The Republican Party Of Lincoln was the Strong Central Government Liberals of 1860

[still_one]

3. I didn't say it was over, but in my view it also isn't unclear. When Johnson signed the Civil

Rights Act, those "Dixiecrats" left the Democrat party and became republicans.

After the Civil War the reason why the South went Democratic was because of Lincoln as you said in your OP, and that stayed that way until Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act.

FDR was a civil rights advocate, and Eleanor Roosevelt, a champion of civil rights, no doubt started the defections of the South away from the Democratic party as you said, but what pushed them completely over was the Civil Rights Act in my view

"When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law on July 2, 1964, he is said to have told an aide, “We (Democrats) have lost the South for a generation.”

But that statement did not just apply to the Democrats. Republicans were, necessarily, part of the change equation.

The change came quickly. Two weeks after the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, the Republican National Convention in San Francisco nominated for the presidency Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, one of the handful of Republican senators who had opposed the measure."

http://billmoyers.com/2014/07/02/when-the-republicans-really-were-the-party-of-lincoln/