A good solid reputation runs for 10-20yr even after you stop doing whatever it was that got you the reputation.
Look how long it took the midwest to realize that the neoliberals they voted for were shipping their jobs to china. They were running on the good will of supporting unions in decades prior.
The south flipped because republicans figured out that adding a bunch of religious rhetoric to their platform got them easy votes. If it was just civil rights the south would have been voting blue well into the 1980s.
> The south flipped because republicans figured out that adding a bunch of religious rhetoric to their platform got them easy votes.
That’s kind of true, but also oversimplified. Republicans have always been the party of religious evangelicals. In the time of Lincoln, abolition was in large part an evangelical Christian movement. After 1965, when both parties had embraced the civil rights acts, social and religious issues took on more importance.
Apart from that, you’re overlooking the economy. Southern states were poor and agrarian during the New Deal era. The wanted government support, they opposed tariffs, they supported a weak currency. All that places them at odds with big business, which was the other leg of the Republican Party. In 1930, the median income in the south was just half of that in the Midwest. After 1960, that changed dramatically due to southern industrialization. Newly minted middle class suburbanites started voting for low taxes and low regulation, just like in the rest of the country.
A good solid reputation runs for 10-20yr even after you stop doing whatever it was that got you the reputation.
Look how long it took the midwest to realize that the neoliberals they voted for were shipping their jobs to china. They were running on the good will of supporting unions in decades prior.
The south flipped because republicans figured out that adding a bunch of religious rhetoric to their platform got them easy votes. If it was just civil rights the south would have been voting blue well into the 1980s.