but observers in subsequent decades looked on the normally obscure midterm year as a fulcrum of more lasting change toward political dominance by the heirs of Goldwater. Political scientists Earl and Merle Black traced a “Great White Switch” in partisan voting patterns across the South. Nicholas Lemann, a student of the black exodus from the South into Chicago, identified a larger reaction of potent, cumulative effect. “The beginning of the modern rise of conservatism coincided exactly with the country’s beginning to realize the true magnitude and consequences of the black migration,” he wrote
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