Fine, but you really could have just searched "Dixiecrat".
This is a wiki link but all facts are referenced and can be followed.
en.wikipedia.org
From the article:
"President
Lyndon B. Johnson, although a southern Democrat himself, signed the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 and
Voting Rights Act of 1965. This led to heavy opposition from both Southern Democrats and Southern Republicans. Subsequent to the passage of civil rights legislation, many white southerners switched to the Republican Party at the national level. Many scholars have said that Southern whites shifted to the Republican Party due to racial conservatism."
Best (and maybe even more confusing) is the percentage of D vs R that voted for the Civil Rights Act. But it was almost entirely based on location and those Dixiecrats that joined with existing Republicans to form the current day hallucinogenic drug known as Conservatism.
I saw those figures, too. No reason to be confused by them. Larger proportions of Republicans voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act than Democrats.
I'll post them here just because...
By party
The original House version:[25]
Democratic Party: 152–96 (61–39%)
Republican Party: 138–34 (80–20%)
Cloture in the Senate:[26]
Democratic Party: 44–23 (66–34%)
Republican Party: 27–6 (82–18%)
The Senate version:[25]
Democratic Party: 46–21 (69–31%)
Republican Party: 27–6 (82–18%)
The Senate version, voted on by the House:[25]
Democratic Party: 153–91 (63–37%)
Republican Party: 136–35 (80–20%)
I also read the wikipage on the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and found this:
"After Johnson signed the Act into law, newly enfranchised racial minorities began to vote for liberal Democratic candidates throughout the South, and Southern white conservatives began to switch their party registration from Democrat to Republican en masse.[139]:290".
So I had a look at the reference, and the claim is made by "Richard H. Pildes".
"These voters were, on average, much more liberal than the median voting
white Southerner had been before 1965. No longer could conservative, oneparty political monopoly be maintained. Over the next generation, these new voters ripped asunder the old Democratic Party of the South, eventually
fragmenting it into two parties: a highly conservative Republican Party, into
which many of these formerly Democratic Southern voters fled, and a new,
moderate-to-liberal Democratic Party that was more in line ideologically with
the rest of the Democratic Party nationwide. There was, of course, a selfreinforcing feedback dynamic to this whole process as well; as the Democratic Party became more liberal in the South, more conservatives fled; as more conservatives fled, the Democratic Party became even more liberal. At the national level, the progressive strands on racial issues that had existed in the Republican Party diminished, to be replaced by a more conservative stance on racial issues, while the Democratic Party at the national level became the party of racial liberalism."
It's Pildes that is confusing. I would like to verify his claims with some dry stats. They're hard to find! He doesn't provide any. Why would masses of Dixiecrats flee to a Party that is more supportive of Lyndon B. Johnson's position than his own Democratic Party? What does Pildes mean when he says the old Democratic Party was fragmented into a "highly conservative Republican Party" and a "moderate-to-liberal Democratic Party" when the Republican Party was born pre-Civil War? He's referring to the same Democratic Party with a "liberal" side and a "highly conservative" side and labeling the "highly conservative" side the "Republican Party", is he not?
