Clarification: Do you mean Democrats who identified with segregationist causes, or do you politicians who left the Democratic Party to form the States' Rights Democratic Party, and who ran Strom Thurmond against Dewey (R) and Truman (D) at the end of the 1940s?
Like, Trent Lott would have been 7 or 8 years old when Thurmond ran.
But Lott was involved with segregationist causes in college (kept his fraternity all-white)... and wound up getting elected to the House and the Senate as a Republican, but with the endorsement of (meaning: basically being handed the seat of) retiring Democrat William Colmer... which made Lott one of the first Mississippians elected as a Republican to national office since Reconstruction.
Lott had been Colmer's executive assistant. I'm not sure what party Lott was registered with in the late 1960s and early 1970s (by then, Colmer was endorsing Nixon and Goldwater rather than Democratic candidates for national office), but he definitely came out of a Democratic power structure.
It may be an implicit assumption, but is it a correct one? That Goldwater won the South, in a losing effort, seems almost anecdotal, at best.
Of those politicians (e.g. Congressmen, Senators) who identified themselves as Dixiecrats - how many crossed the aisle and became Republicans? How many Dixiecrats left politics, were defeated or simply remained with the Democratic Party, after their movement failed?
Despite it's prevalence of belief, I'm having a difficult time in identifying when this migration took place, if even at all.
The vast majority of Dixiecrats - the staunch segregationist members of the Democratic Party - did not become members of the Republican Party, either before or after the passage of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964.
In fact, almost all remained Democrats for the duration of their time in office.
Dixiecrats who remained Democrats after 1964:
Orval Fabus Benjamin Travis Laney John Stennis James Eastland Allen Ellender Russell Long John Sparkman John McClellan Richard Russell Herman Talmadge George Wallace Lester Maddox John Rarick Robert Byrd Al Gore, Sr. Bull Connor
Dixiecrats who became Republicans after 1964: Strom Thurmond Miles Godwin
Am I missing something, here?
Well the 1964 elections presented the clearest divide between the Democrats and Republicans in terms of Civil Rights. However, despite LBJ winning a landslide victory, Barry Goldwater ended up winning the Deep South states. So I suppose it is an implicit assumption that the segregationist Dixiecrats in these places switched allegiance to the Republican party, seeing them as more conservative.
Check out this section of the FAQ:
Is this FAQ post to be taken as being indicative of the opinions of most historians, here?