan Deal, and Sonny Perdue?

Strom Thurmond was ONE of 21 Senate Democrats who switched parties in 1964.  The rest were just fine remaining Democrats.  Again, what would their incentive be to join the party that supported it at an even higher rate, even if that party nominated ONE candidate ONE time that opposed that ONE civil rights law (and had a flawless civil rights record before that)?

Richard Shelby was a Democrat until 1994 ... do you think it took him 30 years to realize that the CRA had been passed?

James also became a Republican in 1994.  It is intellectually dishonest for you to act like the Civil Rights Act caused that.  I know you're not that dumb or that much of a hack.

Zell Miller IS STILL A DEMOCRAT, lol.  He endorsed Michelle Nunn just this past year!  Come on, dude.

Buddy Roemer became a Republican in 1991 ... a full three years earlier than those other two.  Conclusion: obviously the Civil Rights Act signed in the 1960s.

Jesse Helms became a Republican in 1970, 6 years after the CRA was signed.  As for him being the most racist, I think that's highly debatable.  Helms introduced legislation that would take away tax-free status to colleges in North Carolina that discriminated based on race.  He hired James Meredith (ya know, the first Black student to ever attend Ole Miss?) on his staff, for God's sake.  If Democrats like Al Gore, Sr. and Robert Byrd are going to get total passes for saying "I'm sorry, I was wrong" (let's forget for a second that Byrd remained a racist sack of sh^t well into his senile term as leader of the Congressional Democrats, a post he held into Obama's Presidency...), then you should extend the same forgiveness to Republicans.

Trent Lott became a Democrat until 1972.  It took this genius 8 whole years to figure out that Democrats were now a party totally committed to racial equality and Republicans had completely absorbed racism?  What a moron.

Godwin became one in 1973.  Yet another one who didn't question their party allegiance after the signing of the CRA.

Deal became a Republican in 1995.  I've noticed a lot clearer trend of a shift to the cultural left in the '80s for the Democrats alienating a lot of Southerners, much more so than civil rights.

Perdue didn't ditch the Democrats until 1998.  Only a moron would tie that to civil rights or dog whistle politics.

Look, as I've said many times before, the Civil Rights Act opened up politics in the South (just as Martin Luther King predicted it would), but it didn't usher the region toward the GOP.  It did temporarily in 1964, but that was clearly an anomaly.  A party whose Senators and Representatives supported the law overwhelmingly let an opponent of the law win a very divided field.  So what?  They ran right back to a Democrat in Wallace (yes, he ran as an independent, but he went right back to the Dems and was unapologetic in his liberal fiscal views during the campaign) in 1968, sure they voted for Nixon in 1972 but so did every other state and they all came right back home to the Peanut Farmer in 1976.  Looking at the county maps, your rural, poor, White Southern counties STILL voted against Reagan in 1980; his strength came from the suburbs.  That is a fact.

The CRA caused Democrats to lose their stranglehold on Dixie; it by no means delivered it to the GOP.  The GOP had to 1) convince the South that its ECONOMIC interests actually lay with the Republicans and 2) wait for several "Dixiecrats" to die off.  Sorry if that gets in the way of your justification for why everyone who ever did anything good politically was a liberal and therefore the legacy of modern liberal Democrats can only then logically be a noble one, but history is a lot more complicated than "the parties switched" (seriously, I can see how a dumb^ss third grader can believe that, but people posting on this site with a wealth of data and knowledge at their disposal??).  Even on civil rights.

[RINO Tom]

The parties didn't switch. The party coalitions (who votes for which party and more importantly, why) changed.

And this should be obvious and very distinguishable from the laughable fairytale that "the parties switched" for just about anyone with a working brain.

[RINO Tom]

Obviously anyone with a brain knows that the parties used to be much more of "big tent" organizations, but how could someone argue that a Democratic Party (and a predecessor Democratic-Republican Party) could be cranking out quotes like this and still be considered a "conservative" political party (which would be implied, as these quotes were all made before most mythical "switch" dates)?

