issues."...that's from your NYT Magazine article. The two scholars noted in that article totally ignore the voting records of Black Southerners while proposing that Southern Whites moved to the GOP for "Economic Reasons" and not race...here's what actually happened...
...from Stuart Stevens' book "It Was All A Lie"...
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The Republican decision to exploit the race issue and abandon the option of becoming a party of reform manifested itself in the 1961 speech in Atlanta by Barry Goldwater to a gathering of Southern Republicans. "We're not going to get the Negro vote as a bloc in 1964 and 1968, so we ought to go hunting where the ducks ar," he declared. Goldwater then spelled it out, saying that school integration was "the responsibility of the states. I would not like to see my party assume it is the role of the federal government to enforce integration in the schools."
Earlier in the book he notes...
It hadn't always been this way. Before 1964, Republican presidential candidates could expect to get between 30 and 40 percent of the African American vote. Dwight Eisenhower got 39 percent in 1956. Four years later, Richard Nixon campaigned with Jackie Robinson and won 32 percent of black voters. In 1964, Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act, and his black support plummeted to 7 percent. Since 1964, no Republican presidential candidate has broken 17 percent with African American voters, and by 2016 only 3 percent considered themselves Republican.
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Just because two guys try to "whitewash" the Southern Strategy doesn't understate its reality and significance.