The Myth of the Southern Strategy

never happened? yeap...that's why the president of RNC apologized for their actions?

'In 2005, Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman formally apologized to the NAACP for ignoring the black vote and exploiting racial conflicts'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

 

Neshoba County Fair is/was a popular venue for candidates. Both Democratic Senator John Glenn and Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis campaigned there as well. Did you know that?

Bonus question...for 10 extra points. Where did Jimmy Carter 'kick off' his presidential bid?

 

Ken Mehlman doesn't need to apologize for republican sins that never happened. He should apologize for his lousy job he did as RNC chair and head of the 04 campaign. What happened when he was RNC chair? Oh yeah, we lost the House and the Senate.

The guy is gay and he is for gay marriage. Big surprise. I'm willing to bet he's a registered democrat since coming out of the closet. That should make him more popular at the gay bars. He needs to apologize to God for his own sins.

 

Um, you may want to check out a book and a journal article that were written by both sides declaring the strategy to win the South. One was written by a couple of journalists who were warning about the shifting demographics in the South and the danger of not holding on to the white vote and the other was written by Kevin Phillips, the top political strategist to Nixon who wrote this:

What is rather ironic is that Nixon did play the Southern Strategy and you can see many example of this, particularly is nomination of two very racist Southern Supreme Court Justices who obviously did not get confirmed but when it came to actual policy, he was pretty much bi-partisan on everything to do with Civil Rights. He put up a great show to get the white votes, and it worked tremendously, but never followed through with anything of any substance.

 

I get the feeling you didn't bother to read the OP. I addressed nearly every one of your fallacious arguments. You argument that the South went red when blacks got the vote is just plain false. The South didn't suddenly turn red in 1965. There's a dozen other reasons why this make your basic premise false, and your arguments that follow. See post #13 below.

The fact that you can't name one of the aspects of the Southern Strategy and how it was implemented, by whom is telling.

Another falsehood is that blacks used to vote exclusively republican. The NAACP was taken over by socialists led by W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois endorse Woodrow Wilson in 1912 who showed "Birth of a Nation" at the White House after pledging to Du Bois to support black causes. Du Bois pushed blacks to the democrats even with their racist beliefs, some of which Du Bois endorsed like eugenics and segregation. It's that, "democrats are for the poor, republicans are for the rich" line that has been sold ever since and bought by whites and blacks for many years that took them from the republican party. That happened years before the CRA and Nixon.

In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower received 21% of the non-white vote, Stevenson got 79%.
In 1956, Ike did better receiving 39%.
In 1960, Nixon got 32%.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/139880/election-polls-presidential-vote-groups.aspx

Despite the many decades the democrats refused to pass anti-lynching laws, civil rights laws, or repeal Jim Crow laws and poll taxes, blacks supported the democrats, FDR, Stevenson, Wilson.

 

Oh, darn, just found this graph which also proves you wrong. Sorry I didn't get it in the above post. ^^

 

You do realize that you just proved expatriate correct, right...and pretty much confirmed the southern strategy. I mean you posted a graph that pretty much explains the black solidarity of the Democratic Party in 1964 which also is the year of the CRA.

Basically, that would also explain the immediate shift of racist whites to the Republican Party, due to the democratic party's stance on to give rights to them "uppity negros".

/thread.

 

Ooohhh, burn? I can tell when all the lies that have been told to some people are too much to bear. Gran pappy and great gran pappy just had to be correct, and not some guy on the internet who is just spreading lies about conservatives.....

I can only imagine how hard it is to have your entire ideology shot down and destroyed because it was basically based upon the status quo. I'd imagine it'll almost be like finding out there was never a Santa.

 

It appears here that many democrats still believe the south is still operating like pre 1964. Yes, blacks got sold a bill of goods by democrats and the liberal media by telling them that the democrats, the party of Lester Maddox and George Wallace, suddenlty changed because LBJ, the politician that could never find an anti-lynching bill he could vote for while in the Senate, had suddenly changed stripes. Most people, as you can see here, believe the government is the President and most people can't even name two congress critters so it is no wonder that most don't know what went on behind the scenes or who fought for their interest the most.

Now the party of 'progress' that has created a large class of dependents claim any idea that might help these people become independent is racism as if all dependents are black. Of course that just confirms their obsession with race.

 

You are welcome to pretend that the dramatic Party shift in the "Solid South" by the socially-conservative, states-rights (albeit fiercely pro-national defence) bible-thumping good ol' boys had no racial aspect whatsoever, even in the face of Black Southerners simultaneously fleeing their arrival in the Party's ranks during the time the national Democratic Party - in bipartisan efforts - were championing equality.

Honestly confronting the racial reality is understandably difficult for a political party in denial that appears to be destined for racial homogeneity. However, in a diverse nation with a diverse electorate and an opposition party that reflects that diversity, the ineluctable demographics render futule all their desperate, laboured contortions to explain away why they have become, increasingly, so very, very White and why they have driven away all those Black Americans who were once so very, very Republican.

A consensus of good ol' boys telling themselves how much different they are than the same sort of good ol' boys that sported a different party label won't cut it for them. The Cassandra of the GOP is ignored at their peril:

 

Yep, only propaganda would make minorities jump to the party of Lester Maddox. Honesty has no place in the democrat party as Obamacare has recently demonstrated.

 

You are mistaken if you are under the impression that I ever said any such thing as you claim someone once said.

My thesis is not dependent upon guessing what "should" happen.

