Funny how the first time a majority of Southern whites voted for the Republican presidential nominee

[YoungDemCA]

was in 1964.

"In the South, Goldwater broke through and won five states—the best showing in the region for a GOP candidate since Reconstruction. In Mississippi—where Franklin D. Roosevelt had won nearly 100 percent of the vote just 28 years earlier—Goldwater claimed a staggering 87 percent."[53] It has frequently been argued that Goldwater's strong performance in Southern states previously regarded as Democratic strongholds foreshadowed a larger shift in electoral trends in the coming decades that would make the South a Republican bastion (an end to the "Solid South&quot —first in presidential politics and eventually at the congressional and state levels, as well.[54]

In 1964, Goldwater ran a conservative campaign that emphasized states' rights.[57] Goldwater's 1964 campaign was a magnet for conservatives since he opposed interference by the federal government in state affairs. Although he had supported all previous federal civil rights legislation and had supported the original senate version of the bill, Goldwater made the decision to oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964. His stance was based on his view that the act was an intrusion of the federal government into the affairs of states and that the Act interfered with the rights of private persons to do or not to do business with whomever they chose.[58] In the segregated city of Phoenix in the 1950s, he had quietly supported civil rights for blacks, but would not let his name be used.[59]

All of this appealed to white Southern Democrats, and Goldwater was the first Republican to win the electoral votes of all of the Deep South states (South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana) since Reconstruction[50] (although Dwight Eisenhower did carry Louisiana in 1956). However, Goldwater's vote on the Civil Rights Act proved devastating to his campaign everywhere outside the South (besides Dixie, Goldwater won only in Arizona, his home state), contributing to his landslide defeat in 1964.

After this, a majority of white Southerners voted for open segregationist George Wallace or the "Silent Majority", "Southern Strategy" Republican nominee Richard Nixon (though it should be noted that in the 1968 Republican presidential primaries, Ronald Reagan - who, like Goldwater, also strongly opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act - was the initial favorite of the Southern delegates. The man most responsible for wooing the Southern delegates from Reagan to Nixon? Strom Thurmond).

You know the rest of the story: Nixon won the entirety of what had been the "Solid South" for an entire century, and won due to the overwhelming support of Southern whites; then, the "born-again", evangelical Southern Baptist from Georgia i.e. Jimmy Carter won much of the South with overwhelming support from black voters, combined with a significant minority of white voters (though Gerald Ford still narrowly won Southern whites, and - it should be noted - the nominally pro-civil rights Ford had been pushed significantly to the Right by a strong and bruising primary challenge from Ronald Reagan); then in 1980, Reagan himself was elected President with the strong support of Southern whites as well as many white voters outside the South who appreciated his unfounded racist anecdotes about "welfare queens from the South Side of Chicago" and had also liked the fact that he had launched his presidential campaign with a speech in support of "states rights" from the same town in Mississippi where three pro-civil rights volunteers had been murdered by the Klan not two decades earlier; and after Reagan, Southern whites (along with many Northern whites) never again voted for the Democratic Party, and certainly not at the presidential level.

From Willie Horton to "Sister Souljah" and "welfare reform" (note that white Southern Baptist Bill Clinton was the only post-Reagan Democratic candidate to win any states in which Southern white voters were a majority - and even then, only did so while pandering to racists, regrettably), from the horrible, underhanded and unfounded racist rumors that Karl Rove spread about John McCain in 2000 on behalf of adopted Texan and Holier-Than-Thou conservative Christian George W. Bush, all the way to the virulent racism directed at America's first Black President from the "Tea Party", the "Birthers", and Republican racists in general; and the fact that all of this horrifying racist bullshit that has been unleashed in "post-racial America" (*pukes*) has resulted in Donald "Birther" Trump, Stormfront's dream-come-true candidate, being nominated as the presidential candidate of the Republican Party...well, what the fuck has happened? Ugh!

To say that Lincoln is turning in his grave would be to make an incredible understatement.