I still don't understand how Johnson only got 13% in Mississippi. Any Democrat is guaranteed a floor of around 42% without winning more than 10% of whites.
The black vote was severely repressed. Think about Mississippi voting today if the electorate was almost all white. The results would be similar.
I still don't understand how Johnson only got 13% in Mississippi. Any Democrat is guaranteed a floor of around 42% without winning more than 10% of whites.
Mississippi's White vote has fluctuated back and forth though, Carter probably almost won it in 1976 and 1980 and Clinton would have won a solid chunk in 1992.
But blacks were voting in much greater numbers by 1976 and 1980. Ford almost won Mississippi and Reagan actually won it. Maybe Carter got something like 35% of the white vote but I wouldn’t call that “almost winning”.
Anyway, it’s hard to know to how much of the white vote Johnson carried in the Southern states he won in part because it’s hard to find out the black share of the electorate. This was pre-Voting Rights Act. I don’t think the Jim Criw voter suppression was quite as brutal in the border and rim South as it was in the Deep South, so there were blacks voting, but the black vote was still probably smaller in comparison to later. I doubt Johnson carried whites in Florida. The others (minus Texas) were all probably very close.
1976 was well after the Voting Rights Act and I had a thread sometime back about Carter and the Southern white vote. People tended to agree with my conclusion that Ford beat Carter among whites in every ex-Confederate state except Georgia, Arkansas, and Tennessee. Data was also found stating that Ford carried the Southern white vote outright 52-46.
