Shtinamin_ said:
Why do you think they vote more D than R? Better policy? Better change? Or something more surface level like skin tone? (I personally think voting for skin tone and gender is one of the worst and scariest things to do. I like to understand who I vote for and what they plan to do and what they’ve done, and their “success rate”.) |
A lot of Black voters felt betrayed by the Republican Party when Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) voted against the Senate version of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, especially after enduring a century of overt racism from the Democratic Party, especially in the South.
That was the year when Goldwater was the Republican nominee for President against the incumbent, Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Another problem was that when Goldwater flipped five formerly reliable Democratic Southern states in the general election, the Republicans took careful note of that win pattern even though Goldwater otherwise lost in one of the worst landslides in American history. And so the Republicans began campaigning towards white Southern conservatives who felt betrayed by Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act. Nixon and George Wallace (who ran as an independent) both ran their campaigns using dog-whistle language geared towards white voters panicking about the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war movement. Wallace siphoned off enough voters from Hubert Humphrey to give Nixon a huge win. This was what was known as the Southern Strategy, and today the South is dominated by the Republican Party, except in urban areas like Houston and Atlanta, as well as the border areas of Texas. Reagan also appealed to white blue-collar workers who lost their jobs in the 1970s as manufacturing moved overseas, though he was staunchly anti-union, with his handling of the PATCO strike being a prime example.
Republicans perpetuate their deficits with women and minorities by attacking abortion, affirmative action, immigration, and cities. That isn't to say that Democrats are perfect, far from it, in that too many of them pay lip service but little else to these issues. With that said, I live in a state which is Republican top to bottom, even in the two largest cities, and it has the exact same issues with crime and homelessness (crime is, in fact, higher here than in New York or California), as any Democratic state or city, along with a lot of rural poverty and drug use.
