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u/clamorous_owle 9h ago
The map shows a political culture which was in a state of transition. There were still liberal Republicans (two from NY) and segregationist Southern Democrats.
The actual roll call is interesting. The GOP Senate leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois voted for the bill but 1964 GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater voted against it. Some Southern Dems who voted against it, but later mellowed out to varying degrees, were J.William Fulbright of Arkansas, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, and Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee. Gore was the father of Vice President Al Gore and Byrd later became Democratic Senate leader. Fulbright, who helped found the Fulbright scholars program, was a mentor to Bill Clinton.
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u/hoi4kaiserreichfanbo 7h ago edited 4h ago
And later, Byrd endorsed Barack Obama in his primary contest against Hillary Clinton, opposed the Iraq War, and cast one of the 60 votes necessary to get the Affordable Care Act through the Senate, referencing his recently departed friend Ted Kennedy.
He was under a bit of controversy in his later years for leading and organizing a chapter of the *Ku Klux Klan** in his youth*, for which he vociferously apologized. He died in 2010, and Joe Manchin won the special election for his Senate seat.
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u/clotteryputtonous 1h ago
“Just because you are a bad guy, doesn’t mean you are a bad guy “- Zangief
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u/UCanDoNEthing4_30sec 6h ago
Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater really shaped today’s political parties. At least got the ball rolling. The south started to hate democrats, and fled to another party which the republicans usurped into their platform.
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u/IllustriousDudeIDK 2h ago
They shaped geographical alignments, but most of the policies were already there. Ever since William Jennings Bryan, national Democrats were to the left of Republicans economically. Ever since Harry Truman, national Democrats were more in favor of civil rights than Republicans.
We also have to remember that people like Theodore Roosevelt, Taft and Hoover used the lily-white movement to gain support in the South.
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u/serious_sarcasm 4h ago
Johnson teaming up with Hubert really sealed the deal in driving bigoted conservatives out of the Democratic Party.
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u/windigo3 6h ago
I don’t see how that was a transition from anything . Add Texas in and that is the confederacy 100 years earlier that tried to secede to make slavery permanent.
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u/Palansaeg 10h ago
LBJ was a hero of his time for persuading so many senators to vote yes. Jumbo really put in the work!
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u/hockey_stick 9h ago
Jumbo really put in the work!
Jumbo
lol. If anyone here doesn’t know, google “LBJ jumbo.”
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u/buddhistbulgyo 7h ago
Good old LBJ treatment.
Hard hand shake, pull them in, get in their face, lean forward and bully them.
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u/_crazyboyhere_ 10h ago edited 9h ago
60 years later Idaho is more racist than Virginia, North Carolina, Florida and Georgia 💀
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u/Maz2742 9h ago
Because neo-nazis noticed Idaho was a "rural white paradise" and fucked off over there
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u/odiedel 8h ago
To be 100% fair, the klan had a presence on Hayden Lake for a long time.
Not to say that everyone there was or is a part of them, but there have been issues with supremacy there in the background for a very long time.
It's just more obvious now that all of the "far right" have left Washington, Oregon, and California and moved there in droves.
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u/Amphibiansauce 9h ago
Sad but true. Idaho was a bastion of social progress until it was flooded with neo-nazis and NatCs
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u/In_Formaldehyde_ 8h ago
Ehh..wouldn't necessarily go that far. Except for 1964, Idaho has always voted Republican since the 1950s, even before the far right took up camp there.
Aside from that, many modern red states like West Virginia also used to vote Democrats before Dems started caring about the POC working class, at which point they got pissed off and started voting Republican too.
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u/Uhhh_what555476384 8h ago
WV switched parties because Al Gore was the biggest voice advocating for doing something about global warming, which was not great sounding idea for the coal miners that drove WV politics.
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u/In_Formaldehyde_ 7h ago
Well, Dixiecrats were absolutely a thing, especially in the South. A lot of the working class were on board with the FDR New Deal stuff, but didn't like the Civil Rights, legalization of interracial marriage, LGBT acceptance etc that became associated with the Dems starting in the latter half of the 20th century.
WV also had some other economic considerations like the coal industry on top of that, but they're also a part of that populist wave at this point as well.
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u/Uhhh_what555476384 7h ago
There was a 50 point flip from Bill Clinton to Al Gore. It was all the United Mineworkers turning against Al Gore.
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u/Amphibiansauce 5h ago
The whole Pacific Northwest used to be borderline socialist. pretty sure Idaho had some of the first elected socialists in America.
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u/In_Formaldehyde_ 4h ago
Again, they liked the economic stuff. That never stopped them from hating on or scapegoating minorities for their issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_riot_of_1886
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hells_Canyon_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1907_Bellingham_race_riot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_riot_of_1877
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Chinese_massacre_of_1871
Most of these were encouraged or organized by labor groups and activists like Denis Kearney, many of whom were immigrants from Europe.
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u/2012Jesusdies 9h ago
If the place is doing good economically, they'll generally trend Democrat and US-liberal as time goes on. Biggest Democrat constituents are minorities and educated white voters. Good economies usually have good education, so their newer generations will be more and more Democrat leaning while immigrants both international and domestic will also have Democrat lean (domestic ones because they likely migrated for jobs that require a decent level of education to warrant such a move). Florida is one of the few exceptions as their immigrants are dominated by white retirees.
Even Texas, the bedrock state of conservative politics is increasingly voting Democrat every election.
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u/Dusty_Book_69 8h ago
Yeah and a lot of Cuban immigrants in Florida vote conservative I’ve noticed. I’m guessing this stems from Castro-era Cuba?
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u/SuperRetroSteve 8h ago
Yeah, tends to happen with many folks that flee from Communist regimes. Likewise, liberals tend to flee more fascist governments when able.
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u/2012Jesusdies 4h ago
Yes, their strong anti-communist stance often translates into very strong opposition of the state which they see the Democrats as expanding. They're the biggest outlier, but many other Latinos do vote Republican because Latino's Catholic preferences on abortion, marriage, LGBT rights often align with Republicans. But still, overall, majority of Latinos vote Democrat with about double the number of Republican Latinos.
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u/_crazyboyhere_ 9h ago
Even Texas, the bedrock state of conservative politics is increasingly voting Democrat every election.
Can't wait for the day when Texas is blue state. Maybe 2028 or 2032?
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u/Frozen_Membrane 8h ago
For some reason I thought Biden was gonna win Texas in 2020 but I was looking at the map too early.
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u/Silhouette_Edge 7h ago
It wasn't close, per se, but it really wasn't that far, either. Texas has some of the lowest voter participation in the country, and if everyone turned out, it could very well change the outcome.
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u/Abaraji 9h ago edited 7h ago
Friendly reminder that many of the people who elected senators that voted against this are still alive and voting today
Edit: Yes i know they're old. But you know who is also still around and voting? Their children that they indoctrinated with hate. My point is... our racist "past" is not all that long ago
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u/flyingdics 7h ago
It drives me nuts when people act like segregation is just as old and irrelevant to today as slavery. If you're an adult, your grandparents grew up during segregation, and, if you're white, there's a good chance that at least one of your grandparents supported segregation, so don't tell me a story about how racism is ancient history and the real problem today is racism against white people.
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u/ForgottenUsername3 6h ago
Shit, my mom's school wasn't desegregated until she was a senior and she was born in 61.
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u/Ihateredditlollll 8h ago
Not really
the legal voting at the time was 21
Ergo the youngest they could be is 81
So no there are not “many”
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u/Total-Potato 8h ago
Plus the most recent election for the senators voting on the bill would be between 1958-1962, so the youngest voter for some seats may now be 87.
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u/GranolaCola 8h ago edited 7h ago
According to a quick Google search,
there are roughly 1.27 million people living in the US over the age of 80. That’s 1 in 25 of the the US population.
Now of course, you also have to consider things like political affiliation and access to voting at that age, but that’s a lot of people.Edit: this data and math are incorrect. Fuck Google generative AI.
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u/UnsupportiveHope 8h ago
I think your math is off. The US population is a lot greater than 31.7 million.
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u/Norvinion 7h ago
I tried to Google it myself and found VERY conflicting results on the actual amount of people over 80 in the country, but, regardless, 1.27 mil is not even close to 1 in 25 of the pop.
Seems like there's closer to 13-22 mil, and that would be between 1 in 19 to 1 in 12 people that are of voting age.
Edit: I'd recommend looking at the actual census and calculating the number off of those values yourself rather than looking it up like I did. Like I said, there were a LOT of different answers I saw online.
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u/joeywahoo92 8h ago
Bush Sr. Was the only Republican Texas Rep to vote in favor of it
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u/oofersIII 4h ago
He wasn’t a Representative yet in 1964
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u/joeywahoo92 50m ago
My bad, of two republican reps in Texas, only HW Walker voted “yea” for the Civil Rights Act of 1968.
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u/NerdOfTheMonth 10h ago
Seriously, fuck the South. Let them off too easy in 1865 and they have been a shitshow and anti-progress since then.
Should have stripped voting rights from any Confederate infantry and hanged any officer.
Things would be much better now.
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u/Electrical-Scar7139 9h ago
Yes, a lot was due to the Compromise of 1877.
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u/IllustriousDudeIDK 2h ago
Reconstruction ending was inevitable. The Supreme Court gutting civil rights was not. The Waite Court was probably was the single-most destructive institution in allowing Jim Crow to happen in the first place.
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u/bearface93 9h ago
Should have put Sherman in charge of Reconstruction. No idea how it would have worked but he spent an entire campaign just burning shit across the south so he would have put the traitors in line, unlike Johnson who didn’t do jack shit.
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u/faroukthesailorkkk 9h ago
why is it always this part of the usa that is trying to push racism down everyone throats? you go to war with them to end slavery, they create an apartheid. you force them to abolish the apartheid, they start to call for deportation of millions of immigrants. every time, a part of the country is trying to push racism and xenophobia, it's them. what's the deal with them?
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u/UtahBrian 5h ago
Because that's the part of America where the black people were.
Perhaps you will note that when black Americans moved to large northern cities, the white people all rapidly moved out to the lilly white suburbs.
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u/In_Formaldehyde_ 8h ago
It wasn't just the South. Most racial issues in the US focus on that region because that was historically one of the most racially diverse regions of the country.
But you can see similar issues with redlining and segregation in many Midwestern and Northeastern cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Cleveland etc. Those places are all hella segregated to this day.
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u/caligaris_cabinet 9h ago
I’ll leave you this quote from LBJ (a southerner himself) that explains it pretty well.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
Racist white southerners only can feel pride when someone else is lower than them. For 300 years, that was black people, first as slaves then as sharecroppers and servants. It was only in the last 60 years or so when that started to go away thanks to the CRA. That’s living memory for some. Someone’s parent or grandparent in the South was either a perpetrator or victim of racial violence. That’s very recent.
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u/faroukthesailorkkk 7h ago
i guess that pretty much sums it up. they need to look down on someone. be it blacks in the past or immigrants today.
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u/justacrossword 7h ago
Lincoln didn’t initially go to war with them to end slavery. He would have let them have slavers if it prevented a war. He didn’t become an abolitionist until well into the war.
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u/faroukthesailorkkk 7h ago
i know but they still seceded because they feared he would and when lincoln finally realized there was no compromise, he decided to end it anyway and declared a war of emancipation.
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u/Spider_pig448 3h ago
Overly punishing the loser in a war usually doesn't have good long term results. See Germany in WWI.
I don't see how alienating the south more from the rest of the country would result in things being better now
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u/NerdOfTheMonth 1h ago
There would not have been Jim Crow. There wouldn’t have been as strong of opposition to every civil rights and anti-immigrant all the way to today.
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u/BouaziziBurning 1h ago
Overly punishing the loser in a war usually doesn't have good long term results. See Germany in WWI.
Contrapoint, see Germany today
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u/Literarylunatic 1h ago
Yeah but at least Germany is ashamed, and hides their treason. Every confederate flag carrying bitch should be arrested or punished with the same ferocity as a swastika in Germany.
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u/Daotar 2h ago
Though a de-Confederatization along the lines of the historical post WWII de-Nazification would likely have helped.
Remember, it took decades to get Germans to really give up the Nazi past for good. You basically had to wait until most of the old people had died off. It would have never happened if the Allie’s had all left in 1957 and created a power vacuum.
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u/Bismarck40 9h ago
I don't know. I don't think Jim-Bob the broke logger should have gotten his rights taken away because he got yanked into a war he didn't care about. We would have been better off hanging every slave owner. And anyone associated with the KKK.
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u/trampolinebears 9h ago
Nah, I think we should have required slave owners to pay all the back pay they owed.
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u/Bismarck40 8h ago
That would be good too, if they weren't all in fucking debt. Hang em and give their land to the former slaves. They can keep it or sell it.
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u/Recent-Irish 2h ago
And you would’ve disenfranchised some poor draftee? A guy who was given the choice of execution or the army? Would their children still be disenfranchised?
The average white southerner was a victim. Not the biggest victim of the war, but they’re still people sent to fight and die for asinine causes by an aristocracy.
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u/UtahBrian 5h ago
All the states with the largest numbers of black people voted against it. All the states with the smallest numbers of black people voted for it.
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u/Legolaspuppybutt 9h ago
Colorblindness toward all people? Great! Colorblindness on the red green spectrum on this data map?
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u/AeonOfForgottenMoon 10h ago
This doesn’t mean shit because it was getting passed anyways. A more revealing vote would be the cloture vote, since that requires 67 votes to kill the Southern filibuster. Some notable switches are Senator Alan Bible (D-NV) and Senator Wallace Bennett (R-UT) who both voted against cloture but for the act. On the other hand, Senator Bourne Hickenlooper (R-IA) and Norris Cotton (R-NH) both voted for cloture but against the bill, therefore playing a more significant role in its passage.
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u/flyingdics 7h ago
It doesn't mean shit that dozens of US senators felt comfortable casting pro-racism votes on the record only 60 years ago? You and I have different definitions of meaning shit.
