5 ms·

The Democratic Party used to be the party of the south/segregation. What year (or decade) is the point where the two parties flipped places on this issue?

mehrdadn 6y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8a43tp/myth_or_fact_did_the_us_political_parties_switch/dwvtxuk/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8a43tp/myth_...
Spooky23 6y ago
The solid south flipped in the 1960s. LBJ through force of his will basically betrayed the senate democrats and pushed through significant social legislation. (Voting, civil rights, great society, etc) The solid south types saw the writing on the wall and started breaking away. The “Southern Strategy” as implemented by Nixon and perfected by Reagan basically started as a collaboration of conservative southerners (“rehab Democrats”) and western resource extraction interests. Eventually they took over the GOP and you have the circus that we see today.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  No it didn't. The South was split in 1968, with deep south voting for Wallace, a Democrat, and most other states going to Nixon. Finally, after Ford, in 1976 you had Jimmy Carter, a southern Democrat who carried the south entirely: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/43/ElectoralCollege1976.svg/1200px-ElectoralCollege1976.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/43/El... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=1968+election+by+state&t=brave&ia=images&iax=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2Fthumb%2F4%2F41%2FElectoralCollege1968.svg%2F1200px-ElectoralCollege1968.svg.png https://duckduckgo.com/?q=1968+election+by+state&t=brave&ia=...
  - hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
    You don't seem to understand the comment you are referring to. "The Solid South" refers to the block of southern states that voted strongly Democratic from the end of Reconstruction to 1964, when most of those states switched to supporting Goldwater based on his "states rights" rhetoric and opposition to the Civil Rights Act. That "flip" happened in 64, and while it was far from complete (note Wallace was NOT the Democratic candidate in 68, he basically started a 3rd party rooted in racism that won the deep south), that's when the switch started.
    - chrisco255 6y ago
      No only 5 states voted for Goldwater (the same 5 that voted for Wallace). The South has 13 states, 14 if you count Maryland. Wallace ran as an independent but he lost and then returned as a Democrat governor for Alabama. Again, I repeat myself from elsewhere, the south continued to be strongly Democrat in state elections and Congress until the 90s, with Gore and Clinton representing the last strong showing of the old hegemony (enjoying fairly strong support in the south until 2000). Also, the myth that the "solid south" began cracking in 1964 can easily be dispelled by looking at the 1960 election, Kennedy v. Nixon, with Kennedy carrying 8 states in the South (w/ Byrd picking up 2). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_United_States_presidential_election https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_United_States_president... Or the 1956 election, where Eisenhower took half the South and the rest of the country: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1956_United_States_presidential_election https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1956_United_States_president...
      - nl 6y ago
        No, you are missing the point. The "flip" everyone is talking about isn't voting patterns, it is on policy. The question was "The Democratic Party used to be the party of the south/segregation. What year (or decade) is the point where the two parties flipped places on this issue?" The policy changed happened in 1964 with the Republican Goldwater campaign: In the 1964 presidential election, Goldwater ran a conservative campaign that broadly opposed strong action by the federal government. Although he had supported all previous federal civil rights legislation, Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act and championed this opposition during the campaign. He believed that this act was an intrusion of the federal government into the affairs of state; and second, that the Act interfered with the rights of private persons to do business, or not, with whomever they chose, even if the choice is based on racial discrimination. Goldwater's position appealed to white Southern Democrats and Goldwater was the first Republican presidential candidate since Reconstruction to win the electoral votes of the Deep South states (Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina). Outside the South, Goldwater's negative vote on the Civil Rights Act proved devastating to his campaign. The only other state he won was his home one of Arizona and he suffered a landslide defeat. A Lyndon B. Johnson ad called "Confessions of a Republican", which ran in Northern and Western states, associated Goldwater with the Ku Klux Klan. At the same time, Johnson's campaign in the Deep South publicized Goldwater's support for pre-1964 civil rights legislation.[1] Prior to that the Republican party was mostly supportive of the Civil Rights Act, and afterwards it wasn't. The opposite was true in the Democratic party. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- _delirium 6y ago
