Your "evidence" means little to someone who lived it. Why? The only reason that either Clinton or Carter were able to win Southern states was because they were fairly conservative - especially in comparison to today's Democratic party. What you need to remember about the South is that regardless of which party the Deep South followed, it was ALWAYS strongly conservative. Can you even begin to dispute that sentence? No, you can't - not factually. It is true that the Deep South is not as conservative as it used to be, but it's still strongly conservative when compared to the rest of the country. I mean, look how many in Alabama were willing to vote for an accused child molester just so they wouldn't elect a liberal! So if you did not address the fact that Democrat/Republican meant quite a bit less than conservative/liberal, then you missed out on much of what happened.
And don't try to tell me that race "had little to do with it". You do know that Mississippi didn't finalize ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment (banning slavery) until 2013, right? That's five years ago. And you do know there's "
segregation academies" still in operation in the South, don't you? I attended one. Racism, sir, informs daily life there to an extent that you cannot know unless you've both lived there for many years
and lived somewhere outside the Deep South in a place that gives one real perspective.
After all, do you really think it was an accident that Reagan gave his first speech in his first presidential campaign in Philadelphia, MS - a states' rights speech at that? What was up with that? His campaign adviser Lee Atwater put it best:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
No, you don't know. If you want a better education, read "
The Senator and the Sharecropper". The opening scenes take place about ten miles from where I grew up. That book will show you just how much race has to do with Southern politics.
