Question on Southern Strategy's Effect on Evangelicals and Solid South

[Nightingale]

This is nth question I have about Nixon's Southern Strategy, and I thank everyone knows what he did. But did it necessarily mean that the South and Evangelicals would turn Republican (in the aftermath of Roe vs. Wade)?

Let's say Iran's monarchy reforms and there's no late 1970's turmoil. If a more hardliner social conservative like George Wallace won the 1976 Election, do you think the South and Evangelicals would turn to the Democratic Party en masse, esp. if he has a successful two-term presidency?

 

[Nightingale]

No tryers?

 

[overoceans]

This is nth question I have about Nixon's Southern Strategy, and I thank everyone knows what he did. But did it necessarily mean that the South and Evangelicals would turn Republican (in the aftermath of Roe vs. Wade)?

Let's say Iran's monarchy reforms and there's no late 1970's turmoil. If a more hardliner social conservative like George Wallace won the 1976 Election, do you think the South and Evangelicals would turn to the Democratic Party en masse, esp. if he has a successful two-term presidency?

Even without the Southern Strategy pointing it out explicitly, aren't the post-Johnson Democrats still going to be seen as the party of innumerable civil-rights laws and the Great Society welfare progams? I'm having a hard time seeing how George Wallace even gets the Democratic nomination in the first place.

You might need some sort of breakaway Dixiecrat revival, also pulling in the northern hardhat brigades, for this to work.

 

[Prussian1871]

You don't really need George Wallace to have a Democratic South. Keep in mind Jimmy Carter pretty much did this, and I imagine had he taken a few more religious/cultural conservative positions and stuck with them he could have done even better. You'd just need to renovate the party to a platform somewhat like that.

 

[Anarch King of Dipsodes]

The "Solid South" was an unnatural creation. It was sustained by the willingness of Northern Democrats to protect Southern white supremacy. When that ended, the South was going to "revert to the mean", and become a normally bipartisan region, regardless of anything else. (Though the change would be gradual, as it was OTL.) The national Democratic Party went off to the Left, especially on cultural issues, which opened the socially conservative South to Republicans even more, and accelerated the change.

The Democrats were viewed as the party of the urban, social-liberal, academic, and media segment. This segment had been hostile to evangelical and fundamentalist Christians for decades (vide H. L. Mencken's reporting on the Scopes "Monkey Trial" in the 1920s).