  It started flipping in the 1960s, but Southern Democrats hung on to most southern state governments, and many House & Senate seats, until the 1990s. Richard Shelby (a conservative Alabama Senator) only switched parties in 1994, for example.
  - officemonkey 6y ago
    It _started_ even earlier. In 1948, Strom Thurmond ran for President as a Dixiecrat (Democrat for Racial Segregation), which is one reason why Truman v. Dewey was so close. In 1952, Robert Taft wanted to run for President using the "southern strategy" to woo disaffected Democratic voters, but Eisenhower decided to run, and that put an end to that strategy until Nixon was more successful in 1968. Basically, the south became squishy on Democratic Party once northern Democratic Mayors (and FDR) realized that African-Americans were a strong labor voice and a powerful voting block. "The Party of Lincoln" (GOP) had been ignoring African-Americans since TR was in the White House.
- RickJWagner 6y ago
  Senator Byrd was a KKK grand wizard and lifelong Democrat. LBJ said terrible things about blacks. No, it's not simple to reassign blame. There's enough to go around.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    https://web.archive.org/web/20160727193022/http://action.naacp.org/page/-/washington%20bureau/108thCongress.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20160727193022/http://action.naa... 100% in line with the NAACP by the time he died. It is unbelievably naive to reduce Robert Byrd to that classification, or dare I say wilfully ignorant. He also wasn't a Grand Wizard. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__BaztE3EII https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__BaztE3EII Obama wouldn't have said this if he was a racist to his deathbed. LBJ is a more complicated question. He was a man of his time, but he is also a key figure in bludgeoning the civil rights act through congress. Whether he did so out of a desire for justice or power, we'll never know.
    - Spooky23 6y ago
      Check out the Robert Caro books on LBJ. I’d definitely argue “justice”, with a serious helping of insecurity.
Gibbon1 6y ago
dataflow's link will have more detail. Besides the Southern Democrats you had the machine democrats in the urban cities whose power block was representing working class immigrants and minorities. Except blacks who were Republicans up until the late 1920's. Blacks broke for FDR in 1932.
082349872349872 6y ago
Abraham Lincoln's thoughts on party flipping: http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/pierce.htm http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/pierce....
dragonwriter 6y ago
> The Democratic Party used to be the party of the south/segregation. What year (or decade) is the point where the two parties flipped places on this issue? They started flipping with the New Deal Coalition, which gave the Democratic Party a new but not yet unifying working class national agenda. The splitting off of the segregationist States Rights Democratic Party (“Dixiecrats”) in the late 1940s was a response to this and the Democratic Party’s support for Civil Rights at the time. The major turning point, though, was Johnson's support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the subsequent Republican effort to exploit that known as the Southern Strategy. The Dixiecrats hadn't lasted as a breakaway group; the Republicans in the 1940s and into the 1960s had a strong base of support for Civil Rights too, and there wasn't anywhere better than the Democratic Party for white racists to go. But when the Republicans actively courted them, that changed. The phase of political realignment that started in the 1960s (which was itself an extension of the one starting in the 1940s) completed around 1994-1995, as the last of the Southern conservative Democrats (those further right than the center-right neoliberal faction like Clinton) in office jumped ship to the Republican Party.
- leereeves 6y ago
