For Politics in South, Race Divide Is Defining - NYTimes.com

The plain truth of today's conservative thrust is the politics of resentment: whether it is Chris Christie's northern suburban resentment of the floundering, poor and largely minority cities), or the Alabama and Arizona anti-immigrant thrusts the intensity of which points to heritage of slavery and de jure segregation in the south. There the Republican party transformed itself into the white party as southern whites fled the Democratic Party after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the civil rights act of 1964. The "southern strategy" of the Republican party transformed the landscape as the parties polarized racially in a way they had not when northern Republican embraced the Lincoln heritage and the Democratic Party carried in its bosom both the segregationist whites of the south and the swelling African American voters. - GWC

For Politics in South, Race Divide Is Defining - NYTimes.com: "In few places are the current woes of Democrats in the South in such clear relief as they are in Mississippi. It is here that a possibility long considered may soon become a reality, as Democrats ponder the prospect of becoming, definitively, the permanent minority party — in both senses of the word.....
Merle Black, an expert on politics at Emory University in Atlanta, said that point is arguably already here. In 2008 exit polls, he pointed out, 96 percent of self-identified Republicans in Mississippi were white. Nearly 75 percent of self-identified Democrats were black."

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