I’ve been reading Rick Perlstein’s series and something he keeps mentioning is that backlash to civil rights was causing enormous numbers of Northern and Midwestern white workers who normally voted consistently for pro-labor left-wing Democrats to suddenly sympathize with right-wing candidates like Barry Goldwater and even far-right segregationists like George Wallace.
In Before the Storm, Perlstein cites several highly alarming polls from 1964 showing overwhelming support for Goldwater and Wallace from factory workers and union members in several Northern and Midwestern states.
But Goldwater did get completely crushed in the election, possibly the largest landslide in US history. I can’t see how Johnson could have done that well if such a huge portion of the normal Democratic base had abandoned the party. Were those polls just anomalies? Did most white workers actually stick with the Democrats despite narratives about “backlash”? Were these union members only a particular minority of the broader working class, not a representative sample?
Who exactly, in terms of race and class demographics, were the voters who stuck with the Democrats all through the 1964, 1968, and 1972 elections? And who were the ones who switched so that 1968 and 1972 turned out so poorly for Democrats?
The Democrats generally held together even after Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, with the Dixiecrats still hoping they could retain influence enough in the party to mitigate the Act’s real effect, thanks to its relatively weak enforcement provisions. It was really the Voting Rights Act and the Immigration and Nationalities Act, both passed in 1965, that convinced most white supremacists that the Democratic Party at the national level was a lost cause. That realization was compounded by the events of 1968, when the Democrats fractured, and especially the Supreme Court ruling in 1971 that allowed the introduction of forced busing to desegregate schools. Meanwhile, Nixon and his advisors were busily wooing the Dixiecrats and white working class racists in the rust belt - his Silent Majority - to jump to the Republican Party. The whole process took several years. And the real consolidator and beneficiary of the process was Ronald Reagan.