“I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”
– Thomas Jefferson

“Corporations, which should be carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”
– Grover Cleveland, who is for some reason viewed as this "original DINO" of sorts, LOL

“I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”
– Woodrow Wilson's acceptance speech at the 1912 Democratic National Convention

“Democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself.”
– Franklin D. Roosevelt ... to be fair, when people talk about party switching in the '60s, they just conveniently leave out the '30s and '40s rather than make up lies about them

Combine that with these types of quotes from Republicans and Whigs and Federalists long before any mythical switch dates, and it's literally undeniable that there have remained progressive elements of the Democrats and conservative elements of the GOP since the beginning:

“That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise.”
– Abraham Lincoln, quoted in a speech by NOTORIOUS "RINO" Teddy Roosevelt

“I never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence ... [the Declaration] does not declare that all men are equal in their attainments or social position.”
– Abraham Lincoln

"You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves."
- Abraham Lincoln

"The first requisite of a good citizen in this republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to carry his own weight."
- Teddy Roosevelt

There has absolutely been a similar *attitude*, especially on economic affairs, that has stayed consistent through the ages - with the Republicans being the party that celebrates the near perfection of the free market, the idea of the self-made man and praising economic individualism while the Democrats have always been skeptical of this approach, weary of giving business too much freedom/power and believing that the government should be there for the less fortunate.  When you consider that social issues change every 20-30 years, what is so different?  The coalitions?  Well duh ... But the coalitions have changed since the 1990s, and the parties obviously haven't "switched" since then.

Honestly, looking at a few maps and deciding that the parties must have been opposite in the past is a simpleton's exercise and intellectually lazy, not to mention a disrespect to a wealth of primary sources.

[RINO Tom]

So did Thurmond and Helms, but they don't get a pass from Democrats.

Did he, though (I am legitimately asking)? I see articles around, particularly this Slate one, about how he never publicly renounced his views on racial segregation. I was able to find plenty of Byrd-related material with him renouncing this or that, and even pushing policies or ideas that no Dixiecrat would ever do.

I'd like to think Strom came around, but I don't actually know if he did, and if it was genuine.

I'm not sure about Thurmond, but I know he fathered and cared for a Black daughter ... couldn't have been THAT racist, LOL.  And Helms hired James Meredith (first Black student to ever attend Ole Miss) on his staff and was apparently (according to Wikipedia) the only Senator to return his inquiries.

[RINO Tom]

Also not exactly related to Strom, but Paul Thurmond (his son) did call for the removal of the Confederate Flag this summer and had the decency and historical literacy to admit that the Civil War was fought over slavery.

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/06/south-carolina-state-senator-and-son-segregationist-just-called-confederate-flags-remov

[RINO Tom]

Great post, NC Yankee.  I'll add one more thing that I think any self-respecting student of history needs to truly comprehend: we cannot project our ideas of tolerant/intolerant, conservative/liberal, enlightened/unenlightened, etc. onto different eras without being VERY careful.  For example, everyone would look back on the Civil War era and at first glance think of the Democrats as the clearly more intolerant, racist party that was on the wrong side of history, while the GOP was this tolerant, forward-thinking mechanism for change, but people during that day certainly didn't see things in that black and white of terms.  I'm reminded of this quote on pg. 205 of the book "Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of Civil War" by Bruce Levine, a book I had to read for an advanced Civil War & Reconstruction class in college:

"Especially in the North, Democrats strove to depict the contest between themselves and their opponents (the Republicans) as one between cultural tolerance and bigorty (against the South, against Catholics, against the foreign-born).  Only the Democrats were ready to protect the rights of all white residents, native- and foreign-born alike, and regardless of religious faith.  'Let this be made the issue in the Newspapers & the Legislature & everywhere,' Stephen A. Douglas had earlier advised..."

People need to remember that almost every White American of the 1860s thought Blacks were literally an inferior race, including the vast majority of Republicans, and there were VERY real (and at the time considered persuasive) arguments being made by Democrats that slavery was actually good for Black Americans and Republicans were just giving them a path to starving on the streets.

[RINO Tom]

Could people stop with this insane idea that the Republicans were ever a "liberal" party in the American sense? They have been the party of big business and Wall Street from the 1870s to present. Hell, they weren't even "liberal" in the European sense in the 19th century: they were arch-protectionists and major supporters of high tariffs (both for protecting American business and for revenue purposes).

