Quote:
Originally Posted by The_Waco_Kid
the grandchildren of those long dead DEMOCRAT racists are republican because they are ashamed of the Democratic party's long history of racism right up to today.
the Democratic party didn't turn over a new leaf in 1965 they doubled down and found new things to be subtly racist about.
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Your grandchildren comment made me think of a different question to ask Claude.AI. Note that I didn't mention the South.
How did voter alignment change after the passage of the Civil Rights Act change?
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 triggered one of the most dramatic political realignments in American history, reshaping the two major parties over the following decades.
## The "Solid South" Breaks Apart
Before 1964, the South had voted overwhelmingly Democratic since Reconstruction — a legacy of the Civil War. White Southern Democrats had long been a powerful bloc within the party, but they were deeply hostile to federal civil rights legislation.
When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, he reportedly told an aide, *"We have lost the South for a generation."* He was right — though it proved to be more permanent than a generation.
## Immediate Shifts
- In the **1964 presidential election**, Barry Goldwater (who voted against the Act) carried only his home state of Arizona and **five Deep South states** — the first Republican to do so since Reconstruction.
- **George Wallace's 1968 third-party run** captured five more Deep South states, further fracturing the old Democratic coalition.
- **Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy"** in 1968 and 1972 explicitly appealed to disaffected white Southern voters using coded racial and cultural messaging, pulling them toward the GOP.
## Long-Term Realignment
**White Southerners** shifted steadily Republican over the next 30 years — not just in presidential races but in congressional and state elections too. By the 1990s and 2000s, the South had become reliably Republican.
**Black voters**, who had begun shifting Democratic during the New Deal, completed that realignment after 1964. African American support for Democratic presidential candidates has consistently been in the **85–95% range** ever since.
## The Broader Coalition Reshaping
The realignment wasn't just geographic — it reshaped *what each party stood for*:
- **Democrats** became more closely associated with civil rights, urban voters, minorities, college-educated professionals, and later social liberals.
- **Republicans** absorbed conservative white Southerners and working-class whites who felt culturally alienated, shifting the party's center of gravity to the right on both racial and social issues.
## How Long Did It Take?
The full realignment was surprisingly gradual. Many Southern whites continued voting for **conservative Democratic candidates at the state and local level** well into the 1980s and even 1990s before the switch to the GOP became complete down the ballot. Scholars like **V.O. Key** and later **Byron Shafer** have written extensively about why the shift took so long at sub-presidential levels.
The Civil Rights Act wasn't the *only* cause — the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the cultural upheavals of the late 1960s, deindustrialization, and the rise of the religious right all contributed — but 1964 is widely considered the **pivotal inflection point** that set the realignment in motion.
