The utter irrelevance of "more Republicans than Democrats voted for the CRA"

[All Along The Watchtower]

There's been this abuse going around of a historical fact that, while technically true, is utterly irrelevant" to the modern American political discourse. I am speaking, naturally, of the fact that more congressional Republicans than Democrats voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Technically true, but utterly irrelevant - as I will demonstrate below.

Consider the other historical fact that Senator Barry Goldwater - who Ronald Reagan quite famously endorsed for the Republican presidential nomination with his keynote address at the 1964 Republican National Convention - voted against the Civil Rights Act. The result? In Goldwater's historic landslide loss in 1964 to President Johnson, five Deep Southern/Dixiecratic states voted for Goldwater, and by significant margins. The only other state that Goldwater won was his home state of Arizona. IIRC, there was only one Southern Republican in the Senate at the time of the Civil Rights Act: John Tower of Texas. He, too, voted against the CRA.

Over the following years after the CRA's passage, white Southerners defected to the Republican Party: first at the presidential level, then at the congressional and gubernatorial levels, then at the level of state legislatures, and finally, at the local level. The old Yellow Dog Democrats of the Solid South are an increasingly endangered species.

Today, white Southerners are the single largest and most loyal bloc of Republican voters, particularly at the presidential and congressional levels. But I am sure that none of these historical and political trends are related to the Civil Rights Act's passage in 1964.

[Mr. Reactionary]

Lol. It's been 50 years and the Dems are still trying to spin history.

[Goldwater]

who care

[Blair]

But LBJ was racist!

[Antonio the Sixth]

Lol. It's been 50 years and the Dems are still trying to spin history.

Wrong party.

[White Trash]

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.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

who care

Seriously. If something from 50 years ago has an effect on how you vote today you have serious problems.

[Kingpoleon]

Consider the other historical fact that Senator Barry Goldwater - who Ronald Reagan quite famously endorsed for the Republican presidential nomination with his keynote address at the 1964 Republican National Convention - voted against the Civil Rights Act.

Today, white Southerners are the single largest and most loyal bloc of Republican voters, particularly at the presidential and congressional levels. But I am sure that none of these historical and political trends are related to the Civil Rights Act's passage in 1964.

YOU LIE! - Joe Wilson

Ronald Reagan did not keynote at the GOP convention in 1964. He did not speak. He did not even attend. Once again, lying to serve political purposes.

Also, if 1964 Goldwater makes one a racist:

[Antonio the Sixth]

Consider the other historical fact that Senator Barry Goldwater - who Ronald Reagan quite famously endorsed for the Republican presidential nomination with his keynote address at the 1964 Republican National Convention - voted against the Civil Rights Act.

Today, white Southerners are the single largest and most loyal bloc of Republican voters, particularly at the presidential and congressional levels. But I am sure that none of these historical and political trends are related to the Civil Rights Act's passage in 1964.

YOU LIE! - Joe Wilson

Ronald Reagan did not keynote at the GOP convention in 1964. He did not speak. He did not even attend. Once again, lying to serve political purposes.

Also, if 1964 Goldwater makes one a racist:

Wait until Jfern sees this.

[RFayette]

White Southerners have always been fairly conservative, New Deal support notwithstanding.  Once the Dems stopped being firmly anti-civil rights (starting in 1948), the firewall began to crack.  Once the Democrats became fully liberal on the race issue (1964), they went to the Republicans, who they probably should've been voting for decades earlier.

[RFayette]

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.

Have you met Rockefeller GOP?  He probably does this the most of the bunch.  A couple years ago he was still referring to Arkansas and West Virginia as "Democrat states" which had a great chance of going for Hillary; granted, he wasn't the only one (many Dem hacks did too), but he seemed to be wistfully yearning for the Dixiecrats to go away.  Honestly, I like the Dixiecrats.  Sure, they used to be on the wrong side of history, but I like their values for the most part:  love God and country, not PC, want to keep their own money, and don't want the country flooded with illegals.  I'm glad they're on our team.

[RINO Tom]

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.

[RINO Tom]

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.

Have you met Rockefeller GOP?  He probably does this the most of the bunch.  A couple years ago he was still referring to Arkansas and West Virginia as "Democrat states" which had a great chance of going for Hillary; granted, he wasn't the only one (many Dem hacks did too), but he seemed to be wistfully yearning for the Dixiecrats to go away.  Honestly, I like the Dixiecrats.  Sure, they used to be on the wrong side of history, but I like their values for the most part:  love God and country, not PC, want to keep their own money, and don't want the country flooded with illegals.  I'm glad they're on our team.

