Aside from the “Fascist’ slur applied by the Democrat party to every Republican President and candidate they face (even one they used to love – before he became a Republican), followed by later saying they weren’t so bad compared to the Next GOP Hitler – even as Democrats and the Left celebrate Fascist actions – there’s also the good old-fashioned scream of racist.

I’ve covered some of this before in Democrats Losing Their Grip on Blacks, but in that I only briefly referenced one of the long held myths that supposedly support this argument, with this 10m video – the infamous “Southern Strategy” used by Richard Nixon to win the 1968 election and then taken over by the GOP to win the old Confederate States from the Democrats.

As good as that video is this recent article, The Goldwater landslide myth, fills in some blanks as it addresses yet another claim by a Democrat about the GOP’s takeover of the South.

Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, one of only 6 Republican senators who did, with the other 27 voting for it and providing the two-thirds majority needed to overcome a Democrat filibuster (because the Democrats split 44-23 on the Act), and then in the 1964 election (a landslide win for LBJ) carried 5 of the 11 Confederate states with his stand against civil rights. The argument is that this set the scene for Nixon’s (and the GOP’s) Southern Strategy in the years to come.

But there’s a few problems with that:

Four years later, Nixon too carried 5 of the 11 Confederate states. None of them, however, were the 5 states Goldwater carried. Those five states all went to a Democrat which shows that if Nixon had a Southern strategy of wrangling klansmen into the Republican Party, he failed miserably. For example, Goldwater received 87% of the vote in Mississippi in 1964. Four years later, Nixon received less than 14% of the vote in that state.

In 1972 Nixon got all eleven confederate states, but then that was a landslide election where he won 49 states. just as in Eisenhower’s 1956 landslide meant he got five Southern states, just like Goldwater. But as with the “Fascist” slur nobody has accused Eisenhower of being a racist against Blacks.

To make this argument work in the first place meant ignoring Nixon’s decades long support of civil rights, which the article details, including helping LBJ shepard the 1957 Civil Rights Act, which gets overlooked by the 1964 Act but which broke important barriers. Nixon fought the Southern segregationists far more than did members of their own party.

The real reason they hated Nixon’s guts was because of his role twenty years earlier in destroying the communist Alger Hiss, who’d been a favourite of Washington’s intellectual Left. Being able to suddenly call him a racist was just the icing on the Watergate cake.

Of the post-Nixon “Southern Strategy” there was no effect seen at all:

Democrat Jimmy Carter carried 10 Confederate states (hurray for Virginia) in 1976.
…
While Republicans were able finally to crack the Democrat Party’s southern wall in presidential races, state politics remained Democrat for decades. Only one of the 23 Democrat senators who opposed civil rights in 1964 flipped parties.

Republicans did not capture a majority of the South’s congressional seats until the Gingrich Revolution of 1994 — 30 years after the Goldwater landslide.

And it took years longer for the GOP to capture the State houses and Senate, as the article details in a timeline. By the time it was complete all the 1960’s Southern segregationists were in nursing homes or under the soil.

Why it’s almost as if all those Southern Crackers kept voting Democrat until they day they died and the GOP only succeeded as they were replaced. Some GOP “Southern Strategy” that was.