Among the many points that Rokita missed, is this: why do Black voters choose to be Democrats? His master and slave metaphor isn’t just offensive, it’s false - the Democrats aren’t forcing anyone to vote their way. So if the Republicans sincerely want to draw Black votes, they need to find out what it is about the Democratic Party that attracts Black voters or what it is about the Republican Party that repels them.
From that article, under the heading “Failure of the Southern Strategy” there’s this:
"There are many people who challenge the opinion that the Southern Strategy was responsible for large GOP political gains in the South. Several facts appear to support this challenge, such as:
"Democrat Jimmy Carter’s victory in every Southern state except for Virginia and Oklahoma in the 1976 Presidential election, years after the emergence of the Southern Strategy.
"The first Southern state to give the GOP control of both its governorship and its legislature was Florida, and it did not do this until 1998, long after the original architects of the Southern Strategy had left the GOP. However, it should be noted that the Southern Strategy was mainly targeted at electing presidential candidates, and that Democrats at the state level were much more conservative than the likes of George McGovern, Michael Dukakis or John Kerry. (One of the originators of the Southern Strategy, Kevin Phillips, had even become openly supportive of Democratic political candidates by then.)
"Georgia did not see its first post-Reconstruction GOP governor until 2002.
"Until 2005, Louisiana had been represented since Reconstruction by two Democratic Senators.
"Arkansas has two Democratic Senators, a Democratic governor, three out of four of their U.S. representatives are Democrats, every statewide office is held by a Democrat, and their state legislature is Democratic.
"The move to the Republican Party on the part of southern whites had more to do with whites voting for their economic interests than racism. Wrote Clay Risen in a review of The End of Southern Exceptionalism, a scholarly work by Richard Johnston and Byron Shafer, ‘In the postwar era…the South transformed itself from a backward region to an engine of the national economy, giving rise to a sizable new wealthy suburban class. This class, not surprisingly, began to vote for the party that best represented its economic interests: the Republican Party.’ "
Which, of course, supports my observations and objections to the weilding of the broad brushes in this thread.
That by exclusively aligning themselves with the Democratic party, they lose leverage that they could otherwise have if there was a threat of their defection to the Republicans. President Bush made the point at his speech to the National Urban League
[highlighting mine]
If all those black votes were to go Republican, the ratio would also be 90/10. So why would there be less of a master/slave relationship there?
IvoryBill No one here supports the use of steroetypes and no one here had said anything approaching the idea that all southern Whites are racist or that all Republicans are racist. They are pointing out a rather inarguable trend that has occurred in the past several decades, as the Republicans have gone increasingly conservative and Religious Right, they have certainly associated themselves with others who have quite clearly expressed racist viewpoints. This has tended to alienate many African American voters. OK? No one is saying any particular Southernor (except for David Duke, who is publicly on record as such) is racist.
This surely deserves its own thread!
As white as this one?
Sorry, I thought I was reacting to your position.
[quote]
I will stand by my points that:
Not all, I quite agree. Remember that the person who did the most to push through the civil rights bills was a white Southerner. I don’t know of too many white Republicans before 1964, but I’d suspect not many of them were biased.
We’re a bit past then now, aren’t we. And some parts of Southern Indiana are practically the south culturally.
Many of whom were formerly white Democratic bigots.
I haven’t noticed anyone claiming that all of a class did anything. Why do you think the South went for Goldwater, and against a native son? Goldwater himself was not a bigot, to the best of my knowledge, but his platform of states rights was cover for those who wanted the government to butt out of integrating schools. Are you old enough to have watched the coverage of the '64 convention. (It was more than a few hours a night back then.) Are you old enough to have seen the statements of governors and mayors and police chiefs before bigotry went out of style?
In saying this, I’m not giving a pass to idiots like the Indiana Sec. State. IIRC, the KKK was very big in Indiana in the '20s. But by the '60s this kind of stuff wasn’t in the laws in the north.
Gerald Ford, a moderate Republican from Michigan, loses to a Georgian? I don’t recall Ford making use of a Southern Strategy, or that he used any words or actions to show he wasn’t fully for equal rights. Ford was an old style Republican, one I was proud to vote for.
John Breaux was my Congressman when I lived in Louisiana. Much of Louisiana politics is dominated by Cajuns, like Edwin, who are way different. (And cool.) When I lived in Louisiana the Republicans were definitely not bigoted their big negative was that they were boring compared to Edwin Edwards.
And this happened between 1960 and 1964, of course. It might explain some of the effect today, but not 40 years ago.
[QUOTE=Voyager]
Sorry, I thought I was reacting to your position.
[quote]
Reacting to a person’s position does not include speculation about what they might or might not have to say about a point you’re currently making. That’s why I thought you were getting personal.
I don’t usually go around splitting hairs, but while southern Indiana may share some cultural traits with other parts of the South, it is not, nor has it ever been, considered to be part of the South.