  The Republican Party fought hard in the '60s to get the civil rights bill passed, as well as the voting rights bill. Percentagewise, more Republicans than Democrats supported it. > The degree of Republican support for the two bills actually exceeded the degree of Democratic support, and it's also fair to say that Republicans took leading roles in both measures https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2010/may/25/michael-steele/steele-says-gop-fought-hard-civil-rights-bills-196/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2010/may/25/michael-st... Not only is the party switch theory rather absurd (suggesting that Republicans were exploiting Johnson's support for a bill supported by over 80% of Republicans), it's also counterfactual. In fact, all but three prominent Southern Democrats remained Democrats. Al Gore's father was one of them, as was Robert Byrd, and the leader of them all, George Wallace, who won his last election in 1982, running as a Democrat for governor of Alabama.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > The Republican Party fought hard in the '60s to get the civil rights bill passed, as well as the voting rights bill. Percentagewise, more Republicans than Democrats supported it. Yes, that's why the major turning point is Johnson's support for the bill and the subsequent exploitation of disaffection within the party with that support by Republicans in the Southern Strategy. > Not only is the party switch theory rather absurd It's not a theory. The Southern Strategy starting at least with Nixon’s targeting Southern racists with the well-worn code words of the movement in the 1968 Presidential election is a well-documented fact. The body of anti-civil-rights, especially Southern, Democrats (both in the electorate and, even more clearly on an individual basis, in elected office) moving to the Republican Party over the period of 1964~1995 is a documented fact. That some of the leading wave of those (like Strom Thurmond) who left before 1968 were instrumental in the 1968 Southern Strategy is a documented fact. > In fact, all but three prominent Southern Democrats remained Democrats The list of noteworthy Southern Democrats figures, or even just incumbent officeholders, that switched party from 1964 to 1995 is much longer than 3. [0] I mean, when you see a taking head in the media today arguing that slavery was beneficial to blacks (as you do), they aren't Democrats. When you see someone arguing (or ruling from the bench) against the Voting Rights Act of 1965, they aren't Democrats. When you see former Democrat and former KKK leader and still proud racist David Duke endorsing a major party candidates for President (or running for office himself), it's not for or as a Democrat. The switch of the parties on this issue isn't a mere theory, it's one of the clearest and most readily directly observable facts in American politics. [0] It's not specific to Southern Democrats or Denocratic >> Republican switchers, but this page has a section for the latter and enough descriptive detail to use to identify the former in that list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_party_switchers_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_party_switchers_in_t...
thaumaturgy 6y ago
Oh gosh, the answers and discussion here so far are quite bad. First, we have to discard the idea that there was a specific year, or even decade, that the two parties "flipped". The history of politics is absurdly complex and involves lots of different players and there are rarely any discrete points in history you can point to and say, "this is precisely where this big ideological shift happened". It would be a lot like asking, "what year did tea party politics take over the Republican party?" We also need to address the dog whistle in the air: modern Republicans love saying that they are the party of Lincoln and that it was Democrats that fought for slavery. They count on people having heard of this shift happening but not being well enough versed in it to understand where the lie is hidden. Let's start with Andrew Jackson. He started as a member of the Democratic-Republican party but he pushed hard for an ideology that would become known as Jacksonian democracy [1]. This alienated a lot of fellow members of the Democratic-Republican party, and they joined forces with the remnants of the Federalists and a handful of others and formed the Whig party. The Democratic-Republican party became the Democratic party, led by Jackson. Neither the Whig party nor the Democratic party had views which exactly parallel any of today's popular political ideologies. After the Mexican war, the loose coalition of Whigs started to