What this is all about is that the majority of Southern whites won't accept non whites as equals

[coldmountain]

123. The South abandoned the Democratic party out of racism!

The long goodbye

Is the white Southern Democrat extinct, endangered or just hibernating?

AFTER President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he reportedly turned to his press secretary and lamented that Democrats “have lost the South for a generation.” Johnson's judgment was optimistic. Despite brief flashes of strength during the presidential elections of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Democrats—particularly white Democrats—have been losing ground in the South for half a century.

In the Congress that passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the eleven former Confederate states—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia—had a total of 128 senators and representatives, of whom 115 were white Democrats (see chart). In 1981 Republicans took control of the Senate for the first time since 1953, but most Southern elected officials remained white Democrats. When Republicans took control of the House in 1995, white Democrats still comprised one-third of the South's tally.

This year, however, it seems that white Southern Democrats have met their Appomattox: they will account for just 24 of the South's 155 senators and congressmen in the incoming Congress. The delegations from Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina held only white Democrats in 1963; when the new Congress convenes next January, they will have none. Georgia was also once a Democratic stronghold—in 1981 its House delegation's lone Republican was a fresh-faced young history professor called Newt Gingrich—but this year Republicans won every statewide office. Democrats do well in black and Hispanic-dominated districts, the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, and the university-heavy areas around Raleigh, North Carolina and Austin, Texas. Otherwise the South is largely red.

http://www.economist.com/node/17467202