Regards....I was on vacation and lately the market threads have occupied me.
I love how everyone blames us for LBJ, Carter, and Clinton. Folks need to remember that we here in the South have Black populations approaching 40% in many states and they will vote large and overwhelmingly Dem. Whites in the South have to more or less match the monolithic pattern of black voting in an opposite fashion to insure a Pubbie carrying the state. No doubt these scalawags were borne of the South but the black vote got them the electoral votes from here. It took white liberal votes in the blue zones to make it a fait accompli.
We had a similar situation in Houston during our last election. Despite claims that it isn't by the media and Democrats, I believe Houston proper is a conservative city.
This is demonstrated in our city council. The seats are officially non-partisan, but openly affiliated conservative Republicans safely hold 5 district seats out of 9 and 2 at large seats out of 5 for a total of 7 seats out of 14. The remaining 4 district seats are all minority liberal Democrats. The remaining 3 at large seats are all Democrats, two of them liberals and one a moderate. Additionally the only reason they have 3 instead of 2 at large seats is because we shot ourselves in the foot a few election cycles back when one of the at large seats opened up because half a dozen republicans jumped in and chopped up the GOP vote needed to make the runoff.
I also believe that conservatives would easily hold another district seat if the districts were not absurdly gerrymandered to favor liberal Democrats. Case in point - there are two strong reliably conservative regions of the city on the far north and far south sides with democrat ghettos in between. They are both in the same council district connected by about 30 miles of drainage ditch running in between them and nothing else, because if they were geographically attached to the areas next to them the Democrats would lose at least one seat.
Anyway, strictly speaking the city has a slight conservative majority in it on a given city election. But our mayor is a liberal Democrat - Lee P. Brown. The only reason he is mayor is because he enjoys nearly 97% unanimous support from the blacks (blacks are about 25% of the city population) . A conservative Republican barely lost to him in the last election. We got about 65% of the white vote and over 70% of the hispanic vote. In any normal election anywhere else, that would have been enough to give us a landslide victory. But Brown mobilized the blacks by running "Hate Crimes" scare commercials with James Byrd's DNC prostitute daughter. They came out in unprecedented numbers, voted 97% for Brown, and gave us a mayor the rest of the city did not want by a clear majority (Brown also aided his cause by campaigning to blacks outside the city limits - over a thousand of them who did not even live in the city and were not entitled to vote drove in on election day and were permitted to cast ballots by corrupt democrat poll workers).
Now does that mean Houston is a left wing craphole because we've got a democrat kook mayor? Despite Lee Brown's concentrated efforts to turn it into one, heck no. Compared to the urban crime cesspools of yankeeland, we're about as good of as you can get these days. The same goes for the south.
So how about FDR getting 70% + of the votes in Dixie four times straight back when blacks weren't even allowed to sit at a lunch counter let alone vote?
The South loves Federal pork more than any other region and FDR was the pork massser.