The utter irrelevance of "more Republicans than Democrats voted for the CRA"

[TDAS04]

But I don't see how it can be argued that Southern whites - particularly Deep South Whites -used to be anything but largely conservative, outside of the New Deal Era of say, 1935-1950.  Unfortunately, this conservatism manifested itself in a bad way - racial segregation, along with many good ways - high religiosity, love of country, etc.  These demographic trends existed before the South was solid R, and I think it's safe to say these states were conservative for a long long time.  

Is that why they seceded?  

I agree that they've long been conservative, but they haven't always been more patriotic than other Americans.

[TDAS04]

While it's true that it took a while for Republican control of the South to trickle down to the local level, the CRA clear impacted the Deep South's voting patterns in presidential elections.  Even Carter lost (albeit narrowly) the Southern white vote to Ford in 1976.  Also, even though blacks had started moving in the Democrats' direction in the 1930s, 1964 was when blacks began consistently delivering >80% of their vote to Democrats (which they have ever since).  It didn't matter that Goldwater wasn't a racist, or that LBJ was personally racist.  Goldwater voted against the CRA, and Johnson aggressively pushed for it and signed it.