It isn't. They just make up a narrative where they become the good guys. So in this case the parties flipped. The New Deal had nothing to do with blacks flipping to Democrats. FDR only got 70% (give or take) of their vote. They were totally Republicans before Nixon the racist switched to his southern strategy. And the Jimmy Carter apparently became a racist with his own Southern strategy in 1976:
Then in 1980 the whole country went racist with the south:
Then even worse in 1984:
The reality is that most of the world doesn't revolve around race. There is a whole other set of factors for why the switch up happened. Could race be involved with some of it? Yeah, but it didn't stop those party switching racists from voting almost lock step together for Carter over a decade after the Civil Rights act.
Good rebuttal with the Carter election. That was a little before my time (I was alive but not politically aware) so I'm not going off personal experience, but from what I know Carter was kind of a unicorn candidate.
He was a Dem but from Georgia who was also a strong evangelical candidate. He supposedly ran as an apolitical candidate and the country was reacting to the Nixon scandal and the Ford pardon.
So Carter, being an evangelical southerner, was a unique candidate for that moment.
There's a reason why Reagan opened his campaign in the south and played right into the southern strategy which obviously was effective as you can see.
The way I understand it was the conservative south were democrats because of, well Lincoln. That started to crack under FDR as he expanded the federal govt and sided with unions. Then it cracked open after the civil rights bill. Lyndon Johnson said that he probably just delivered the south to the republicans for the next century.
Anyway the Southern Strategy is summed up as this. The prevalent question is....does the strategy ring a bell right now (culture wars, anti feminism, racial scare tactics, strong evangelical influence)?
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In 1969, an aide in the Nixon White House named Kevin Phillips published a book titled the Emerging Republican Majority.
The book argued that the Republican Party needed to use racial and social issues to build up a base of socially conservative voters in the south.
Republicans didn’t win the South solely by capitalizing on white racial angst. That decision was but one in a series of decisions the party made not just on race but on feminism and religion as well. The GOP successfully fused ideas about the role of government in the economy, women’s place in society, white evangelical Christianity and white racial grievance, in what became a “long Southern strategy” that extended well past the days of Goldwater and Nixon.
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