Stat ‘o the Day
by digby
from 1960 to ’64, after Dem president signed Civil Rights Act, GOP nominee’s share of black vote fell from 32% to 6%: http://t.co/Wla3W1B1bI
— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) March 6, 2015
Then there’s the other side of that coin:
Since President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, signed it into law, there have been 12 presidential elections. Republicans have won seven of them – and carried the white vote in all 12. Democrats have won five, including Mr. Obama’s 2008 breakthrough fueled by overwhelming support from African-Americans as well as Latinos.
But Mr. Obama hasn’t come close to breaking through in the state where law enforcement officers attacked protesters at the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
While blacks have grown as a share of the Alabama electorate, support for Democratic presidential candidates among the state’s white majority has collapsed. The 27 percent Michael Dukakis received from Alabama whites in 1988, exit polls showed, fell to 19 percent for John Kerry in 2004. Mr. Obama drew just 15 percent of Alabama whites.
That tiny share, like the 10 percent Mr. Obama received from whites in neighboring Mississippi, places some Deep South states out of reach. Outside the Old Confederacy, Mr. Obama did vastly better among whites while carrying such battlegrounds as Wisconsin (48 percent), Colorado (44 percent) and Pennsylvania (42 percent).
He goes on to reference the new report from CAP showing that the Republicans have to do better with minorities than George W. Bush did if they want to win the presidency. Let’s just say that’s unlikely unless the Democratic Party decides to revert back to its old strategy trying to get some of those Southern white folk at the expense of their own base. Obama’s coalition of white liberals, women, African Americans, Hispanics and other ethnic and racial minorities is the future.