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6) Eisenhower won his election by gaining traction for the Republican Party, winning elections in Florida, Texas, Virginia, and Tennessee. Four years later, Eisenhower won a landslide win in Louisiana and Kentucky.
This is important because:
7) • When he departed office in 1961, the Democratic Party's grip on the South was perhaps greater than it had been for decades.
While Democrats stuck to conventional segregation, the rest of the nation was changing, and the civil rights movement started.
8) • After President John F. Kennedy, a strong supporter of civil rights, was assassinated in late 1963, Southern Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson said was his duty to enact the Civil Rights Act as a homage to Kennedy, and proposed the law 5 months before his death. Democrats altered it
9) • The Civil Rights Act was rejected by 21 Democrats in the Senate. Only one of them, "Dixiecrat" Strom Thurmond, was ever elected to the GOP. The remainder, including former Ku Klux Klan Exalted Cyclops Al Gore, Sr. and Robert Byrd, remained Democrats until the day they died.
10) • Also, when those 20 lifetime Democrats departed, their Senate seats stayed in Democratic control for decades. Until 1994, when a Republican wave election gave the GOP control of the House for the first time since 1952, the vast majority of House seats in the South did as well.