Sadly, this meme of Dixiexrats becoming loyal Republicans after 1964 is comfortable and serves the interests of several groups (aka it's pushed as truth constantly), as it absolves liberal Northern Democrats of pandering to racists for years, it justifies to Black voters why they vote the way they do and I suppose it could be spun as a nice little justification for regressive voters like yourself whose main ideology is being uncomfortable with people who ain't like you.

[Oldiesfreak1854]

How is it irrelevant?  It's as relevant as Bayer and Volkswagen's Nazi connection.  Southerners didn't join the GOP because of racism.  Don't believe me?

Exit polls from the 70s and 80s consistently show that the most Republican voters in the South were young voters, not former Dixiecrats.  And the South continued to elect Democrats long after the CRA was passed.

http://www.claremont.org/crb/article/the-myth-of-the-racist-republicans/
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/386257/myth-republican-racism-mona-charen
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/300432/party-civil-rights-kevin-d-williamson

[RFayette]

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.

Have you met Rockefeller GOP?  He probably does this the most of the bunch.  A couple years ago he was still referring to Arkansas and West Virginia as "Democrat states" which had a great chance of going for Hillary; granted, he wasn't the only one (many Dem hacks did too), but he seemed to be wistfully yearning for the Dixiecrats to go away.  Honestly, I like the Dixiecrats.  Sure, they used to be on the wrong side of history, but I like their values for the most part:  love God and country, not PC, want to keep their own money, and don't want the country flooded with illegals.  I'm glad they're on our team.

Sadly, this meme of Dixiexrats becoming loyal Republicans after 1964 is comfortable and serves the interests of several groups (aka it's pushed as truth constantly), as it absolves liberal Northern Democrats of pandering to racists for years, it justifies to Black voters why they vote the way they do and I suppose it could be spun as a nice little justification for regressive voters like yourself whose main ideology is being uncomfortable with people who ain't like you.

Blacks can vote for whoever damn well they please.  I certainly don't share their political philosophy, but let's be real, most of them are voting in their own self-interest, either for economic self-advancement or for advancement of a larger group they are part of, whether it be redistributive projects like affirmative action or higher levels of public spending.

Liberal Northern Democrats pandered to racists for many years, and Republicans pandered to racists in the '60s as part of the Southern strategy, though generally in a more "coded" way.  But here's the thing: groups vote the way they do now, in 2016, based on the policies of the current platforms.  I really don't think white Southerners or blacks are voting based on the shenanigans of the '50s-'70s.  They are voting based on which party they think is right now. 

But I don't see how it can be argued that Southern whites - particularly Deep South Whites -used to be anything but largely conservative, outside of the New Deal Era of say, 1935-1950.  Unfortunately, this conservatism manifested itself in a bad way - racial segregation, along with many good ways - high religiosity, love of country, etc.  These demographic trends existed before the South was solid R, and I think it's safe to say these states were conservative for a long long time. 

[TDAS04]

But I don't see how it can be argued that Southern whites - particularly Deep South Whites -used to be anything but largely conservative, outside of the New Deal Era of say, 1935-1950.  Unfortunately, this conservatism manifested itself in a bad way - racial segregation, along with many good ways - high religiosity, love of country, etc.  These demographic trends existed before the South was solid R, and I think it's safe to say these states were conservative for a long long time.  

Is that why they seceded?  

I agree that they've long been conservative, but they haven't always been more patriotic than other Americans.

[RINO Tom]

Unless you're fine with calling their racism strictly conservative (which I'm simply not, so we can chalk this conversation up as pointless), then I'm not seein' it.  Compared to Northern Whites (where the blue laws originated, where prohibition was huge), they weren't markedly more conservative.  They certainly weren't more "conservative" on economic issues.

[OSR stands with Israel]

Goldwater wasnt a racist he voted for the 1957 and 1960 civil rights and likely would have voted for the Voting rights acts. And lets remember a certain republican senate majority leader who watered down the 1957 civil rights for political reasons, oh wait that wasnt a republican that was a Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson

[TDAS04]

While it's true that it took a while for Republican control of the South to trickle down to the local level, the CRA clear impacted the Deep South's voting patterns in presidential elections.  Even Carter lost (albeit narrowly) the Southern white vote to Ford in 1976.  Also, even though blacks had started moving in the Democrats' direction in the 1930s, 1964 was when blacks began consistently delivering >80% of their vote to Democrats (which they have ever since).  It didn't matter that Goldwater wasn't a racist, or that LBJ was personally racist.  Goldwater voted against the CRA, and Johnson aggressively pushed for it and signed it.

