Posted on 05/01/2013 6:32:43 PM PDT by neverdem
I by-and-large agree with the thrust of Jamelle Bouie’s recent American Prospect article, which argues that Republicans badly misapprehend the reason(s) African-Americans generally vote for Democratic candidates. Too many conservatives assert that African-Americans have developed a “false consciousness” and simply need to be shown the error of their ways before they’ll start supporting Republicans. Asking “What’s the matter with black people?” simply isn’t going to get the GOP very far in its minority outreach efforts.
But in the course of this argument, Bouie makes the following statement: “White Southerners jumped ship from Democratic presidential candidates in the 1960s, and this was followed by a similar shift on the congressional level, and eventually, the state legislative level. That the [last] two took time doesn’t discount the first.”
If you polled pundits, you’d probably get 90 percent agreement with this statement. And if you polled political scientists, you’d likely get a majority to sign off on it. That’s maddening, because it’s incorrect.
I’ve written at length on this, both in my book and here, but it is worth revisiting. In truth, the white South began breaking away from the Democrats in the 1920s, as population centers began to develop in what was being called the “New South” (remember, at the beginning of the 20th century, New Orleans was the only thing approximating what we currently think of as a city in the South).
In the 1930s and 1940s, FDR performed worse in the South in every election following his 1932 election. By the mid-1940s, the GOP was winning about a quarter of the Southern vote in presidential elections...
(Excerpt) Read more at dyn.realclearpolitics.com ...
Read the article and put that in context of the entire article.
“Goldwater’s nomination may well have represented a watershed in the GOP’s ideological development (though I think there are some nuances there that are frequently missed as well), and there’s no doubt, at least in my mind, that GOP candidates used racialized appeals to try to win over Southern whites. None of those debates are impacted by the observations above.
But the assertion that white Southerners began voting Republican in 1964 is simply incorrect, whether for president, Congress, or statehouses. The development of the Southern GOP was a slow-moving, gradual process that lasted over a century, and is just being completed today.”
You have to tell us what your post is about.
My post was about the impression some have attempted to put forth that the Southern Democrats were somehow “conservative”.
Huey Long put the lie to that assertion.
Huey Long was a Louisiana Governor and U.S. Senator from Louisiana.
He was best known for the “Share Our Wealth” program he advocated, a tax on assets (not income) that would put the government in charge of “redistributing” wealth.
The Democrats (southern or otherwise) were big time big government socialists for a long long time.
I know who Huey Long was, but you are wrong if you don’t know how naturally conservative the South is, it is why the democrats couldn’t hold onto it as issues became more defined as left and right, and why it is so staunchly right wing today.
Huey Long was a conservative? You think Huey Long was an exception? He was very much a product of his time and place, a Southern Democrat through and through.
What an idiotic post.
Why would you make up such a silly fake post when my actual post is just above your fantasy creation.
Hey, no need to be rude.
Huey Long was a Southern Democrat. He was not a conservative. He was not that far removed from the rest of the party, Southern or not.
Texas at that time was electing Governors who went on to be FDR appointed Judges, and who tried to limit cotton growing and oil production via government mandate.
The Democrats have been big government socialists for a long time, Southern or not.
Sorry if the truth gets your dander up.
My apologies for telling you truth you don’t want to hear.
I don’t care about Huey Long.
Anybody who would create that lie of post 45 is not interested in any truth or honesty.
Bother someone else with whatever you want to tell the world about the one time governor of Louisiana.
No, I imagine you wouldn’t care much about Huey Long if you were trying to sell the snake oil that Southern Democrats were conservative.
‘Conservative’, if you can call it that, about keeping Blacks from voting in Democrat primaries.
Not so conservative about not being big spending big government proponents of the FDR’s “New Deal”.
The depression hit the South hard and public works kept a lot of folks there from starving. By the end of his second term though, FDR's progressive agenda was clearly backfiring but Southern voters kept on supporting it.
Interestingly, Long was said to have been considering a run for President himself in 1936, before getting shot by the son of a rival.
Yes, FDR wasn’t liberal/socialist enough for some Southern Democrats - there was a lot of support for Huey Long to run for President. “Share Our Wealth” was their motto.
The story jumps from, “Republicans badly misapprehend the reason(s) African-Americans generally vote for Democratic candidates,” to,“White Southerners jumped ship from Democratic presidential candidates in the 1960s;"; And then goes on to state it was much earlier than this.
History has shown that the Democratic Party was and is the party of slavers and racists. Today’s Blacks believe by a margin of over 90% that the Republican Party is now the home for slavers and racists; to refute this needs to be part of the context that Blacks believe this would be ignorance or denial. The writer makes no mention of why Southern White Democrats “jumped ship” to the Republicans, he only uses a limited number of election results as evidence that it did happen. These election results are suspect as some of the postings in this thread have pointed out. He never points out migration of Whites from south to north, or vice versa either. Now, put two and two together and you can see the real context of this article and how it can be conceived as vindicating Blacks who think that the Republican Party is now the Party of slavers and racists.
Frankly, the writer, Sean Trende, should also have written in this article on the history of how Blacks “jumped ship” from Republican to Democrat. It would be nice to know the reasons why too. I have a good hunch on what those reasons are, and it’s not about Civil Rights.
Personally, I saved the column to bolster my arguments that the switch wasn’t made because of race issues.
Well, if you can give a convincing argument for that with this article, more power to you.
It is one of the best that I have seen from that perspective.
My Great Grandmother lived through Reconstruction in the South where carpetbaggers and crooked politicians were all Republicans. It was no wonder that my grandparents, and great uncles and aunts were all solidly democratic, BUT the democratic party back then bore absolutely no resemblance to those using the name today. I suppose there were Republicans around, but when I registered to vote in Mississippi you had to register as a democrat if you wanted to vote. Everything was determined in the primaries. I honestly don't recall registering as a Republican even being an option. That all changed with LBJ, but there were still diehard holdouts. When McGovern ran in '72, that was it. Even those who suffered through Reconstruction weren't voting for the socialism being pushed by the dims.
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