White South Entirely Democrat to Predominantly Republican. Did People Change or Party Name?
Is the republican party today; the same as Lincoln's Party? Why did the south switch sides? To understand some of the reasons the South went from a largely Democratic region to a primarily Republican area today, just follow the decades of debate over racial issues in the United States.
For more than half a century after the Civil War, black voters held strong loyalties to the Republican Party. But those loyalties began to wane with the depression and the New Deal, and by the time race returned to the forefront of national politics in the 1950s, the number of black voters who identified as Democrats were twice the number who identified as Republicans.
In 1948, after President Harry Truman (himself a Southern Democrat) introduced a pro-civil rights platform, a group of Southerners walked out of the party’s national convention.
These so-called Dixiecrats ran their own candidate for president (Strom Thurmond, governor of South Carolina) on a segregationist State's Rights ticket that year; he got more than 1 million votes.
It was a Democratic president — Lyndon B. Johnson — who signed the Civil Rights Act into law in 1964. Republicans gave the bill a good share of support in Congress, but the party’s presidential nominee that year, Barry Goldwater, argued that it expanded government power too much.
As a result, Republicans went from losing black voters to losing them spectacularly. Ever since, it's been common for 80 percent or even more of black voters to support Democrats. The South, who formed the Confederacy; switched sides with the Party of Lincoln. WTF?
Walk a Mile in My shoes is an open discussion trying to bring the world together by understanding each other. We want to walk a mile in your shoes and hoping you can walk a mile in our shoes. I agree that a mile is a long walk but maybe we can learn to love instead of hate.
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