Is the Party Switch a Myth?

Presidential elections are good to look at to get a generalized idea of the political landscape of the time. Congressional elections are more important and narrow and so tell more about which way the state is leaning. Here are the Senate election results for the deep south from 1962-1966, right before and after the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

There was one Republican Senatorial victory in 1966, but it was a narrow one

After the civil rights movement the only Democrat senator that changed parties was Strom Thurmond, who infamously filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1957. He switched parties to help Goldwater, a segregationist, with his election campaign, which led him to win southern states in 1964. He, like most everyone else, eventually became significantly less racist with time. He was the first Senator to hire an African American to his staff that wasn't a clerk (Noah).

Almost all of the other senate races at the time were either unopposed or not even close. Even after the south voted republican in 1964, the democrat party in the south was still the party of racism, so they continued to vote blue for congressional seats.

Legislative elections say more about the values of a people than the presidential election. Here is a table of the percentage of Republicans in state legislation from 1962 - 2002.

The graph helps to show that as the older southern democrats began to retire or die, the younger generations that didn't have to deal with segregation or Jim Crow began to sympathize more with the republican party of the north.

Haley Barbour, the Governor of Mississippi said "The people who led the change of parties in the South ... was my generation. My generation who went to integrated schools. I went to integrated college -- never thought twice about it ... by my time, people realized that [segregation] was the past, it was indefensible, it wasn't gonna be that way anymore. So the people who really changed the South from Democrat to Republican was a different generation from those who fought integration."

Civil Rights Act of 1957

• House "YEA" R: 84% vs. D: 51%
• Senate "YEA" R: 93% vs. D: 59%

Civil Rights Act of 1964

• House “YEA” R: 78% vs. D: 69%
• Senate “YEA” R: 82% vs. D: 60%

Democrat Hubert Humphrey and Republican Everett Dirksen worked together to make the bill more acceptable for both parties.

Dirksen then gave a speech that reminded his colleagues that the Republican Party stood for equality since its founding in the years before the Civil War. The speech convinced 71 Senators to agree to the bill and end the 60 day filibuster (NCC).

To Summarize:

1. The presidential election maps of the 60's and 70's can't be used to attribute racist motive.
2. Senate elections reflect a clear democrat dominance in the south before and after the Civil Rights Act.
3. The south had been increasingly economically republican since about 1942, but racial issues kept them voting democrat.
4. State legislation remained dominated by democrats in the south until a younger generation, who was more sympathetic to the republican party and accustomed to integration, organically came to power in the mid 90's and early 2000's.
5. There was a higher percentage of republicans in Congress that voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but it was still very bipartisan.

In conclusion, these facts debunk the myth of the party switch.