2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Are you old enough to remember real Dem's? [View all]MADem
(135,425 posts)Your "facts" are COMPLETELY out of order, to put it kindly.
Trent Lott, in college, was a "college Democrat." Many others, too. Strom Thurmond was a Dem for YEARS before he flipped. Remember Jesse Helms? Bet you don't remember that HE USED TO BE A DEMOCRAT.
"The Dems" didn't pass the Civil Rights Act. LBJ did--by bribing, threatening, and strong-arming people he had dirt on/knew he could flip. And he could not have passed that without the GOP. In fact, MORE Republicans voted for it than did Democrats.
Also, when southern Democrats were racist assholes, they were countered by REPUBLICANS from the north, who leaned on the abolitionist history and were very pro-civil rights.
If you look at the VOTES, you will see that overwhelmingly (in some cases, entirely) Democratic delegations from states like Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, etc. voted AGAINST the Act. Don't believe me? Here, click the link and see for yourself: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/88-1964/h182
Read this--it will open your eyes: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/28/republicans-party-of-civil-rights
Of course, it was also Democrats who helped usher the bill through the House, Senate, and ultimately a Democratic president who signed it into law. The bill wouldn't have passed without the support of Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana, a Democrat. Majority Whip Hubert Humphrey, who basically split the Democratic party in two with his 1948 Democratic National Convention speech calling for equal rights for all, kept tabs on individual members to ensure the bill had the numbers to overcome the filibuster.
Put another way, party affiliation seems to be somewhat predictive, but something seems to be missing. So, what factor did best predicting voting?
You don't need to know too much history to understand that the South from the civil war to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 tended to be opposed to minority rights. This factor was separate from party identification or ideology. We can easily control for this variable by breaking up the voting by those states that were part of the confederacy and those that were not....
You can see that geography was far more predictive of voting coalitions on the Civil Rights than party affiliation. What linked Dirksen and Mansfield was the fact that they weren't from the south. In fact, 90% of members of Congress from states (or territories) that were part of the Union voted in favor of the act, while less than 10% of members of Congress from the old Confederate states voted for it. This 80pt difference between regions is far greater than the 15pt difference between parties.
You should read Caro. His material on how that went down is fascinating.
It was RACISM, not "Dems doing progressive things," that flipped the south to the GOP--this is not a secret, or a surprise. LBJ said he expected our party to 'pay' for that for a generation or more. He was right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Democrats#Losing_the_South
Vulgar language in this, courtesy of Atwater, but illucidative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy#Roots_of_the_Southern_strategy_.281963.E2.80.931972.29
Those who don't know their own history are condemned to repeat it.