Well, I put up the Johnson quote here recently, and I agree with you in general, but Tim is right about a few things. Not many elected Democrats switched to Republicans around '64, or since then for that matter. Strom Thurmond was the only one in '64, Jesse Helms and Trent Lott switched in the '70s , but before they were elected. A few more in the '80s and '90s, oddly there seemed to be more defections in the Clinton years than in the Reagan years. There's a list at en.wikipedia.org
But the larger point remains. The post-reconstruction South was solidly Democratic till 1964 and the Voting Rights act and other civil rights legislation. The south hated Republicans before 1964, primarily because the Republican party was indeed the party of Lincoln and civil war resentment never died there. After '64, the present reality finally started to overcome the historical antipathy, much aided by Nixon's southern strategy. The switch to Republican wasn't instant, but was pretty inexorable. It seemed to go hand in hand with the rightward move of the Republican party- there used to be liberal Republicans and conservative (mostly southern) Democrats; now, not so much. I'd argue that the Democratic party hasn't moved left anywhere near as much as the Republicans have moved right, but there is a much cleaner split than there used to be. Saying the Republicans are the party of Lincoln these days means about the same as saying the Democrats are the party of Jefferson. It's a different world.
A funny postscript: There was this bit from 2004:
Few African Americans voted for George W. Bush and other Republicans in the 2004 elections, although it was a higher percentage than any GOP candidate since President Ronald Reagan.[ citation needed] Following Bush's re-election, Ken Mehlman, Bush's campaign manager and Chairman of the RNC, held several large meetings with African-American business, community, and religious leaders. In his speeches, he apologized for his party's use of the Southern Strategy in the past. When asked about the strategy of using race as an issue to build GOP dominance in the once-Democratic South, Mehlman replied, "Republican candidates often have prospered by ignoring black voters and even by exploiting racial tensions," and, "by the '70s and into the '80s and '90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African-American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out. Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong." [37] [38] en.wikipedia.org
And then Mehlman was succeeded by Michael Steele. But that went nowhere, Obama's election pretty much sent it all back in the other direction. I know Republicans resent any implication of racism in their antipathy toward Obama. And in a sense there's some justification for that- they seem to hate all Democratic presidents going back to Roosevelt pretty much equally. Excepting maybe Truman and Kennedy a little, but I can't think of any other Democratic president ever given the least little respect by current conservatives. Of course, if current conservatives looked at Reagan's record as president compared to current dogma, they'd have to put Reagan in the RINO category too. The quest for ideological purity is pretty brutal.
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