fracture over the issue of slavery. A bunch of smaller groups, including former Whigs, joined together to form the Republican party, which opposed the expansion of slavery. Meanwhile, in the lead-up to the Civil War, the Democrats started to split into northern Democrats and southern Democrats ("Dixiecrats"). At this time, slavery is the leading political issue of the day, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Lincoln runs as a Republican and wins. There's a Civil War, and Reconstruction begins. The northern Democrats had held a wishy-washy position on slavery, and as a result, they lost all political power. Industrialist political influences in the north became represented by the victorious Republican party, while the Democratic party held on to power in the south. This is the part where people see a "pro-slavery Democratic south" and an "anti-slavery Republican north", but neither of these parties at the time are all that similar to their modern antithesis. The Republican party at this time has a conservative group and a progressive group, and they fight frequently over things like concentration of wealth (sound familiar?). Southern Democrats meanwhile focused most of their political efforts on fighting any and every expansion of civil rights for former slaves. Conservative Republicans won the presidency with McKinley, but Teddy Roosevelt, a progressive, was his VP. McKinley gets assassinated, Roosevelt takes office, and proceeds to enact a bunch of progressive reforms. [2] This ultimately results in a lot of friction between Roosevelt and conservative Republicans and that leads to an internal fight, with Taft leading the conservatives and Roosevelt forming the Progressive party. Along comes Woodrow Wilson. (Bear with me, we're getting there.) Wilson, a Democrat, has been frustrated by his party's inability to tackle any issues other than civil rights. He manages to gather enough political influence to take control of the Democratic party, getting it out of the hands of the Dixiecrats. [3] The infighting in the Republican party meanwhile leaves southern blacks unprotected, so they get really unhappy with both parties. All of this comes to a head post-Depression when FDR comes along. He's a very egalitarian, populist, post-Wilsom Democrat, and he captures a lot of political power. So the situation now is this: there is a broken Republican party in the north, with progressive Republicans and conservative Republicans, and there is a progressive Democratic party, and there are a bunch of unhappy Dixiecrats -- the "Southern Democrats". FDR manages to pick up a bunch of the progressive Republicans along with black voters, and then Truman comes along and continues FDR's racially progressive policies, so this is when black voters begin to vote as Democrats. The Southern Democrats were nearly shut out of national politics altogether at this point, while northern conservative Republicans were kept on life support until Nixon. There's a Nixon-Goldwater fight over the Republican party, but Nixon is an absurdly shrewd politician, and over the course of several years, he's able to build an FDR-like coalition of multiple groups under the Republican banner, including the northern conservatives and the former Dixiecrats, who were thrilled to get some political power again. Nixon though was still an old-guard Republican and he would barely recognize today's Republican party. But, from here, the remaining dots are easy to connect. This was the shortest summary of 150 years of messy politics that I could come up with. I'm skipping over a lot of important details and there are probably some points here that can be argued by those better-versed in this stretch of history. But the important part is that these two modern parties have not existed as constant political entities, and so they didn't "switch sides". They were just labels for loosely-associated smaller political and demographic groups, and those groups changed allegiances depending on the biggest political issues of the day. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacksonian_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacksonian_democracy [2]: The excellent u/Samuel_Gompers with a lot more detail on this: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nolzz/why_was_there_such_a_huge_shift_in_the_core/cckrkh5/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nolzz/why_w... [3]: u/Samuel_Gompers again, https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yczua/can_someone_address_a_brief_history_of_democrats/c5ui4pm/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yczua/can_so...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

