How racism explains Republicans’ rise in the South

[KamaAina]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/24/how-racism-explains-republicans-rise-in-the-south/

Even if candidates don’t talk about it, race will be among the most important factors in the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The Democratic Party has the support of 56 percent of Latinos, 65 percent of Asian Americans and 80 percent of the black population, according to the Pew Research Center. The share that supports the Republican Party is disproportionately white.

For decades, those racial divisions have shaped how individual candidates expect to perform at the polls. If Republican candidates were as popular among minority voters as they are among white voters, winning elections would be much easier. And Democrats would dominate the polls today if they had maintained the support of the white electorate.

They didn't. Democrats began losing the support of white voters after World War II, particularly in the South. During the civil rights movement, white Southerners left the Democratic Party in droves....

Other historians, though, have long argued that civil rights legislation supported by President Kennedy and other Washington Democrats led to the party's loss of power in the South. And a study published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, based on more than half a century of newly available polling data, supports that interpretation. It was the issue of race, the review of Gallup archives shows, that undid Democrats in the former Confederacy.

The fruits of Nixon's "Southern strategy", and of Lee Atwater's labors.

[hifiguy]

1. Rick Perlstein's excellent "Before The Storm"

and "Nixonland" tell the story in detail.

LBJ had this figured out nearly 55 years ago: