Don't forget to vote

[CJD]

(11-06-2019, 05:32 PM)bfine32 Wrote: What you say about KY is true Bevin will be our 25th Dem Governor since 1900 as opposed to only 5 GOP. It's why i always find it amusing when folks say the parties "swapped" in the 60's. My family has been very active in state politics for generations and have always been Democrats. I am the black sheep.

Ah, that topic is always fun haha. I am not politically literate enough to fully quantify what exactly happened in the 60s, so I don't know that the parties swapped anything explicitly. But one think that is undeniable is that the states that were previously Democratic strongholds now vote almost exclusively Republican. The year that began: 1964.
https://www.270towin.com/historical-presidential-elections/

So, did the southern states switch their votes out of spite because a Democrat proposed the civil rights act legislation and his Vice President, also a democrat, passed it? Did the Republicans shift their strategy after the Civil Rights act to pick up the southern racists (coined: the Southern Strategy)? Did some Democrats switch parties after the civil rights act? Did the two parties kind of mix and meld based more on geography than party and re-emerge as they today? Was it a combination of all these things? Or did something completely unrelated to the Civil Rights Act cause that particular voter base shift?

I dunno. That's for the smarter people to diagnose.

The truth is Democrats and Republicans of the past were, generally speaking, more right wing than the average person is today, so they'd all probably identify as Republicans if they were plopped into modern politics anyway. So the switch of the 1960s doesn't really concern me. I focus more on the actual policies of the politicians of today, rather than discussing what the politicians of the past may have done and who gets credit for what policies.