NO, JIMMY CARTER DIDN'T LOSE THE SOUTH FOR THE DEMOCRATS

Jimmy Carter is being remembered as an extraordinary ex-president and, by some, as a better president than conventional wisdom suggests.

His electoral legacy is also being remembered. How do you read this New York Times headline?

I read it as Jimmy Carter lost the South for the Democratic Party. The Times story itself is somewhat more nuanced:

On the day he was sworn in as governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, an ambitious white peanut farmer from rural Sumter County, announced that “the time for racial discrimination is over.” The declaration landed like the carefully calculated bomb it was intended to be in the South of 1971 — and landed Mr. Carter on the cover of Time magazine, along with the blurb, “Dixie whistles a different tune.”

But in his ensuing half-century of public life, Mr. Carter, the one-term Democratic president who died Sunday at 100, would be forced to listen rather helplessly as Republicans mostly called the tune in his native South, supported by white voters who were uncomfortable with the Democrats’ embrace of racial inclusion and abortion rights, and were attracted to the small-government, low-tax promises of the party of Ronald Reagan.

Indeed, after Mr. Carter’s ascension to the White House, the states of the old Confederacy would go on to become, with a few exceptions, a crucial base of support for Republican presidential candidates. Much of that support came from Mr. Carter’s fellow Southern evangelicals, who turned sharply away from him and the Democrats during his presidential term. They became one of the most loyal Republican voting blocs and remain so to this day.

That was part of a shift that had begun in the early 1960s, as Republicans found a way to chip and then blast away at what had been a solidly Democratic South since the end of Reconstruction.

Carter won every Southern state except Virginia in 1976 and then lost all of them except his home state of Georgia when he ran for reelection in 1980. But "the solidly Democratic South" had been restive for quite a while before Carter ran the first time.

There certainly wasn't a "solidly Democratic South" in 1972, when Richard Nixon won every state except Massachusetts. Prior to that, in 1964, Republican Barry Goldwater -- the ideological and rhetorical model for nearly all Republicans since 1980 -- won Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. In 1968, George Wallace, the former segregationist governor of Alabama and a registered Democrat, ran as a right-wing independent and won Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia.

But there'd been signs of this restiveness even earlier. In 1960, unpledged electors gave 6 of Alabama's 11 electoral votes to segregationist senator Harry Byrd. All 8 of Mississippi's electors voted for Byrd as well.

Byrd's running mate was Strom Thurmond, who'd run as the "Dixiecrat" presidential candidate in 1948 after President Harry Truman desegregated the military and the federal workforce, and after a civil rights plank was voted into the Democratic party platform. That year, Thurmond won more than 70% of the vote in Alabama and South Carolina, and nearly 90% of the vote in Mississippi. He also won Louisiana.

So over a couple of decades, a Democratic Party that was increasingly pro-civil rights sometimes struggled to hold the states of the South. Carter held the line in one election, but for Democrats, the South would have been slipping away no matter who headed the ticket in 1976. Carter shouldn't be blamed.