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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

You've misread my comment. I responded to you stating that Democrats like to distance themselves from their past by pointing out that they don't do this with claims about switching ideologies.

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?

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That 3 is the number of politicians who switched. I focus on prominent individuals because history has recorded their actions, so we can actually speak factually about their behavior.

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.

You started the thread with an assertion that is on the same footing as my speculation.

That assertion is based on facts, not speculation, and I'm happy to back it up with as many facts as you like. For example:

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.)

1976 is the only time since the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that a Democrat has won a majority of the south. !976 was definitely not a regular election. The Democratic candidate was white evangelical southerner. The Republican candidate was a northerner who had been Nixon's vice president and had pardoned Nixon. It took pretty extreme circumstances for the south to vote for a Democrat after 1964.

What are the extreme circumstances there? That the Democrat was a Southerner? So were Clinton and Gore.

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.

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