How racism explains Republicans’ rise in the South
Max Ehrenfreund
November 24
... 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 ...
Economists Ilyana Kuziemko of Princeton University and Ebonya Washington of Yale University are among the first to analyze Gallup’s data. Their study looks back to 1963, when activists boycotted segregated businesses and public facilities in Birmingham, Ala. In June, two black students tried to enter a building at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa as Gov. George Wallace, a Democrat, stood in the doorway to block them. President Kennedy, also a Democrat, responded with a show of force, summoning the National Guard. Wallace gave way, and a few hours later, the president went on television to call for equality ...
Kennedy's white constituents in the South were outraged. They had overwhelmingly supported Democrats since the end of Reconstruction. Yet between April 5 and June 23 of that year, the share of white Southerners who approved of Kennedy declined by 35 percentage points to about 20 percent , according to the Gallup polls. This abrupt shift marks when white Southerners turned against Democrats ... The percentage of whites in the rest of the country saying they approved of the president did not change appreciably ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/24/how-racism-explains-republicans-rise-in-the-south/
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