re: #34 HappyWarrior

I think the real moment the Republican party started hitting its downward spiral is when Nixon decided to embrace Strom Thurmond and many of the old Dixiecrats and made the Southern Strategy a focal point of his campaign. To me, that’s where Nixon goes from merely being Tricky Dick to the biggest dick ever to live in the White House.

It’s a theory of mine that the Republican party started to get weird when they allied with the Conservative Democrats and fundamentalist isolationists in the run up to World War II. It’s the synthesis of the whole John Birch movement.

Eisenhower did a lot of to beat that part of the party back- but still, I can’t help but think that some of the more amoral forces in the GOP saw that the path to power ran through the racists after they received even less votes than in 1944 vs Truman and Thurmond.

Check out some of the election maps of the South after Nixon won in 1972.