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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhat I Amazing Is That Texas Used To Be A Blue State. What The Heck Happened -----
to those people? When I started at DOL in 1974 Texas was blue. It had the largest public employee association in the country.
Skink
(10,122 posts)Honeycombe8
(37,648 posts)and it's just my opinion, that some of the social issues just got to be too much for conservative Democrats. Affirmative action and quotas were a big part of it, IMO. More minorities. Then ultimately gay rights. Remember that Texas, being so near Mexico, has a huge hispanic immigrant population.
Also, there seems to have been a lacking of strong Democratic candidates like Ann Richards. They turned into weak sounding, smallish, stereotypical men. Rick Perry used to be a Democrat himself. He changed parties along with everyone else.
I lived in Louisiana and Texas during the 1970's until now. That's my take on it.
LiberalFighter
(50,928 posts)Honeycombe8
(37,648 posts)he hunts, he has a strong authoritative voice, he is decisive....whereas teh Democratic men are pale, unhealthy looking, with small voices, unattractive. In other words, the Democrats have been unable to find a candidate who can WIN.
In politics, it's often the case that if you want to be a leader, you have to look and sound like one.
WCGreen
(45,558 posts)seen as the party of pot smoking, liberated women and Civil Rights were being enforced by the federal government.
NoPasaran
(17,291 posts)Starting sometime in the 1970s, southern conservatives started moving to the GOP in one of the great political realignments of history. A couple of decades later, the TDP was as irrelevant as the Texas Republican Party had once been.
Texas is a conservative state, and it's tended to be a one-party state. (Even the antebellum Whigs found it tough going.) It's just the label that has changed over the years.
LiberalFighter
(50,928 posts)B Calm
(28,762 posts)onenote
(42,703 posts)Couldn't have been too blue if they were already electing repubs.
Manifestor_of_Light
(21,046 posts)My parents were delegates to the 1958 Texas Democratic Convention.
They were part of a group trying to nominate Henry B. Gonzalez for governor.
They said there were fistfights, walkouts and rump conventions!!
And some old lady hit Father over the head with her purse in the middle of a free-for-all!!!
Ah, the good old days!!!
thelordofhell
(4,569 posts)elleng
(130,905 posts)Is the white Southern Democrat extinct, endangered or just hibernating?
Nov 11th 2010
AFTER President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he reportedly turned to his press secretary and lamented that Democrats have lost the South for a generation. Johnson's judgment was optimistic. Despite brief flashes of strength during the presidential elections of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Democratsparticularly white Democratshave been losing ground in the South for half a century.
In the Congress that passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the eleven former Confederate statesAlabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginiahad a total of 128 senators and representatives, of whom 115 were white Democrats (see chart). In 1981 Republicans took control of the Senate for the first time since 1953, but most Southern elected officials remained white Democrats. When Republicans took control of the House in 1995, white Democrats still comprised one-third of the South's tally.
This year, however, it seems that white Southern Democrats have met their Appomattox: they will account for just 24 of the South's 155 senators and congressmen in the incoming Congress. The delegations from Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina held only white Democrats in 1963; when the new Congress convenes next January, they will have none. Georgia was also once a Democratic strongholdin 1981 its House delegation's lone Republican was a fresh-faced young history professor called Newt Gingrichbut this year Republicans won every statewide office. Democrats do well in black and Hispanic-dominated districts, the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, and the university-heavy areas around Raleigh, North Carolina and Austin, Texas. Otherwise the South is largely red.
This does not indicate a disappearance of liberals. White Southern Democrats were largely conservative before, and the Democratic domination of Congress in the second half of the 20th century rested on an uneasy coalition between men such as James Eastland, a senator from Mississippi who insisted three years after Brown v Board of Education banned segregation that the vast majority of Negroes want their own schools, their own hospitals, their own churches, their own restaurants, and northern urban liberals such as Ted Kennedy. Strom Thurmond, Richard Shelby and Phil GrammSouthern Republican stalwarts allwere first elected as Democrats, and of the 37 Democrats who voted against the health-care bill in March, 16 were Southern whites.'
http://www.economist.com/node/17467202
reformist2
(9,841 posts)Chipper Chat
(9,678 posts)Fire and brimstone! Vote republican or you'll go to hell. Etc:
LiberalFighter
(50,928 posts)It is aliens from outside the galaxy returning to invade the bodies of their women.
Selatius
(20,441 posts)Prior to the Civil Rights Act, the New Deal Coalition was forged to fight off the Great Depression and curb some of the more grievous abuses on Wall Street. Progressive taxation and jobs programs seemed to ensure that the New Deal Coalition would last for a very long time.
In those days, social wedge issues involving guns, gays, and the Bible were hardly addressed by any of the two major parties. The result is that people tended to align politically over economic issues. It is over economic issues that the Democratic Party won the most votes. The party became known as the party of the working class, while the Republican Party was the party of private business interest and Wall Street.
The social movements of the 1960s and the Civil Rights Act all but guaranteed the destruction of the New Deal Coalition. It took some time, but the new alignment essentially meant that the Democratic Party lost most of the rural vote, where once rural locales were hotbeds of left-wing activism in decades past. While most working class people in rural areas have more economic commonality with workers in urban areas, they tend to separate over social issues, and that separation has never been gapped.
Given that the new play by Wall Street is to donate cash to members of both political parties, usually one more than the other during any mid-term and major election year but always an amount to both, the parties tend to fight over social issues instead of economic ones. It's the safer bet. Followed by tremendous corporate consolidation over radio and television programming, this trend would only be reinforced, as the shareholders of these companies prefer the ostracism of views considered too far to the left for their liking. Few shareholders would allow their networks to push policies that specifically challenge their economic monopoly.
Orangepeel
(13,933 posts)bemildred
(90,061 posts)For the second time in 200+ years, the South stuck by the slaveowners and racists.