Oh that's just plain silly and actually ignorant of the history of the South.
Up until the election of Richard Nixon as President almost ALL Southern wihte were democrats. The late 1960s began the Great Political Awakening here in the South. The Jim Crow laws were abandoned (which was good) but personally, black and white relations were always BETTER in the South than elsewhere. Finally, the laws restricting blacks were lifted. The rest of Southern society didn't change much on racial relations, which were never as bad as the North said or believed it was. The laws were wrong, and finally, we fixed them. I'll even acknowledge the courage and convictions of the men of the North and the blacks who fought to change them, and made my homeland a more just place.
Still, there was no Republican Party to speak of in the South except a handful of black professionals and a few far-sighted whites. Along with the Civil Rights movement the other huge and historic change for the South was the migration of white Southern conservatives from the democrat party to the Republican. And they changed because the democrats were not, and are not conservatives. The democrats became liberals in the late 1960's, which peaked in the 1972 nomination of anti-Vietnam war McGovernand over the past generation have (Clinton --> Obama) become socialists.
Ronals Reagan once said, "I didn't leave the democrat party, the party left me." Most white Southerners will tell you the same thing.
But to state that no true conservative could have ever been a democrat before is nonsense and ignores what happened to the United States from the 1960s until about 20 years ago. A whole region of the country basically changed party affiliations.
That was the smart thing to do because that means he was never a RINO.
For a short while we were stuck with the retreads in the Souf' but we don't need them anymore.
There's a cutoff point. It's past the cutoff.
NO MORE RINOs.
What I said was far different. To wit: "......if you ever got elected as a Democrat to public office YOU CAN NEVER BE A REAL REPUBLICAN."
ignore the Perry thread troll