Why, all the Democrats had to do was pass one stinkin’ bill and the game was over. It would be like Republicans sponsoring a gay marriage law and suddenly getting 90% of the gay vote.
There you have it, folks: the most famous piece of civil rights legislation in U.S. history was “one stinkin’ bill.” By the way, you are completely wrong. Black people were overwhelmingly voting Democrat decades before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, although the margins shifted a lot after that bill. And of course it’s not just because the Democrats passed “one stinkin’ bill,” it’s that Republicans - including some Republicans who used to be Democrats - did everything in their power to stop the bill.
Not at all, no. Of course Republicans have already surrendered this issue to the Democrats as well, so even if a few of them wanted to do this, it wouldn’t work any time soon.
Well if the Republicans would do just that (and maybe stop broadcasting the message that Teh Ghey are the most evil thing on the planet after Obama), the gay bloc might just consider voting for them. It’s worth giving it a whirl, anyway.
Or, y’know, just stick with the “we’ll never get the gays, let’s just get the people who hate all things gay and are gradually dying off” strategy. And keep getting crushed because many right wingers (including the grand majority of libertarians) are very uncomfortable voting for the gay-bashing party and wish that part of the Republican electorate (and elected) would STFU about Teh Ghey. And rape. And birth control. And immigrants. And women. Basically just stick to economics issues, military adventurism and busting unions.
Including ONE Republican. Go ahead, name another. Also, I said already that African-Americans voted Democrats long before the Civil Rights Act. THe Civil Rights act is where the margins went up to 90%.
My point was that Democrats get a benefit of the doubt among black voters that the Republicans do not get, and I don’t think it has anything to do with race. It has to do with the 10th amendment. African-Americans trust the federal government more than state governments, so the party of a strong federal government will tend to win their allegiance.
But most of those Democrats and people like them became Republicans.
Why are you focused on a shift from 70% to 85-90% instead of the stuff that shifted their support from almost zero to 70%?
And you’re wrong - and I’m not sure you’re that interested in hearing how anyone else sees it.
Which wouldn’t be unreasonable since state governments often oppressed black people while the federal government was more likely to intervene on their behalf, and that dynamic is still playing out on a couple of issues today. But it’s not just a Constitutional issue. It’s also about how Republicans talk to and about black people and issues a lot of black voters tend to care about. It’s not just their principles, it’s their attitude.
False. Oh wait, since you’ve given me a hard time, I’ll give you one: name them.
Actually, that’s too open-ended: name as many as you can, and I’ll counter with segregationist Democrats who remained in good standing in the party, without necessarily changing their views. I’ll bet I can name more off the top of my head than you can searching the internet. I’ll start: JW Fulbright, George Wallace, John Stennis, Al Gore Sr, Richard Russell.
The New Deal, which fundamentally changed the way relationship between the federal government and the states.
I agree with this. I just wonder how far we can get. Although even getting to 20% would be a game changer.
You’d be giving up more than that extra 10% of black voters to get them because it would require a very strong change in attitude.
It’s called authenticity. The storm ravaging of his state, and his battle for their recovery, struck a chord with it’s citizens. Black and white and otherwise, I’d say.
I would posit people responded to OBama in much the same way. (Yes, they are savvy enough to recognize there will be spin, there will be some promises unmet, some back pedalling, etc. such is the nature, it seems, of politics!)
Should authenticity become a requirement, the Republicans will indeed be badly off.
That roughly 70% support for Democrats before Civil Rights is misleading- before the Voting Rights Act, huge swaths- millions of black people- simply could not vote, and judging by where these people were and which party was preventing them from voting, that 70% would have been a lot lower had all black people actually been allowed to vote.
Fulbright, at least, changed his views and later supported Civil Rights. And all those people are dead. The Republicans, in general, do nothing to repudiate the disgusting statements of Republican office holders who are actually alive.
I’m wondering if perhaps, instead of continuing to try to defend everything Republicans have done, you could acknowledge that not everybody sees this the way you do. (By the way the list of Southern politicians who became Republicans in the years and decades after the Civil Rights Act is not short, and it includes such beacons of humanity as Thurmond, Helms, and Lott, all of whom remained in the Senate into the 2000s.) And we know how the political orientation of the South changed. As I already discussed, yes, there were greater regional differences between the parties decades ago: Southern Dixiecrats and northern progressives could both be Democrats. It’s obvious that black voters were supporting the later more than the former. There are still some regional differences but they’re nowhere near that extreme. In the end the Dixiecrats aged out of prominence, recanted their views, or became Republicans. The Democratic Party plainly moved away from them. The Republican Party has not done that. After all, they picked up the people who left the Democrats. Few Republicans will use racial slurs and rightly so, but their attitude toward black voters and the issues that matter to them does not help. It’s one thing to oppose some programs - although that can cost you votes - and another to spend years railing about “welfare queens” and calling people moochers who refuse to work and then demanding drug testing for anyone who gets government assistance. It’s one thing to disagree with a black president and another to dismiss the idea that he can even be treated as a president. I can’t really come up with a positive counterpoint to trying to shorten early voting hours and pass voter ID laws - a few Republicans are even open about the fact that they’re doing this to hurt Democrats. You can oppose a health care law without comparing it to slavery. It’s foolish to think voters don’t notice this kind of disrespect and unreasonable to expect them to ignore it.