The big shift isn't in the party platforms so much as who made up the party. The mass defection of African-Americans from the GOP to the Dems from 1930s-1960s ended up making the Northern Democrats the party of civil rights (can't get elected in NY or IL or etc without the black vote), which alienated white conservative Southern Democrats and gradually pushed them into the GOP in the 1970s-2000s. It's inaccurate to say the parties "switched platforms" generally, though. The main groups that made up the GOP in the 1920s (big business, highly-paid professionals, Midwestern farmers) are still all mostly Republican groups, while the main groups behind Northern Democrats (recent immigrants, labor unionists, religious minorities, the poor) are mainly still Democratic voting blocs.

Most people can't see past "racist Alabama redneck voted Democrat in 1890, racist Alabama redneck voted Republican in 2016; conclusion: parties are opposite now."

[RINO Tom]

Could people stop with this insane idea that the Republicans were ever a "liberal" party in the American sense? They have been the party of big business and Wall Street from the 1870s to present. Hell, they weren't even "liberal" in the European sense in the 19th century: they were arch-protectionists and major supporters of high tariffs (both for protecting American business and for revenue purposes).

The big shift isn't in the party platforms so much as who made up the party. The mass defection of African-Americans from the GOP to the Dems from 1930s-1960s ended up making the Northern Democrats the party of civil rights (can't get elected in NY or IL or etc without the black vote), which alienated white conservative Southern Democrats and gradually pushed them into the GOP in the 1970s-2000s. It's inaccurate to say the parties "switched platforms" generally, though. The main groups that made up the GOP in the 1920s (big business, highly-paid professionals, Midwestern farmers) are still all mostly Republican groups, while the main groups behind Northern Democrats (recent immigrants, labor unionists, religious minorities, the poor) are mainly still Democratic voting blocs.

Most people can't see past "racist Alabama redneck voted Democrat in 1890, racist Alabama redneck voted Republican in 2016; conclusion: parties are opposite now."

LOL exactly.

One sentence argument: There has literally never been a time from the GOP's founding in the 1850s to present at which the Republican Party wasn't the party of Wall Street and Big Business.

Progressive Era.

The Republicans were still the party of industry and big business during that era when compared to the Democrats.

Roosevelt was in many ways as idiosyncratic a nominee as Trump*, whereas W. Wilson was in line with many Democrats (as he was of course a compromise nominee in 1912) and the party had thrice nominated W. J. Bryan. By contrast, McKinley, Taft, Hughes, Speaker Cannon, J. Sherman – basically every major national player but Roosevelt and LaFollette – supported policies designed to promote business and capitalism, and even Roosevelt framed many of his arguments as in the interest of fair capitalism rather than pro-worker reform. Additionally, the Republican SCOTUS nominees during that era (even Roosevelt's) were some of the most activist judges the country has ever seen, all in the name of big business.

*(I highly recommend interested students of history read Roosevelt's speeches from the era. He sounds a lot like Trump.)

Forgive my inability to cite my source, but I remember hearing on a History Channel documentary one time that a friend wrote a letter to someone at the RNC urging them not to let Teddy Roosevelt be McKinley's VP pick because he was "a Democrat in disguise."  I believe many Democrats in the era accused Roosevelt (and Taft) of opportunistically "stealing their issue" when it came to trust busting.  I think at the end of the day, it remains somewhat obvious that 1) Roosevelt was not representative of the GOP's ideology toward business and 2) was less "liberal" on that issue than most Democrats, even still.

[RINO Tom]

In every election from the birth of the GOP to 1952, the GOP vote by state is better correlated to the current democratic vote. The parties did, evidently, somewhat reverse.

People would so easily believe two parties completely switched their ideals before they’d believe some states changed over decades, too??  Lol.

[RINO Tom]

This does not mean the parties haven’t radically changed over time, but if you believe “the parties switched,” you are dumb.  No way around it.

Sorry, Old School!

