Nixon led George Wallace in the South by 9 points in a hypothetical 1972 poll

[RINO Tom]

I imagine you would have actually gotten a pretty similar county split to Reagan/Carter in 1980, as uncomfortable as that is for the "Dixiecrats were the first to switch to the GOP" narrative.

[RINO Tom]

I imagine you would have actually gotten a pretty similar county split to Reagan/Carter in 1980, as uncomfortable as that is for the "Dixiecrats were the first to switch to the GOP" narrative.

There would have been some major differences as compared to 1980. Nixon would have done way better with black voters than Reagan and much worse with Deep South whites, even compared to Carter's very decent showing with that group. Nixon also would have done a lot better than Reagan in New England.

My point is that Reagan did not win the Southern states that he won in 1980 by winning the areas that had supported Wallace in 1968.  He won those states by thin margins due to suburban strength, and he lost most of the counties that the eloquent users of Atlas would now classify as filled with "racist hicks" - voters that went to Carter, per county results.

[RINO Tom]

Maybe black voters would have delivered a handful of Southern states to Nixon.

I imagine you would have actually gotten a pretty similar county split to Reagan/Carter in 1980, as uncomfortable as that is for the "Dixiecrats were the first to switch to the GOP" narrative.

There would have been some major differences as compared to 1980. Nixon would have done way better with black voters than Reagan and much worse with Deep South whites, even compared to Carter's very decent showing with that group. Nixon also would have done a lot better than Reagan in New England.

My point is that Reagan did not win the Southern states that he won in 1980 by winning the areas that had supported Wallace in 1968.  He won those states by thin margins due to suburban strength, and he lost most of the counties that the eloquent users of Atlas would now classify as filled with "racist hicks" - voters that went to Carter, per county results.

Well, Nixon only got 14% in Alabama and Mississippi in 1968.  As Reagan just barely carried these states over Carter, he needed plenty of Wallace voters to do that, and he got them.  Though yes, rural Southerners largely stayed with Carter; perhaps it was suburban Wallace voters in these states who would back Reagan in 1980 (and many of them had even voted for Ford four years earlier).

Yeah, it was more of a comment on this forum's recent obsession with "racist hicks," as if people in rural areas are inherently more racist than those in metro areas ... I'm sure everyone on this site, if it had existed during the 1976 election, would be phrasing Reagan as the more racist of the two.

[RINO Tom]

KYWildman, you really need to perform more research. The South was trending away from Democrats well before 1964. More well off voters were now able to vote Republican, mainly because of economic and racial reasons. (see the growing suburbs of the East Southern Coast) Now many of these voters went back to the Democrats in 1964, and deep southern Dixiecrats vice versa, but in 1968 they went back to Republicans, as they could afford to. The Dixiecrats, being more fiscally populist, went to George Wallace, as they could not afford to vote Republican. Many outer southerners such as those in WV still voted Democratic as there were less racial tensions in those areas plus because of their economic status.

No, you really need to read my posts in their entirety and comprehend them. I explicitly noted the trend in the South away from the Dems going back since 1944, but it only actually broke for the GOP in 1964. Some of those Deep South states had NEVER voted for a REPUBLICAN before, even if they had broken for a racist Dixiecrat third party candidate against Truman or JFK because they supported Civil Rights. And the absolutely massive swing even from just 1960 to 1964 alone in some of these states cannot be overstated, regardless of any trends. The plain and obvious conclusion is that "racial reasons" was by far the largest contributing factor, and that is what my argument was. I was refuting RINO Tom's nonsensical mental gymnastics trying to explain how ackshually Barry Goldwater and the GOP loved black people and the Democrats have been the real racists all along. I was never denying that the South had been increasingly trending away from the Democrats in direct correlation with the Democrats' trend towards Civil Rights -- that was my entire point!

How bitter and obsessed do you have to be to put the bolded words in my mouth?  in’ weirdo, lol.