Myth 1: “To be competitive in the South, Republicans started to pander to white racists in the 1960s.” In reality, Republicans were politically competitive in the South as early as 1928, when Rep. Herbert Hoover won forty-seven percent of the South’s popular vote in the presidential election. A similar situation occurred in 1955 when Dwight Eisenhower won several southern states after supporting desegregation in the Supreme Court decision of Brown vs. The Board of Education.
Myth 2: “Southern Democrats, angry with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, switched parties.” In reality, only 1 out of the 21 Democratic senators who opposed the Civil Rights Act became a Republican. The other 20 remained in the Democratic party or were replaced by other Democrats. On average, it took another 25 years before those remaining 20 seats went Republican.
Myth 3: “Since the implementation of the Southern Strategy [in the 1960s], the Republicans have dominated the South.” Richard Nixon, the supposed mastermind behind the Southern Strategy, actually lost the Deep South in the 1968 election while Democrat Jimmy Carter nearly swept the region eight years later in 1976. Democrat Bill Clinton won six southern states in 1992, including Kentucky, West Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, Georgia and Louisiana. It was not until 1994 that Republicans held the majority of southern congressional seats, 30 years after the Civil Rights Act.
Professor Swain quotes Kevin Williamson of the National Review: “If Southern Rednecks ditched the Democrats because of a Civil Rights law passed in 1964, it’s strange that they waited until the late 1980s and early 1990s to do so. They say things move slower in the South—but not that slow.”
Swain concludes that it’s the South itself that has changed. The region now holds the conservative views of pro-life, pro-gun, and pro-small government. “Southern whites are far more likely to vote for a black conservative like Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina than a white liberal. In short, history has moved on. Like other regions of the country, the South votes values, not skin color.”