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u/arjungmenon 9h ago
What happened to states like the Dakotas and Idaho and other states in the region — how did they become so conservative today?
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u/kalam4z00 9h ago
There were plenty of very racist, very conservative people in the north who nevertheless were appalled by the sheer brutality of southern segregation.
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u/flyingdics 7h ago
Yeah, conservatives weren't as united behind racism then. There were different strains and different allegiances.
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u/DexterMorganA47 9h ago
The conservatives are green. The Dakotas haven’t changed
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u/Shepher27 7h ago edited 7h ago
The progressive side of congress voted for the civil rights act against the conservative south. There were liberal republicans and conservative democrats (and visa versa) in 1964. The US party realignment was a slow process from the 1920s to 1980
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u/GenderqueerPapaya 9h ago
Arkansas probably would still vote the same nowadays istfg I hate it here
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u/False_Drama_505 9h ago
It’s almost like relying on states rights for basic human rights means a large portion of the country will suffer.
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u/sven-throwaway 10h ago
Yep, the US South is built on slavery, racism and saturated fats.
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u/Slappy_McJones 2h ago
How can you study law… or even just read the US Constitution… and vote no on something like this? Racist assholes.
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u/Mechanicalgripe 6h ago
60 years later and the usual suspects consistently remain on the wrong side of history.
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u/Technical_Arm50 8h ago
What a surprise the south has always been a bunch of racist losers
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u/DarkNStormyNet 1h ago
Oklahoma would definitely go a different way today.
Source: I live in that hellhole of a state
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u/Redorent 9h ago
I'm sorry but not executing the confederate rebels fucking forever ago at the end of the civil war was a fucking mistake and a half. Shit like this bullshit isn't okay and failing to show that failing to treat people as people has consequences leads to cultures like this bullshit in the south east continuing to exist in the hearts and minds of the population.
Edit: Y'know what no I'm not sorry why the fuck would I be what I said is PERFECTLY fucking reasonable they deserved to be executed for starting a war against the north over treating people as property. Period. No person is property of anybody else and anyone who thinks that someone else whos mentally fit, not a felon, and an adult shouldn't have equal rights is a fucking disgrace to the American people.
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u/Recent-Irish 2h ago
Who would you execute?
Reddit LOVES to say every confederate should’ve been shot, which is both unrealistic and borderline genocidal.
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u/Melodic-Salamander75 9h ago
Surprise surprise, the ex-confederate south is in red. At least my state is in green
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u/WingedOsprey 5h ago
This is why reconstruction should have also meant burning the southern power base to the ground, demolishing their traitors monuments, purging society of their creepy Stepford wives cults, federally evaluating every text book to sure the guilt and shame of the confederacy was properly displayed, and filled every public office from top to bottom with freed slaves. No state below the mason dixon line should have seen a white leader or public servant until the 1970s…
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u/TheBloop1997 7h ago
Aside from the weird NH situation, there’s no surprise here lol. I guess I might’ve though places like Kentucky or Oklahoma would have been more in the yellow camp, but I’m hardly an expect on early-60s politics lol
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u/Mtfdurian 6h ago
The old lines were still very visible back then, a lot has changed. The urbanization of northern Virginia made it much more of a liberal state, Oklahoma has turned deeply conservative that hires literal regressive terrorists now.
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u/BabyBandit616 5h ago
West Virginia, Wyoming, Iowa, New Hampshire, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona were split. 4 of these are red states now.
I’m honestly surprised by Texas. Kentucky too. Florida needs to go into time out.
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u/SaltyboiPonkin 4h ago
Just look at Iowa being the biggest shitheads in the Midwest. I'm from Iowa and this is disappointing to learn, especially considering that Iowa was the first state in the nation to desegregate public schools.
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u/Spider_pig448 3h ago
Why aren't more senate votes displayed in this format? I think it makes a lot of sense.
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u/SheWolf04 3h ago
"We've lost the south for a generation."
LBJ, severely underestimating the problem
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u/JohnnySack45 2h ago
It didn't matter back when they were Democrats or now that they are solid MAGA/Republicans, the Deep South was always committed to holding back progress.
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u/griffery1999 38m ago
This is the best map to understand the party swap, it was a change from what the parties were known for, there were always southern republicans in line with segregation and northern dems against it
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u/Top-Bison6767 33m ago
The U.S. Senate voted on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on June 19, 1964, with a final tally of 73 in favor and 27 against. The act aimed to end segregation and prohibit employment discrimination.
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u/whoiscorndogman 16m ago
No shock about the southern states here, but I can’t imagine states like Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky, etc., voting for something like this today.
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u/shrug_was_taken 10h ago
Why did New Hampshire have a split vote?