RangerDave wrote:
Of course, all those Dixiecrats abandoned the Dems in droves and started voting Republican about 40-50 years ago because the Dems embraced Civil Rights, so....
That's not exactly how it happened. In 1956 the South was more or less split between the parties, with the Democrats getting more states out of the South but the Republicans getting more Southern electoral votes. in 1960, unpledged electors from Mississippi and Alabama voted for Byrd, not Nixon, and most of the other Southern states went to Kennedy. They didn't like either candidates' stance on civil rights. In 1964, pretty much the only people voting for Goldwater were the deep south states; he'd managed to alienate moderate republicans who also supported the civil rights act. In 1968, however, George Wallace took all 4 deep south states plus Arkansas, and Texas still was going Democrat. It wasn't until 1972 that the South was solidly Republican, and in that campaign and again in 1980 and 1984 the Republican candidate pretty much totally steamrolled the entire country anyhow.
In other words, it took from about 1960 until about 1988 for the South to really become solidly republican, with considerable dicking around with 3rd candidates in the time period where they were supposed to have suddenly gone from Democrat to Republican overnight. Furthermore, the south wasn't as reliably Democrat before 1960 as it's supposed to have been.
The switch of the South from primarily Democrat to Republican has been anything but the abrupt shift its commonly portrayed as. In any case, it hardly makes the Republican party any more racist; it wasn't a matter of these people thinking the Republicans were going to preserve segregation for them; it was simply that there was no one else to vote for.. except when there was someone, like Wallace, who is an excellent example of why 3rd party crackpots are not viable.
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And if you honestly believe Republican convention organizers weren't interested in using the optics of a "young, black, Mormon woman" on the stage to push back against the image of the Reps as being racist, you're just hopelessly naive. As for Condi Rice, I never said anything about her.
Of course they're interested in that. It's pretty much the only way to get the Democrats and Liberals in general to stop screaming "racism" in their attempts to be the Party of Everyone Who Isn't A White Male. This is particularly hilarious when they forget that the various minorities they are trying to link together have their own disagreements; the black population contains a large proportion of gay-hating fundamentalists, but to hear the liberals tell it, those people are only whites who live in flyover states.