He lamented that his advocacy for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, while the right thing to do, meant that “the Democrats have lost the South for a generation.”121 It would actually turn out to be much, much longer. The GOP quickly adopted the Southern Strategy to woo the white South into the Republican Party. The key was to pitch the GOP’s message and policies as designed to short-circuit the civil rights gains of African Americans and, equally important, to cast conservative whites as victims besieged by liberalism, minorities, and the Democrats’ big, intrusive
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