Because it helped them. And it did so at a time when state governments were passing Jim Crow laws and lynching were a pressing concern. (Although iiandyiii is right that those historical percentages may not be reliable.)
If Republicans stop doing all those things and go in another direction I can imagine things changing over time. If they insist it’s entirely a matter of Constitutional interpretation, it won’t.
Seriously?
J. William Fulbright - last held office in 1974, died in 1995
George Wallace - last held office in 1987, died in 1998, publicly repudiated racism in 1979
John Stennis - last held office in 1989, died in 1995, voted for Civil Rights legislation in the eighties
Al Gore Sr - last held office in 1971, died in 1998
Richard Russell - last held office in 1971 at the time of his death
Trying to blame contemporary Democrats for the actions of these politicians back in the seventies is ridiculous. Should we still blame contemporary Republicans for the actions of Nixon and Agnew?
They also were not controlling the party agenda nor the major flavor of the party brand. The elements in the GOP that work against issues favored by many Blacks and who promote exclusionary and disenfranchising tactics are often in control and the dominant taste element in GOPola.
You are right though. Given the exact same candidate, one D and one R, many Blacks would choose D. That is based on party track record. A candidate is partly judged by who (s)he has chosen to align with.
So did Thurmond, and sooner than almost anyone else. the self-serving liberal myth tries to have it both ways: the Democrats who stayed true to the faith get a dispensation because they stayed true to the faith, even if it might have take them 10-20 years to repent. Those who became Republicans, even if they abandoned their segregationist views very quickly, they will remain evildoers for eternity. Well, all one of them, since that too, is a myth.
Helms and Lott may have switched before entering public office, but were first elected as Republicans, putting them in the same class as Reagan, and well, millions of other non-southern Dems who migrated to the GOP between the New Deal and the Reagan revolution.
Only Strom Thurmond actually switched parties, and he changed as much, if not more, than any southerner who remained a Democrat.
What the mythology shows is that Democrats do indeed use deception to keep black voters in the fold. Heck, even the media can’t help themselves, every so often they play old videos of George Wallace or Orval Faubus and stick an R next to their names. That’s how deep the myth has become ingrained.
I was simply arguing against the idea that Republicans had to get rid of their idiot members somehow. Democrats never needed to, when all four those five were still in the Senate, still being racist, they won 90% of the black vote.
And as far as Wallace goes, the guy was running just a bit too competitively in the 1972 race, even outside the South, for a party base that wasn’t racist anymore because they had supposedly either gone to the Republicans or reformed somehow.
No they don’t need to get rid of them. They do need to renounce what they stand for. They do, if they want to get more than a minor fraction of their votes, need to stop pursuing policy objectives that alienate Blacks and Hispanics; not have the exclusionary elements running the show. And then they need to keep it up for a few election cycles, long enough for people to believe them, suffering through the anger of those who are exclusionists in the meantime.
Hard to do.
I think it takes a charismatic leader of vision to pull it off. FDR managed to bring the Democratic Party around. By the time LBJ came the task was not as big. I don’t see any LBJ or even Reagan in your wings. But who knows who will show up? Then they have to get past the TPs in the primary …
That’s a little better, but did the Democrats actually do that? There at least the record seems to be a little muddier. Seems more like they just benignly ignored them, while still letting them keep their leadership posts.
FDR created the FEPC … that was enough to renounce what the racist elements of the time stood for. His public position was captured with this quote: “Whoever seeks to set one race against another seeks to enslave all races.” Now he was also a product of his times and no doubt held a few stereotypes and prejudices of his own, but his policies and public utterances were strong.
Truman then created a Committee on Civil Rights. The representative to the Democratic Convention overruled his compromise with the Southern wing of the party and forced a platform that was forcefully for civil rights and desegregation, which Truman then jumped aboard:
There was an active effort to renounce what the racist members stood for; there was a sustained effort, over multiple election cycles, to work for policies that remedied then current injustices. It split the party and lost him the Dixiecrat vote. He was widely expected to lose as a result. Obviously he did not.
I don’t see that as merely benignly ignoring them. It was sustained active disrespect of their views at the level of top party leadership, platform statements, and policies implemented, knowing that such came with cost.