[rayiner]

Your counterargument rests on the premise that nobody thought to weaponize "hate and stupidity" until the 1970s. That's not cogent.

> When Johnson championed the Civil Rights act it set the stage for the Southern Strategy

The concept of the “southern strategy” is not cogent. The backlash against the 1964 civil rights act happened in the 1968 election, when Wallace won 13% of the vote and 5 states. But all the Wallace states voted for Carter in 1976, along with all the other southern states besides Virginia. The south was Carter’s base—he only won the election by 2 points and lost New England, the midwest, and the west coast. Then three of the Wallace states voted for Clinton in 1992, plus several other southern states. Clinton also wouldn’t have won without the south. Your theory is that the reliable republican lean of the south states in the 1990s due to events that happened decades earlier. That’s a stupid idea.

The realignment instead lines up with the transition of southern economies from agricultural to industrial/services economies, i.e., the transition from “the south” to “the sunbelt.” That economic strategy is based on siphoning jobs from the northeast and midwest through low taxes and deregulation. That’s why Carter still won all the “solid south” (except Virginia) in 1976, and Clinton still won three of the five Wallace states in 1992. Virginia was the first southern state to transition to a sunbelt economy, followed by the piedmont south, with the deep south states like Louisiana and Kentucky trailing behind.