I am against racism for various reasons...
but I want to see a fair debate. I think we should recognize that the change in voting patterns is not just about racism.
Most of my relatives in New York and New England switched from voting democrat to republican because democrats abandoned their values. It was not just the south in happened all over the suburbs everywhere.
Many evangelical and Catholic voters were abandoned by the democrats.
Any party that favors partial birth abortion is going to be seen by many believers as a party that is supporting infant murder.
Many believers are going to leave a party with such a barbaric stance and many of those believers have families and live in suburbs.
this part of the wikipedia shows it maybe more nuanced.
In academia, "southern strategy" refers primarily to "top down" narratives of the political realignment of the South, which suggest that Republican leaders consciously appealed to many white southerners' racial resentments in order to gain their support.
[5] This top-down narrative of the southern strategy is generally believed to be the primary force that transformed southern politics following the civil rights era.
[6][7] This view has been questioned by historians such as
Matthew Lassiter,
Kevin M. Kruse and
Joseph Crespino, who have presented an alternative, "bottom up" narrative, which Lassiter has called the "suburban strategy". This narrative recognizes the centrality of racial backlash to the political realignment of the South,
[8] but suggests that this backlash took the form of a defense of
de facto segregation in the suburbs, rather than overt resistance to
racial integration, and that the story of this backlash is a national, rather than a strictly southern one.
[9][10][11][12]
The perception that the Republican Party had served as the "vehicle of white supremacy in the South", particularly during the
Goldwater campaign and the presidential elections of 1968 and 1972, made it difficult for the Republican Party to win the support of black voters in the South in later years.
[4] In 2005,
Republican National Committee chairman
Ken Mehlman formally apologized to the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a national civil rights organization, for exploiting racial polarization to win elections and ignoring the black vote.
[13][14]
