Ku Klux Klan with Barry Goldwater's campaign signs
A newly released study shows how the Ku Klux Klan helped turn the South Red. For years the Ku Klux Klan, the Democratic Party and belief in white supremacy formed a powerful triumvirate in the southern states. And then northern Democrats passed legislation requiring complete civil and voting rights for African Americans, shattering the partnership that had once wielded such power. No longer would the Democratic Party be the party of white supremacy.
The Klan, re-energized during the 1960s, began working to elect Republican candidates like Goldwater, or third party candidates, like George Wallace.
According to RawStory:
“The Klan played an active role in encouraging white southerners to prioritize white supremacy over party loyalty,” wrote the study’s authors.
KKK leaders urged southerners to “form a voting bloc to defeat any n*gger-loving politician that runs for office,” and the group evaluated and supported candidates based on their “authentic whiteness” rather than party ties.
Using their rallies to spread the word, the KKK made its influence felt most strongly in those "less-prosperous counties where whites were more vulnerable to economic competition." The study found that those counties with an active Klan chapter were much more likely to support Goldwater and Wallace.
Please read below the fold for more on this story.
From the Newswise report on the study:
The researchers studied county voting records in 10 southern states in which the KKK actively recruited members in the 1960s. The analysis of five presidential voting outcomes, between 1960 and 2000, showed that southern counties with KKK activity in the 1960s had a statistically significant increase in Republican voting compared to counties with no established KKK chapter, even after controlling for a range of factors commonly understood as relating to voting preferences. They also found that conservative racial attitudes among voters in the 1992 election strongly predicted Republican voting, but only in counties where the KKK was organized in the 1960s.
The studies' authors suggest that the social agenda of the Klan convinced Democratic voters to change their allegiance to the Republican Party during the '60s and the '70s. They were certainly helped in this endeavor by the dog whistle political campaigns run by the Republican candidates.
What is more interesting is the suggestion that the attitudes of fifty years ago are still influencing our polarized politics of today:
The Klan’s efforts to link voting behavior to its social agenda in the 1960s disrupted long-established voting patterns in the South,” Cunningham explains. “The fact that such efforts continued to predict partisan allegiances decades later demonstrates how the impact of a social movement can endure long after the movement itself has declined, as well as providing a new explanation of political polarization in the U.S.”
From the
study abstract:
Short-term movement influence on voting outcomes can endure when orientations toward the movement disrupt social ties, embedding individuals within new discussion networks that reinforce new partisan loyalties.
So what started out as a radical political change based on fighting against equal rights for all Americans has become woven into the political fabric of the South. What is most striking is that the Republican Party has long been known for its ties to, and its efforts on behalf of, the wealthiest Americans. But poor Southern whites chose to ignore that, and its implications for their economic future, and cast their votes instead for hate.