Ya know, like Strom.
If you don't think it's kind of obvious which party currently has more members that think it's fun to race bait or worse, well whatever.
> And then the parties have flipped ideologies substantially
Strom Thurmond was one of three Southern segregationists who switched parties. The rest of the segregationists remained Democrats, including such famous names as George Wallace and Robert Byrd.
And the Civil Rights Act had more support from Republicans than from Democrats.
That's why I put the word "distancing" in front of the word "claim".
Does that 3 count include an exhaustive survey of voting Republicans or is it just sophistry to get people reading the remark to focus on prominent individuals?
Unless you have an exhaustive survey of individuals who switched parties, let's avoid unfounded (and likely partisan) speculation about what such a survey might say.
In 1976, after the South supposedly supposedly switched allegiance, shortly after LBJ's (reported) claim that he'd "lost the South for a generation", all the Southern states except Virginia voted for Carter, a Democrat.
(Apparently there's some doubt about whether LBJ actually said that. The media may have lied to us again.)
That Ford was closely associated with Nixon and had pardoned him? Why would the South have cared more about that than the rest of the country? Despite the pardon, Ford won 27 states, including California, and 48% of the popular vote.
In 68 much of the South voted for Wallace, a Democrat running as an independent, and Texas voted for the Democrat ticket. In 72 every state save MA and DC voted for Nixon, so the South doesn't stand out there. Then in 76 the South voted for the Democrat, Carter.
It's not until Reagan that we see the South reliably voting Republican.