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Growing up, I always heard you couldn't tell a Blue Dog from a Republican. Very common in local elections in Texas because no one could get elected running labeled a Republican. I am also thinking of John Connally. Reagan's election pretty much set them free. Reason Texas is so deeply blue now. Am I correct?
Well, not exactly. Of course, this is a change in time, so the answer in 1928, when Texas voted for the GOP for the first time, is not the same as 1952 (the second time) or 1972 onward.
Often overlooked in the history of the so-called "flip" of the South is the changing economic landscape. Think of "Song of the South" by Alabama. I'm sure those guys all vote Republican today, but their lyrics in the dying days of Southern Democracy were:
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Well somebody told us Wall Street fell
But we were so poor that we couldn't tell
Cotton was short and the weeds were tall
But Mr. Roosevelt's a gonna save us all
Daddy was a veteran, a southern democrat
They oughta get a rich man to vote like that
There's actually some really good history preserved here. The south was rural and impoverished, but as commerce, industry and prosperity moved in, that changed the south dramatically, and was very instrumental in flipping the South. As that happened, the blue dog democrats and Republicans were close, as you say on social issues, but still widely apart on economic issues. The people moving into the GOP were the suburbanites, the children of poor farmers, who had moved to Dallas, Houston, etc. and were finding their way into the American dream. The GOP had always been the party of economics and "rich men" but also to a degree, the party of ASPIRING RICH MEN, which is why middle class people who are not wealthy, embrace things like trickle down economics and free markets. They see (rightfully in my opinion) a sense of hope in that economic mindset, whereas Democratic economics only says you're poor and they're rich and provides the only solution as taking from one and giving to another.
The poor southerners were still vastly different from the GOP folks, even though they were religious, etc. but as more and more of them moved out and up, economically (and some of the farmers remaining benefited from reduced competition and world markets opening up to become wealthy, rather than poor farmers), they began to embrace GOP, as opposed to Blue Dog, mindsets. The Democratic Party still appealed to some, but that began to fade as they became more liberal, and the poor farmer mentality (which was certainly not Reaganomic when it came to things like subsidies) could not overcome the conservative social (and in regards to the cold war, political) mentality.