mehrdadn 6y ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8a43tp/myth_or_fact_did_the_us_political_parties_switch/dwvtxuk/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8a43tp/myth_...

Spooky23 6y ago

The solid south flipped in the 1960s. LBJ through force of his will basically betrayed the senate democrats and pushed through significant social legislation. (Voting, civil rights, great society, etc) The solid south types saw the writing on the wall and started breaking away. The “Southern Strategy” as implemented by Nixon and perfected by Reagan basically started as a collaboration of conservative southerners (“rehab Democrats”) and western resource extraction interests. Eventually they took over the GOP and you have the circus that we see today.

chrisco255 6y ago
No it didn't. The South was split in 1968, with deep south voting for Wallace, a Democrat, and most other states going to Nixon. Finally, after Ford, in 1976 you had Jimmy Carter, a southern Democrat who carried the south entirely: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/43/ElectoralCollege1976.svg/1200px-ElectoralCollege1976.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/43/El... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=1968+election+by+state&t=brave&ia=images&iax=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2Fthumb%2F4%2F41%2FElectoralCollege1968.svg%2F1200px-ElectoralCollege1968.svg.png https://duckduckgo.com/?q=1968+election+by+state&t=brave&ia=...
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  You don't seem to understand the comment you are referring to. "The Solid South" refers to the block of southern states that voted strongly Democratic from the end of Reconstruction to 1964, when most of those states switched to supporting Goldwater based on his "states rights" rhetoric and opposition to the Civil Rights Act. That "flip" happened in 64, and while it was far from complete (note Wallace was NOT the Democratic candidate in 68, he basically started a 3rd party rooted in racism that won the deep south), that's when the switch started.
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    No only 5 states voted for Goldwater (the same 5 that voted for Wallace). The South has 13 states, 14 if you count Maryland. Wallace ran as an independent but he lost and then returned as a Democrat governor for Alabama. Again, I repeat myself from elsewhere, the south continued to be strongly Democrat in state elections and Congress until the 90s, with Gore and Clinton representing the last strong showing of the old hegemony (enjoying fairly strong support in the south until 2000). Also, the myth that the "solid south" began cracking in 1964 can easily be dispelled by looking at the 1960 election, Kennedy v. Nixon, with Kennedy carrying 8 states in the South (w/ Byrd picking up 2). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_United_States_presidential_election https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_United_States_president... Or the 1956 election, where Eisenhower took half the South and the rest of the country: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1956_United_States_presidential_election https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1956_United_States_president...
    - nl 6y ago
      No, you are missing the point. The "flip" everyone is talking about isn't voting patterns, it is on policy. The question was "The Democratic Party used to be the party of the south/segregation. What year (or decade) is the point where the two parties flipped places on this issue?" The policy changed happened in 1964 with the Republican Goldwater campaign: In the 1964 presidential election, Goldwater ran a conservative campaign that broadly opposed strong action by the federal government. Although he had supported all previous federal civil rights legislation, Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act and championed this opposition during the campaign. He believed that this act was an intrusion of the federal government into the affairs of state; and second, that the Act interfered with the rights of private persons to do business, or not, with whomever they chose, even if the choice is based on racial discrimination. Goldwater's position appealed to white Southern Democrats and Goldwater was the first Republican presidential candidate since Reconstruction to win the electoral votes of the Deep South states (Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina). Outside the South, Goldwater's negative vote on the Civil Rights Act proved devastating to his campaign. The only other state he won was his home one of Arizona and he suffered a landslide defeat. A Lyndon B. Johnson ad called "Confessions of a Republican", which ran in Northern and Western states, associated Goldwater with the Ku Klux Klan. At the same time, Johnson's campaign in the Deep South publicized Goldwater's support for pre-1964 civil rights legislation.[1] Prior to that the Republican party was mostly supportive of the Civil Rights Act, and afterwards it wasn't. The opposite was true in the Democratic party. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
_delirium 6y ago
It started flipping in the 1960s, but Southern Democrats hung on to most southern state governments, and many House & Senate seats, until the 1990s. Richard Shelby (a conservative Alabama Senator) only switched parties in 1994, for example.
- officemonkey 6y ago
  It _started_ even earlier. In 1948, Strom Thurmond ran for President as a Dixiecrat (Democrat for Racial Segregation), which is one reason why Truman v. Dewey was so close. In 1952, Robert Taft wanted to run for President using the "southern strategy" to woo disaffected Democratic voters, but Eisenhower decided to run, and that put an end to that strategy until Nixon was more successful in 1968. Basically, the south became squishy on Democratic Party once northern Democratic Mayors (and FDR) realized that African-Americans were a strong labor voice and a powerful voting block. "The Party of Lincoln" (GOP) had been ignoring African-Americans since TR was in the White House.
RickJWagner 6y ago
Senator Byrd was a KKK grand wizard and lifelong Democrat. LBJ said terrible things about blacks. No, it's not simple to reassign blame. There's enough to go around.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20160727193022/http://action.naacp.org/page/-/washington%20bureau/108thCongress.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20160727193022/http://action.naa... 100% in line with the NAACP by the time he died. It is unbelievably naive to reduce Robert Byrd to that classification, or dare I say wilfully ignorant. He also wasn't a Grand Wizard. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__BaztE3EII https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__BaztE3EII Obama wouldn't have said this if he was a racist to his deathbed. LBJ is a more complicated question. He was a man of his time, but he is also a key figure in bludgeoning the civil rights act through congress. Whether he did so out of a desire for justice or power, we'll never know.
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    Check out the Robert Caro books on LBJ. I’d definitely argue “justice”, with a serious helping of insecurity.

Gibbon1 6y ago

dataflow's link will have more detail. Besides the Southern Democrats you had the machine democrats in the urban cities whose power block was representing working class immigrants and minorities. Except blacks who were Republicans up until the late 1920's. Blacks broke for FDR in 1932.

