I think you mean he won ALL the states that went for Wallace.
How exactly would the Democrats have “thrown the racists out?”
Johnson fully recognized that embracing civil rights would cost the Democrats the South; according to his aide Bill Moyers the remark he made the evening he signed the legislation was “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”
It’s no great mystery. The basis for the modern electoral map was set in motion by the realignment of the 1960s on race.
Both parties voted to pass historic interventions like the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. However, it was successive Democratic Presidents who got out in front of issue and prosecuted this with the public, knowing full-well that they were fracturing their party and losing their viability in the south.
Importantly, the Democrats fought through the Dixiecrat-fillibuster and repudiated their southern brethren, and for that they accrued some deserved status as being progressive on race which they have continued to embrace as a core value of the party. In contrast, the Republicans record is very muddied by their embrace of disaffected Dixiecrats like Strom Thurmond and the general Southern Strategy to take the south back from the Democrats and dominate it.
This marked a pivotal moment in the cultivation of a more insular and angry counter-culture on the right, including the exploitation of racial resentment, away from the big tent which included progressive Republicanism.
Even voters who don’t know the exact history of this progression can instinctively grasp this reality with little trouble. You don’t have to dig very deep to see a troubling obsession with race which continues to plague the conservative movement. You see it with the weird racial obsessions we see about Obama as the Kenyan Manchurian candidate and Birtherism. It’s part and parcel of the paranoid racially tinged politics of resentment that preoccupies a significant contingent of conservative politics.
Can’t find it on Wikiquote, but I think the quote was, “We [the Democrats] have just lost the South for a generation.”
(Guess what? That generation is now past. Obama won Virginia and Florida in 2008 and 2012 both – he even won North Carolina in 2008. That’s not just any Democrat, that’s the black one. Times have changed.)
There’s SOME truth to this, but you’re forgetting something: both parties SIMULTANEOUSLY made a conscious and deliberate decision to abandon their corew constituencies to rebuild a new coalition.
Yes, Richard Nixon made a conscious decision to go after Southerners and the white working class, who had long been the backbone of the Democratic party. But at the exact same time liberal strategists like Fred Dutton and George McGovern were busy booting the South and the White working class out of their colaition, and rebuilding the Democrats as the party of college-educated urbanites and racial minorities.
It was more former Whigs than former Democrats, and a fair chunk of Know Nothings, but yes, the Republicans were formed around abolitionism (or at least containing slavery) in response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The inherent two-party split in our system had previously been along the big government / small government line, as it has returned to. But each party, at all times, has represented a coalition of disparate interests, often at great tension with each other.
Virginia and Florida now have a functional majority of transplanted educated Northerners, and NC’s is growing too although not yet solid. Making allowance for those, the Republican electoral base today is, essentially, the slave states. Yet they still claim to be “the party of Lincoln”.