White, socially-conservative, states-rights, fundamentalist Christian males who called themselves "Democrats" once controlled Southern politics.

White, socially-conservative, states-rights, fundamentalist Christian males who call themselves "Republicans" now control Southern politics.

Southern Blacks once overwhelmingly supported the "Party of Lincoln." Their dramatic shift coincided with the above displacement.

Such striking realignments are not inexplicable, serendipitous matters of chance and coincidence. Nor is it credible to pretend such a strikingly racial re-alignment is utterly free of a decidedly racial component.

Political parties strategize. The strategy, as articulated by those who contrived it, worked for the Republican Party, but now needs to be revamped to address their long-term interest: survival in an increasing diverse nation - assuming the defunct Confederacy does not rise again and is accommodated this time.

 

So, basically we can put to rest the "myth" of the southern strategy, it was a good propaganda tool for the GOP.

 

Your incessant sniveling about the twice-popularly-elected mediocre President, whilst revelatory, is a self-indulgence that is not germane to the topic - unless it is your contention that his skin colour was a contributory factor for Southern White solidarity, of course.

 

You are dreaming. He claimed blacks almost 100% republican. This graph proves him wrong.
Blacks were voting for the racist democrat party years before the CRA and the graph proves my point.
I explained this more completely in my previous post (prior to the graph) which I doubt you read.
1964 is the year after JFK was assassinated. Everybody voted for LBJ. Even racist white democrats.
1964 was also the year that LBJ kicked the black Mississippi delegates out of his presidential DNC nominating convention.
1964 was also the year that the republicans voted for the CRA in higher percentages than democrats in both houses of congress.
There was no "immediate shift of racist whites to the Republican Party" no matter how many times you tell that lie.

1964 George Wallace did well against LBJ in several Democratic presidential primaries including some in the North.

1968 George Wallace won the racist white democrat vote on a segregationist platform.

1972 George Wallace win 6 Democratic presidential primaries including 3 in the North. He would have won the nomination for the democrats that year except for a bullet took him out of the race.

And as I pointed out several times, democrats dominated the South politically into the 90's, and as another poster pointed out in Georgia until 2004, and Louisiana until 2007. That includes all those dixiecrats that stayed in the democrat party, and all those democrats that voted against the CRA and VRA.

 

1. Why did pro-segregation Dixiecrats like Strom Thurmond, Trent Lott, and Jesse Helms suddenly become so "comfortable" in the Nixon Republican Party?

2. Why did voters in the South who voted for George Wallace....and had previously voted for pro-segregation Dixiecrats.....start voting Republican in the 70s and 80s? Thus turning a South which opposed Republicans since Lincoln....into a "Solid South" for Republicans after 1980?


3. Why did Ronald Reagan give his FIRST post-Convention speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi....where three civil rights workers had been killed 16 years earlier......and his speech never mentioned them....nor civil rights.....but instead the Wallace code "states' rights"?

4. Why did the Nixon-Reagan Republican Party oppose the Martin Luther King holiday in the early 1980s....yet NOW try to claim MLK as one of their own?

 

It's like none of you read the thread at all. But at least you are the first one to point to an element of the "Southern Strategy" plan. Step one, nominate two racist white justices who stand no chance of being confirmed. Step two...

 

no one has ever suggested that ANYTHING changes overnight in American politics and certainly no one has suggested that there can be one and only one motivator for political change.

- - - Updated - - -

do you have that graph from 1865 until 1936?

 

Most blacks were republican back in that time, due to either running to the north to get educated or running away from slavery. All blacks that were elected to congress were in the north, and were republican. After 1964, it went from being a crap shoot on which party to identify with, to now being for the democrats if you were wanting equal representation, or being for the GOP if you wanted to continue with what Texas's letter of secession spelled out.

I really don't understand how people can not use just a little bit of cognitive thinking to see that.

 

They are totally invested in their historical revision and the collection of rationalizations that accompanies it.

 

It's hard to accept that pappy and granpappy were wrong in their reasoning regarding political affiliations.

 

Lott and Helms weren't Dixiecrats so don't think that you are going to get away with a big lie like that. Unlike hundreds of Southern pro-segregationist Dixiecrats who were always "comfortable" in the democrat party.

Assumes facts not in evidence. But the change in demographics has been explained. Conversely, why don't you explain to us why they started voting republican in your opinion?

He did it because he has every right to campaign in the South. Just because it was once the solid territory of the democrat party, where you probably can't go 15 miles without tripping over a site where some racist democrat KKK member committed some kind of atrocity against blacks or republicans, doesn't mean you can ban republicans from campaigning there.

As if racist white democrats in the South all we're hanging on Reagan's every word waiting for the go ahead to vote for him by signalling with the code words everybody in the South knows. 99% of America never saw or heard that speech. Duh.

They didn't. It passed overwhelmingly in both houses of congress and was signed by Reagan.

 

Cognitive thinking will be of no use to you unless you read my post.

 

You did when you suggested that people changed parties. They didn't.

No? Do you?

 

Already dealt with in the thread. He did not apologize for racism in the GOP. He acknowledged 40 years of leftist lie narrative on race as part of a political speech. Even arguendo, one political speech to the NAACP is NOT -evidence- of the type the OP very plainly asks for. Evidence of a plan, of policy, of actual steps taken to enact that plan, is what OP asks and gets none in a 10? page thread now? NONE. If there is none of that evidence, then the MOUNTAINS of factual counterevidence in the thread demonstrate plainly that there was no Southern Strategy in the GOP to court racist votes.