082349872349872 6y ago

Abraham Lincoln's thoughts on party flipping: http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/pierce.htm http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/pierce....

dragonwriter 6y ago

> The Democratic Party used to be the party of the south/segregation. What year (or decade) is the point where the two parties flipped places on this issue? They started flipping with the New Deal Coalition, which gave the Democratic Party a new but not yet unifying working class national agenda. The splitting off of the segregationist States Rights Democratic Party (“Dixiecrats”) in the late 1940s was a response to this and the Democratic Party’s support for Civil Rights at the time. The major turning point, though, was Johnson's support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the subsequent Republican effort to exploit that known as the Southern Strategy. The Dixiecrats hadn't lasted as a breakaway group; the Republicans in the 1940s and into the 1960s had a strong base of support for Civil Rights too, and there wasn't anywhere better than the Democratic Party for white racists to go. But when the Republicans actively courted them, that changed. The phase of political realignment that started in the 1960s (which was itself an extension of the one starting in the 1940s) completed around 1994-1995, as the last of the Southern conservative Democrats (those further right than the center-right neoliberal faction like Clinton) in office jumped ship to the Republican Party.

leereeves 6y ago
The Republican Party fought hard in the '60s to get the civil rights bill passed, as well as the voting rights bill. Percentagewise, more Republicans than Democrats supported it. > The degree of Republican support for the two bills actually exceeded the degree of Democratic support, and it's also fair to say that Republicans took leading roles in both measures https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2010/may/25/michael-steele/steele-says-gop-fought-hard-civil-rights-bills-196/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2010/may/25/michael-st... Not only is the party switch theory rather absurd (suggesting that Republicans were exploiting Johnson's support for a bill supported by over 80% of Republicans), it's also counterfactual. In fact, all but three prominent Southern Democrats remained Democrats. Al Gore's father was one of them, as was Robert Byrd, and the leader of them all, George Wallace, who won his last election in 1982, running as a Democrat for governor of Alabama.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > The Republican Party fought hard in the '60s to get the civil rights bill passed, as well as the voting rights bill. Percentagewise, more Republicans than Democrats supported it. Yes, that's why the major turning point is Johnson's support for the bill and the subsequent exploitation of disaffection within the party with that support by Republicans in the Southern Strategy. > Not only is the party switch theory rather absurd It's not a theory. The Southern Strategy starting at least with Nixon’s targeting Southern racists with the well-worn code words of the movement in the 1968 Presidential election is a well-documented fact. The body of anti-civil-rights, especially Southern, Democrats (both in the electorate and, even more clearly on an individual basis, in elected office) moving to the Republican Party over the period of 1964~1995 is a documented fact. That some of the leading wave of those (like Strom Thurmond) who left before 1968 were instrumental in the 1968 Southern Strategy is a documented fact. > In fact, all but three prominent Southern Democrats remained Democrats The list of noteworthy Southern Democrats figures, or even just incumbent officeholders, that switched party from 1964 to 1995 is much longer than 3. [0] I mean, when you see a taking head in the media today arguing that slavery was beneficial to blacks (as you do), they aren't Democrats. When you see someone arguing (or ruling from the bench) against the Voting Rights Act of 1965, they aren't Democrats. When you see former Democrat and former KKK leader and still proud racist David Duke endorsing a major party candidates for President (or running for office himself), it's not for or as a Democrat. The switch of the parties on this issue isn't a mere theory, it's one of the clearest and most readily directly observable facts in American politics. [0] It's not specific to Southern Democrats or Denocratic >> Republican switchers, but this page has a section for the latter and enough descriptive detail to use to identify the former in that list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_party_switchers_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_party_switchers_in_t...

