Oh my....she disputes the realignment of the 60s and 70s by saying that Republicans were competitive in the South. But she focuses on a few cases of at the Presidential level while ignoring the dominance of the Democrats at the Congressional level. Moreover, Swain neglects the important actions taken by FDR and Truman administration that were already generating racial backlash in the South.
Oh my, she notices that replacement of Dems took 20 plus years...indeed it did...partisanship is largely habitual and incumbency advantages make realignments take a long time. Quite bizarre performance.
None of this is particularly impressive social science in my view.
As is well known, both parties were quite aware of the effect championing civil rights would have on the Democrats and Republicans at the time.
There is plenty of bad social science around...any reason that you think Carol Swain makes a particularly compelling case?
It seems you have a pretty solid grasp on the complexity of this issue, but I just want to interject something, because there's something that gets thrown around a lot, and I think people misunderstand the reality of it, which is this idea that the parties "flipped" on race.
They didn't flip on race. Before the civil rights era, there were racists in both parties, but the largest race-related issues were all heavily regional, and the Democratic coalition controlled the south. But when you dig down into the data, it becomes clear that it's not accurate to say that racists used to be Democrats and then became Republicans
en masse.
For example, if you break down the Civil Rights Act vote by region, you'll notice that a Democrat in the south was more likely to vote for the CRA than a Republican in the south, and a Democrat in the north was more likely to vote for the CRA than a Republican in the north. However, when you look at the vote nationally, a generic Republican was far more likely to vote for the CRA, simply because there were almost no southern Republicans.
Civil Rights was pushed by a coalition of both Republicans and Democrats (primarily, but not exclusively, northern Democrats), and the Democratic party ended up owning a lot of the changes, which hurt them among white southerners, because many of those changes were aimed directly at southern discrimination. The GOP gradually won over a lot of these white southerners. So, if you want to say that white southern racists generally switched from the Democratic party to the Republican party, that would probably be an accurate statement, but that is a far different thing than what people generally think when they imagine the parties "switched sides" on race.
The truth is, this idea of one party being the party of minorities, and the other being the party of disaffected whites is wholly new, and really can only exist because we now live in a time in which we have nationalized the two major parties to an extent never before seen. But just as it's an oversimplification to think of one party as pro-choice and one party as pro-life, dividing the parties along racial lines is still relatively inaccurate. In truth, both major parties have always been primarily economic coalitions, and the apparent shift in racial attitudes is tied wholly to a unique change in voting behavior specifically among southern whites.