Southern Whites' Shift to the GOP Predates the '60shttps://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/04/30/southern_whites_shift_to_the_gop_predates_the_60s_118172.htmlBut 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.
But the big breakthrough, to the extent that there was one, came in 1952. Dwight Eisenhower won 48 percent of the vote there, compared to Adlai Stevenson’s 52 percent. He carried most of the “peripheral South” -- Virginia, Tennessee, Texas and Florida -- and made inroads in the “Deep South,” almost carrying South Carolina and losing North Carolina and Louisiana by single digits.
Richard Nixon's supposed
"Southern Strategy" started before RMN was eligible to vote!
