Civil-rights-era policy shifts drove southern whites into the Republican Party

Evidence

By the late 1960s, even fundamentalist leaders like Billy James Hargis and John R. Rice thought it best to distance themselves from the overt racism of a man like Wallace, and Nixon’s “Southern strategy” helped draw former segregationists into the Republican Party. With Democratic administrations overseeing federally mandated desegregation efforts, and with Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act into law, the Republican Party’s defense of “states’ rights” appealed to southern whites. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 105

Categorization

• XREF: Standard historiography of the Southern strategy (cf. Kruse, Lassiter); Du Mez here positions evangelical support within it. — connects to: Goldwater’s defeat shifted GOP dominance from moderates to free-market conservatism — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 506; Racially conservative whites’ defection drove the Southern realignment; Southern economic catch-up could independently explain realignment away from Democrats. — Ilyana Kuziemko and Ebonya Washington, Why Did the Democrats Lose the South?…, 43 (+14 more)