re: I'll never understand how the black population can support Democrats

quote:

---

The parties flipped after all that.

---

quote:

---

Ostrich

---

quote:

---

Johnson had successfully associated himself with Kennedy's popularity. Johnson also successfully painted his opponent, Republican Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, as a right-wing legislator who wanted to abolish the social welfare programs created in the 1930s (such as Social Security).

---

quote:

---

Ostrich

---

quote:

---

Ostrich

---

quote:

---

n June of 1964, though, the bill came up again, and it passed...over the strenuous objections of Southern Democrats. 80% of House Republicans voted for the measure, compared with just 61% of Democrats, while 82% of Republicans in the Senate supported it, compared with 69% of Democrats.

Nearly all of the opposition was, naturally, in the South, which was still nearly unanimously Democratic and nearly unanimously resistant to the changing country. One thing that most assuredly didn't change, though, was party affiliation. A total of 21 Democrats in the Senate opposed the Civil Rights Act. Only one of them, "Dixiecrat" Strom Thurmond, ever became a Republican. The rest, including Al Gore, Sr. and Robert Byrd--a former Exalted Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan--remained Democrats until the day they died.

Moreover, as those 20 lifelong Democrats retired, their Senate seats remained in Democrat hands for several decades afterwards. So too did the overwhelming majority of the House seats in the South until 1994, when a Republican wave election swept the GOP into control of the House for the first time since 1952. 1994 was also the first time Republicans ever held a majority of House seats in the South--a full 30 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

---

quote:

---

After the 1964 election--the first after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the opportune time for racist Democrat voters to abandon the party in favor of Republicans--Democrats still held a 102-20 House majority in states that had once been part of the Confederacy. In 1960, remember, that advantage was 117-8. A pickup of 12 seats (half of them in Alabama) is hardly the massive shift one would expect if racist voters suddenly abandoned the Democratic Party in favor of the GOP.

In fact, voting patterns in the South didn't really change all that much after the Civil Rights era. Democrats still dominated Senate, House, and gubernatorial elections for decades afterward. Alabama, for example, didn't elect a Republican governor until 1986. Mississippi didn't elect one until 1991. Georgia didn't elect one until 2002.

In the Senate, Republicans picked up four southern Senate seats in the 1960s and 1970s, while Democrats also picked up four. Democratic incumbents won routinely. If anything, those racist southern voters kept voting Democrat.

---