[cmurf]

Presidential elections lead the transition in the parties, and you can see this as early as 1948, and clearly by 1964, directly traceable to the Civil Rights Act. Barry Goldwater fought against the CRA, and he won Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina that year.

In the 1968 election you can see the transitional effects strongly, as George Wallace won 4 of those 5 states, and the Nixon Southern Strategy succeeds by 1972 with all the southern states voting Republican. And that was the end of the Southern Democrats. 1976 is an outliar, and it's 1992 before there's a crack in the armor and Clinton wins a few southern states. And the strategy as told by Lee Atwater is hardly a myth. https://www.thenation.com/article/exclusive-lee-atwaters-inf...

That there are additional reasons why southerners flipped to the Republican party, including opposition to increasingly social liberalism of Democrats, does not mean the Southern strategy is a myth. An example of myth is the "lost cause" of the confederacy, revisionist history.

[0815test]

Barry Goldwater had significant reservations about the CRA's constitutionality, that's the only reason he voted against it. And he freely let people use that vote against him, without ever trying in the slightest to make it sound like a good thing to some fraction of voters. He was sort of like the Rand Paul of his day.