Why did LBJ do so well in Oklahoma's Little Dixie?

[Diabolical Materialism]

Looking at the county map for 1964 it looks like LBJ cleaned up pretty well in the region in spite of it being very culturally southern and being competitive for Wallace four years later. Why did Goldwater do as well here?

[Blow by blow, the passion dies]

Traditionally Democratic, even Al Gore won two counties there

[Diabolical Materialism]

Traditionally Democratic, even Al Gore won two counties there

So was the rest of the South at the time. Why did the rest of the South go for Goldwater but this specific region didn't?

[Blow by blow, the passion dies]

Traditionally Democratic, even Al Gore won two counties there

So was the rest of the South at the time. Why did the rest of the South go for Goldwater but this specific region didn't?

LBJ was from neighboring Texas and fit the state well.

[Sumner 1868]

It's a region that had heavy New Deal public works investment - flood control a big WPA priority - and had a very effective local Democratic machine.

https://www.kgou.org/politics-and-government/2015-06-29/losing-little-dixie-how-decades-of-democratic-dominance-came-to-an-end-in-southeast-oklahoma

Goldwater's support of privatizing public works cost him a lot of votes in the South and border states that on paper should have been winnable. Even in Mississippi, Goldwater's best state, the northeast counties with TVA access gave LBJ a third of vote versus Goldwater getting North Korean margins in the Black Belt counties.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Goldwater was more of a black belt white and low country white candidate. Regions and areas in the poorer, less diverse and more pro-New Deal areas tended to not respond as favorably in cases where he won them (hence NE MS mentioned above) or even outright vote against him as happened in places like Tennessee.

Wallace on the other hand skewed far more in the opposite direction while Nixon became the default candidate of the low country and growing Southern suburbs. Look at South Carolina 1964 and 1968

Note the impact of the rise of black voting and its impact in the black belt in flipping most of those counties to the national Democratic ticket, leaving Republicans to the cities and suburbs and remaining white majority low country counties.

[Diabolical Materialism]

Very interesting. Thanks guys.