What if the New Deal Coalition...wasn't?
A look at the extent to which the South was meaningfully in coalition of Democrats an key issues
One of the great ‘true but misleading’ statements of 20th century American politics is that ‘more Democrats than Republicans voted against the Civil Rights Act”; one of the greater oversimplifications in response is the claim that the parties ‘flipped’ somewhere between the 1940s and 1970s. The electoral record is indeed complex, particularly as Southerners showed some apparent sectional loyalty by embracing Nixon over the Minnesotan Hubert Humphrey, but largely coming back to the Democratic fold for one vote for Georgian Carter and giving Arkansas Clinton relatively good results as well. This irregular voting behavior has opened the door for some outlandish theories - that it was, for example, primarily due to changing economic factors unrelated to the Civil Rights movement.
But what much of both sides of the discussion misses is that at least since the death of Franklin Roosevelt the South has not been a clear coalition partner even in the economic issues that are ostensibly the foundation of the ‘New Deal Coalition". Simply looking at votes on two issues - the Taft Hartley Act of 1947, and the Social Security Amendments of 1965 - reveals that the ‘coalition’ was always on shaky ground and the vision of white southerners as reacting *against* a neoliberal turn by the Democrats doesn’t make much sense.
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