https://newstalk1130.iheart.com/featured/common-sense-central/content/2018-05-01-the-myth-of-the-republican-democrat-switch/
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the famous Little Rock Nine
Likewise, throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, Democratic governors and overwhelmingly Democratic State Legislatures controlled the South, which steadfastly opposed the push for civil rights. In contrast, Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, openly praised school desegregation in the Brown v. Board of Education decision and sent federalized Arkansas National Guard troops to Little Rock to protect nine black students after Democratic Governor Orval Faubus threatened to keep them out of a previously all-white high school.
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The commonly referred to "switch"
If this was a sudden "switch" to the Republican Party for the old Democrat segregationists, it sure took a long time to happen.
The reality is that it didn't. After the 1964 electionthe first after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the opportune time for racist Democrat voters to abandon the party in favor of RepublicansDemocrats still held a 102-20 House majority in states that had once been part of the Confederacy. In 1960, remember, that advantage was 117-8. A pickup of 12 seats (half of them in Alabama) is hardly the massive shift one would expect if racist voters suddenly abandoned the Democratic Party in favor of the GOP.
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After the "switch"
In fact, voting patterns in the South didn't really change all that much after the Civil Rights era. Democrats still dominated Senate, House, and gubernatorial elections for decades afterward. Alabama, for example, didn't elect a Republican governor until 1986. Mississippi didn't elect one until 1991. Georgia didn't elect one until 2002.
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origins
So how did this myth of a sudden "switch" get started?
It's rooted in an equally pernicious myth of the supposedly racist "Southern Strategy" of Richard Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign, which was accused of surreptitiously exploiting the innate racism of white southern voters.
Even before that, though, modern-day Democrats point to the 1964 presidential campaign of Republican Barry Goldwater, who refused to back the 1964 Civil Rights Act as proof that the GOP was actively courting racist southern voters. After all, they argue, Goldwater only won six states–his home state of Arizona and five states in the deep south. His "States' Rights" platform had to be code for a racist return to a segregated society, right?
Hardly. Goldwater was actually very supportive of civil rights for black Americans, voting for the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts and even helping to found Arizona's chapter of the NAACP. His opposition to the 1964 Act was not at all rooted in racism, but rather in a belief that it allowed the federal government to infringe on state sovereignty.