[Virginiá]

How is it irrelevant?  It's as relevant as Bayer and Volkswagen's Nazi connection.  Southerners didn't join the GOP because of racism.  Don't believe me?

Exit polls from the 70s and 80s consistently show that the most Republican voters in the South were young voters, not former Dixiecrats.  And the South continued to elect Democrats long after the CRA was passed.

http://www.claremont.org/crb/article/the-myth-of-the-racist-republicans/
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/386257/myth-republican-racism-mona-charen
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/300432/party-civil-rights-kevin-d-williamson

This is a decent read so far (Claremont), but I didn't see anything about exit polls in it. I don't have time to read the entire thing tonight, but I searched those articles for "poll" and came up with nothing for exit polls showing young Republican voters. The Claremont article spells out a different story for why the South began switching - Such as transplants from other states who brought Republican-leaning voting patterns with them (similar to what is happening with Colorado and Virginia right now), and the GOP attracting middle class suburbanites in the peripheral southern states. That means existing adult southern Democratic voters in those peripheral states did switch, but not necessarily due to racist platitudes.

However, to be fair to your point, even without the data I'd say young voters in those states that were attracted to the GOP at a young age powered the Republican party's continued success in the region. Young adults in their 20s tend to have their dominant political views and affiliations "imprinted" and usually stay loyal for most of their life, barring any major events that break those bonds. Evidently, these same voters also voted Democratic at the local/state level for various reasons. Local politics differ from national politics and it can sometimes take a state a long, long time to move from one party to the next at the state level. Consider Virginia, who stopped voting Democratic for president in the 50s (save for LBJ), yet they remained mostly Democratic in state/local politics up until the 90s - Though you could see the cracks forming in the 70s. Mississippi was strongly Democratic until the 90s, and had a Democratic legislature up until 2010. Basically the same thing for most southern states, to varying degrees.

The reason I say all that is because it begs the question of how you define "switch to Republicans" (or vice versa).

Anyway, thanks for the Claremont link! I'm going to finish it tomorrow.

[Clark Kent]

Goldwater wasnt a racist he voted for the 1957 and 1960 civil rights and likely would have voted for the Voting rights acts. And lets remember a certain republican senate majority leader who watered down the 1957 civil rights for political reasons, oh wait that wasnt a republican that was a Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson

Thank you.

[Slow Learner]

Tbf Gerald Ford was perfectly fine with letting open housing provisions get torn apart.

[Sumner 1868]

Goldwater wasnt a racist he voted for the 1957 and 1960 civil rights and likely would have voted for the Voting rights acts. And lets remember a certain republican senate majority leader who watered down the 1957 civil rights for political reasons, oh wait that wasnt a republican that was a Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson

Goldwater voted against the most important civil rights legislation in American history. If he did not do this out of racism, then he did it for political gain. Either way it makes him terrible. The sins of Lyndon Johnson do not exonerate Barry Goldwater.

[OSR stands with Israel]

Goldwater wasnt a racist he voted for the 1957 and 1960 civil rights and likely would have voted for the Voting rights acts. And lets remember a certain republican senate majority leader who watered down the 1957 civil rights for political reasons, oh wait that wasnt a republican that was a Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson

Goldwater voted against the most important civil rights legislation in American history. If he did not do this out of racism, then he did it for political gain. Either way it makes him terrible. The sins of Lyndon Johnson do not exonerate Barry Goldwater.

That was the voting rights act people some how mix those two up.

[Sumner 1868]

Goldwater wasnt a racist he voted for the 1957 and 1960 civil rights and likely would have voted for the Voting rights acts. And lets remember a certain republican senate majority leader who watered down the 1957 civil rights for political reasons, oh wait that wasnt a republican that was a Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson

Goldwater voted against the most important civil rights legislation in American history. If he did not do this out of racism, then he did it for political gain. Either way it makes him terrible. The sins of Lyndon Johnson do not exonerate Barry Goldwater.

That was the voting rights act people some how mix those two up.

Actually, I would argue they were of equal importance. Certainly nothing before or after was as bold as the two measures.