Wednesday, December 10, 2014
New study finds that the KKK facilitated the move of Southern white voters from the Democratic party to the Republican party. I wish I could be more surprised by this.
The Ku Klux Klan played an active and enduring role in steering southern white voters away from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, according to a new study.
The white supremacist group resurged to prominence in the 1960s as a reaction to the civil rights movement, and its violent extremism inflamed racial division and polarized communities for generations, according to the study published by the American Sociological Review.
“It encouraged white voters to prioritize the defense of white supremacy when making voting decisions, upending long-standing Democratic Party allegiances,” wrote the study’s authors.
The researchers — David Cunningham, professor and chair of the Department of Sociology at Brandeis University, Rory McVeigh of the University of Notre Dame and Justin Farrell of Yale University — studied county voting records in 10 southern states where the KKK actively recruited members in the 1960s.
Analysis of voting outcomes of five presidential elections between 1960 and 2000 showed a statistically significant increase in GOP voting compared to counties with no established KKK chapter, even after filtering out a range of other factors that could influence voting preferences.
The study found that counties with a Klan chapter were much more likely to back those two candidates, and adjacent counties without an active KKK chapter of their own were also more likely to support Goldwater and Wallace.
“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.
And we wonder why the Republican party seems so racist.
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