thaumaturgy 6y ago

Oh gosh, the answers and discussion here so far are quite bad. First, we have to discard the idea that there was a specific year, or even decade, that the two parties "flipped". The history of politics is absurdly complex and involves lots of different players and there are rarely any discrete points in history you can point to and say, "this is precisely where this big ideological shift happened". It would be a lot like asking, "what year did tea party politics take over the Republican party?" We also need to address the dog whistle in the air: modern Republicans love saying that they are the party of Lincoln and that it was Democrats that fought for slavery. They count on people having heard of this shift happening but not being well enough versed in it to understand where the lie is hidden. Let's start with Andrew Jackson. He started as a member of the Democratic-Republican party but he pushed hard for an ideology that would become known as Jacksonian democracy [1]. This alienated a lot of fellow members of the Democratic-Republican party, and they joined forces with the remnants of the Federalists and a handful of others and formed the Whig party. The Democratic-Republican party became the Democratic party, led by Jackson. Neither the Whig party nor the Democratic party had views which exactly parallel any of today's popular political ideologies. After the Mexican war, the loose coalition of Whigs started to fracture over the issue of slavery. A bunch of smaller groups, including former Whigs, joined together to form the Republican party, which opposed the expansion of slavery. Meanwhile, in the lead-up to the Civil War, the Democrats started to split into northern Democrats and southern Democrats ("Dixiecrats"). At this time, slavery is the leading political issue of the day, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Lincoln runs as a Republican and wins. There's a Civil War, and Reconstruction begins. The northern Democrats had held a wishy-washy position on slavery, and as a result, they lost all political power. Industrialist political influences in the north became represented by the victorious Republican party, while the Democratic party held on to power in the south. This is the part where people see a "pro-slavery Democratic south" and an "anti-slavery Republican north", but neither of these parties at the time are all that similar to their modern antithesis. The Republican party at this time has a conservative group and a progressive group, and they fight frequently over things like concentration of wealth (sound familiar?). Southern Democrats meanwhile focused most of their political efforts on fighting any and every expansion of civil rights for former slaves. Conservative Republicans won the presidency with McKinley, but Teddy Roosevelt, a progressive, was his VP. McKinley gets assassinated, Roosevelt takes office, and proceeds to enact a bunch of progressive reforms. [2] This ultimately results in a lot of friction between Roosevelt and conservative Republicans and that leads to an internal fight, with Taft leading the conservatives and Roosevelt forming the Progressive party. Along comes Woodrow Wilson. (Bear with me, we're getting there.) Wilson, a Democrat, has been frustrated by his party's inability to tackle any issues other than civil rights. He manages to gather enough political influence to take control of the Democratic party, getting it out of the hands of the Dixiecrats. [3] The infighting in the Republican party meanwhile leaves southern blacks unprotected, so they get really unhappy with both parties. All of this comes to a head post-Depression when FDR comes along. He's a very egalitarian, populist, post-Wilsom Democrat, and he captures a lot of political power. So the situation now is this: there is a broken Republican party in the north, with progressive Republicans and conservative Republicans, and there is a progressive Democratic party, and there are a bunch of unhappy Dixiecrats -- the "Southern Democrats". FDR manages to pick up a bunch of the progressive Republicans along with black voters, and then Truman comes along and continues FDR's racially progressive policies, so this is when black voters begin to vote as Democrats. The Southern Democrats were nearly shut out of national politics altogether at this point, while northern conservative Republicans were kept on life support until Nixon. There's a Nixon-Goldwater fight over the Republican party, but Nixon is an absurdly shrewd politician, and over the course of several years, he's able to build an FDR-like coalition of multiple groups under the Republican banner, including the northern conservatives and the former Dixiecrats, who were thrilled to get some political power again. Nixon though was still an old-guard Republican and he would barely recognize today's Republican party. But, from here, the remaining dots are easy to connect. This was the shortest summary of 150 years of messy politics that I could come up with. I'm skipping over a lot of important details and there are probably some points here that can be argued by those better-versed in this stretch of history. But the important part is that these two modern parties have not existed as constant political entities, and so they didn't "switch sides". They were just labels for loosely-associated smaller political and demographic groups, and those groups changed allegiances depending on the biggest political issues of the day. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacksonian_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacksonian_democracy [2]: The excellent u/Samuel_Gompers with a lot more detail on this: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nolzz/why_was_there_such_a_huge_shift_in_the_core/cckrkh5/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nolzz/why_w... [3]: u/Samuel_Gompers again, https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yczua/can_someone_address_a_brief_history_of_democrats/c5ui4pm/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yczua/can_so...

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