ACTUAL facts!

Posted on: November 15, 2018 at 14:03:15 CT

After the 1964 election--the first after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the opportune time for racist Democrat voters to abandon the party in favor of Republicans--Democrats 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.

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.

In the Senate, Republicans picked up four southern Senate seats in the 1960s and 1970s, while Democrats also picked up four. Democratic incumbents won routinely. If anything, those racist southern voters kept voting Democrat.

After Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974, Democrat Jimmy Carter swept the South en route to the presidency in 1976. Did Carter similarly run on racist themes? Or was he simply a stronger candidate? After Ronald Reagan carried the south in two landslides (including the biggest in U.S. history in 1984) and George H.W. Bush ran similarly strongly in 1988 while promising to be a "third Reagan term," Democrat Bill Clinton split the southern states with Bush in 1992 and with Bob Dole in 1996.

All the while, Democrats kept winning House, Senate, and gubernatorial elections. Only in 2000 did southern voters return to unanimous Electoral College support for a Republican presidential candidate.