Several posters to this thread (you included) have chosen to focus your reflections on the South. As Republicans draw around 50% of the popular vote nationally, a balanced analysis of why more blacks favor the Democratic party would include all regions of the US, and not insist that it’s primarily due to their reaction to the “Southern Strategy” argument. It’s a shallow analysis, in my opinion, as the Southern states have 55% of the black population, which leaves out the 45% in other regions of the US. Do all the black Democrats in all regions of the U.S. vote that way because of what the national Republican party chose to do strategy-wise in the presidential elections of 1964 and 1968 and 1972? I don’t think so. Can we attribute all of the shift in voting behavior from Democrat to Rebublican in the South to converted bigots? I don’t think so.
What does my age have to do with anything?
Well, if we’re going to go back to the '20s and earlier (which I wasn’t around to witness first-hand) the Jim Crow laws in the South were put in place by Democrats as a reaction to Republican Reconstruction policies. But we don’t need to bash all Democrats for those bad laws now, do we?
My apologies for the blank post above. I tried to fix it on edit and it didn’t work and I was timed out. Many of my quotes of Voyager’s post have been eaten by the hamsters, but here goes:
Reacting to a person’s position does not include speculation about what they might or might not have to say about a point you’re currently making. That’s why I thought you were getting personal.
I don’t usually go around splitting hairs, but while southern Indiana may share some cultural traits with other parts of the South, it is not, nor has it ever been, considered to be part of the South.
Several posters to this thread (you included) have chosen to focus your reflections on the South. As Republicans draw around 50% of the popular vote nationally, a balanced analysis of why more blacks favor the Democratic party would include all regions of the US, and not insist that it’s primarily due to their reaction to the “Southern Strategy” argument. It’s a shallow analysis, in my opinion, as the Southern states have 55% of the black population, which leaves out the 45% in other regions of the US. Do all the black Democrats in all regions of the U.S. vote that way because of what the national Republican party chose to do strategy-wise in the presidential elections of 1964 and 1968 and 1972? I don’t think so. Can we attribute all of the shift in voting behavior from Democrat to Rebublican in the South to converted bigots? I don’t think so.
What does my age have to do with anything?
Well, if we’re going to go back to the '20s and earlier (which I wasn’t around to witness first-hand) the Jim Crow laws in the South were put in place by Democrats as a reaction to Republican Reconstruction policies. But we don’t need to bash all Democrats for those bad laws now, do we?
Thanks for your lucid and enlightening description of Louisiana politics. Given where I live I wouldn’t know a thing about it.
As you’re replying to what I quoted from the Wikipedia article cited by Sailboat, you might want to go there and do some editing. I thought we were talking about events today, not those of 40 years ago. Maybe that’s why we don’t seem to be communicating.
Indeed. In fact, Washington (Daviess County) Indiana is one of the towns that purportedly drove every African American out of town in (IIRC) the early 1900’s. I’m still searching for the cite on this, but we had a few towns like that in Kentucky as well. I stay in Washington IN a few times a year and don’t remember ever seeing an African American there.
Edit - not going to bother.
-Joe
Gosh, I wonder what event happened to push them to the other side.
Things I’ve learned in almost 7 years in Mississippi.
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What “Democrat” really means in Mississippi
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The one real reason for whites voting Republican in Mississippi
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That neat expression, “That’s mighty white of you”, which I hear on an almost daily basis.
-Joe
If you are saying there are better explanations for black voting patterns than the Southern Strategy, I agree completely. The Democratic support of civil rights legislation, poverty programs , and support of traditional unions surely has a lot more to do with it. I haven’t seen any numbers, but I’d be suprised if the Southern Strategy was a big motivator.
[quote]
What does my age have to do with anything?
Reading about the civil rights movement in a history book is a lot different from having someone who lives not ten miles from you getting killed in Mississippi while working for voting rights. What Trent Lott got trashed for wouldn’t even have been noticed 43 years ago. We’ve come a long way, at least in terms of what is permissible public discourse.
Southern Democrats from that tradition - sure will. Like I said, I suspect pre-60 Republicans were good guys. The whole fight in 1964 (and 1948) was that the Democratic party was split between the Southern branch and the more moderate Northern branch. Truman integrated the Armed Forces, Thurmond ran for president in 1948 as a Dixiecrat. and Wallace ran in 1968 as an independent. What this whole digression is about is how the national Republican party found that they could get votes by appealing to the baser instincts of a segment of the population. Goldwater might have really believed what he said, Nixon, though? No way.
Dave Treen was governor for part of the time I lived there, and he certainly couldn’t be counted as a bad Republican. I love Louisiana politics, and it never seemed very racist to me. We did have separate but equal bathrooms in one of the older buildings I taught in at USL, but that was from a while backl.
I thought it odd they were denying the Southern strategy based on demographic changes that happened after the strategy was defined and used. Rove’s attack on McCain in South Carolina in 2000 shows that not all is well, but I’m not denying that there are other factors happening today.
But isn’t there a little bit of The South inside all of us, really?
Dude…are you arguing that it didn’t work?
Most people I know are turned off that a plan to use racial hatred as a lever was thought up and attempted by the party of Lincoln. Whether it worked or not is a moot point.
I’m not black, but it seems to me I’d be even more turned off by it if I was. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say the deliberate attempt to scapegoat black folks and stir up their enemies might have put black voters off from the Republican party long-term.
Sailboat
It certainly puts that Howard Dean gaffe (about the black hotel workers) in its proper perspective.