[RINO Tom]

The one constant is that Republicans have always had more support from small business owners, from family farmers tired of competing with slave labor in 1856 straight through to 2016.  Big business has been somewhere between uniformly Republican (1856-76, 1920-1992) to tilting Republican overall with some sectors voting heavily Democratic (1880-1916, 1996ish-present).

Which sectors of big business voted Democratic in 1880-1916 and which sectors have voted Democratic since 1996ish?

As for post-1996 (but also before), the tech industry has certainly favored Democrats.  Wall Street has clearly favored Republicans, but they're also non-partisan enough that they'll throw their weight behind a clear winner (see donations to Obama in 2008) when it suits their future interests.  Regarding the 1880-1916 period, I would disagree that big business was ever a "swingy" group during that time frame, but obviously Southern big business favored Democrats, and - even though their importance and influence have been greatly exaggerated, IMO - the Bourbon Democrats were certainly a thing.

[RINO Tom]

^ No one says any of that.

[RINO Tom]

^ No one says any of that.

My history teacher in 9th and 12th grade said similar things lol. He was an ultra-conservative Republican who said that both parties essentially had the same platforms since the 1800s.

Well, no one not stupid says any of that.  It takes a seriously ignorant person to think political parties stay the same over centuries or that our two parties "switched" platform or ideologies, even gradually.

[RINO Tom]

^ No one says any of that.

My history teacher in 9th and 12th grade said similar things lol. He was an ultra-conservative Republican who said that both parties essentially had the same platforms since the 1800s.

Well, no one not stupid says any of that.  It takes a seriously ignorant person to think political parties stay the same over centuries or that our two parties "switched" platform or ideologies, even gradually.

I'm afraid you underestimate how many stupid people there are.

I don't think I commented on the number of stupid people in existence.

[RINO Tom]

Hard to pinpoint exactly, but if I had to I would say it started in 1896 with the Democratic nomination of William Jennings Bryan, alienating the Bourbon Democrats, and finished in 1964 passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Republican nomination of Goldwater.

Every new responder to this topic should have to read every single word of NC Yankee's posts in this thread.

[RINO Tom]

Hard to pinpoint exactly, but if I had to I would say it started in 1896 with the Democratic nomination of William Jennings Bryan, alienating the Bourbon Democrats, and finished in 1964 passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Republican nomination of Goldwater.

Every new responder to this topic should have to read every single word of NC Yankee's posts in this thread.

My opinion is democrats became a truly liberal party(neither party was   before 1896) with William Jennings Bryan taking over the party and with exception of Alton Parker , John Davis , and Bill Clinton the have not had a nominee since then who wasn’t a solid liberal

But a "switch" implies a time when the Republican Party was decidedly to the "left" of the Democrats, and given that we can't just place simplistic things like "states' rights" or "racism" on some simplified political spectrum that transcends hundreds of years and several eras (the way we can, arguably, do with class issues, immigration and moralism), this is an assertion that I flatly reject and contend that you have to be - at best - very misinformed to accept.

[RINO Tom]

Another obnoxious argument is the idea that the Democrats trick blacks into voting for them so that they can bring back slavery/segregation/KKK.

I saw some cringe Candace Owens tweet saying exactly that. The number of high profile media personalities pushing this idea, and the number of people taking it seriously, is insane.

I don't really see that very often from "serious" people on this subject, so yeah ... I imagine places like Twitter and (God forbid) YouTube comment sections are where this kind of trash belongs (right next to the GOP being the "more liberal party before 1964" ... until of course someone needs to blame the GOP for the Great Depression or invoke FDR, lol).

I've said it an obnoxious number of times, but the book Republicans and Race by Timothy Thurber expertly analyzes the Black vote's migration away from the Party of Lincoln.  The common narratives that Democrats "bought" the Black vote or "tricked" Black voters or its mirror that the GOP cynically became racist-courting White supremacists one day are both based on convenient half-truths, and the truth is that both parties didn't want to touch civil rights in the Twentieth Century (besides a few True Believers in the GOP who saw it as the party's legacy and a liberal wing of the Democratic Party that truly represented Black voters as constituents), and the way the parties evolved throughout the 1960s and 1970s wasn't really based on conscious, strategic decisions but rather circumstance.