The Democratic Party was the racist white supremacist party until 1964. The Republican Party was found on anti-slavery pro-abolitionist movement. It was not as much the voters who decided but the Democratic Party politicians who decided to quit the Democratic Party. LBJ was a traitor to them, a Southern Democratic from Texas who would sign a Civil Rights Bill in 1964? This was the deepest betrayal they have since Lincoln. The Southern Manifesto signed in 1956 was an existential threat to America, with the Southern Democrat senators and congressmen from the 15 Jim Crow states saying they would NOT obey the Supreme Court’s Brown decision. Explicitly saying that in the first draft, a basic threat to the Union.
The Democratic governor in Arkansas then closed down all public schools for one year. Governor Orval, a proud Democratic segregationist and white supremacist said “I will never open public schools as integrated institutions.” He then used his state national guard basically as an army to block the nine black students in Little Rock from going to school. He was died hard racist Democrat. No blacks voted in Arkansas and all white single party state never wavered in their support of the racist Democratic Party until 1968 election in voting “Solid South” blue. President Eisenhower, still of the Civil Rights Party, called out the national guard troops under federal authority over the state authority and brought troops into the South for the first time, forcing integration. They called it the “Solid South” because there was effectively on one party that voted in that region, the Democrats, hence the blue map. In most elections black Americans in these most of these states could even vote.
How many black Americans voted for JFK in South Carolina, Georgia, Texas, or Mississippi? You’re right, its a trick question, because black Americans didn’t vote in those states in 1960. Those states voted for Kennedy in the blue column because the Democrats were still bigots and voted blue. There was only one party voting in those states. The Northern states where there were two parties and sometimes more, like New York and Michigan and Pennsylvania tipped Democrat not out of loyalty Civil Rights principles, as they were still the bigot party, but out of immigrants. Immigrants for the previous 6 decades would join unions when they were fresh off the boat, so the Democrats recruited them them for that, and of course new immigrants from Europe, often poor or without identity and adrift, chose Democratic as well because they were instantly elevated above black Americans, who seen as the lowest class. Kennedy was Irish and attracted all those immigrant votes of Catholics from Ireland, Italy and Poland (the three immigrant groups that composed the blue collar town I was born in western New York, a Union town and a sundown town that kept blacks from moving in—there was even a race riot there in 2017 when a black fireman moved into town and locals burned down his house).
Lincoln wasn’t apathetic toward slavery. His party was the anti-slavery party with die hard abolitionists, like John Brown, who attacked and died on his belief to end slavery. He was not alone but rather fresh out of battle and the bloodshed in Bleeding Kansas where white Southerners (Democrats) were fighting against Northern abolitionists and they’re groups were killing each other in basically a mini-civil war for four years. To end this explosive situation of fighting that was erupting in a civil war, Lincoln was given a choice to agree to the constitutional amendment, written by moderate John Crittenden, of border state Kentucky. That constitutional amendment, which he wrote, if it had passed, would meant the South had a right to keep slavery as institution while the north could leave it abolished as it already was, and new states could be voted on in that state by the people. Lincoln reject this compromise on slavery, believing in the Declaration of Independence’s founding principle of inalienable rights, which means civil rights, was for all. Once he rejected this “Crittenden compromise” and the proposed amendment, the Southern states quit, South Carolina almost instantly. They would not compromise either.
Lincoln in his quote was appealing to moderate votes, not wanting to upset those in the board states. Politicians today still talk moderately—or not at all, like Biden who abandoned the John Lewis Voting Act because the usual “there just wasn’t enough support.” The Modern Democratic Party was born in 1965, the years blacks in those 15 states could all start voting and did so in 1968, changing the political landscape in the South, gradually, to becoming a two party system (except for the 20 percent of black Americans in Georgia in the last election who were afraid to register and vote because they couldn’t pass the literacy test). So the Democratic Party now is nothing like it was when black Americans —still over 77 percent lived there in the 1940s—could not basically vote, marry white people, join a union, travel in integrated buses and trains, attended integrated schools—all because the Democratic Party in those 15 states voted for hundreds of laws to segregated and ban black Americans from white life.
Yes, the Democratic Party is not integrated and I voted for Obama three times. But technically in the past they were the supremacist party in Florida and Georgia for example, banning black Americans under their laws. Florida does have a slightly different history as they started under Spanish rule, and did vote republican against Kennedy during that transitional period of the 1960 election, but technically that idiot may be right in pointing to the racist past of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party being founded as the party of abolition and anti-slavery. But we don’t live in the past, and although the party names have remained the same, the philosophies under the hood have shifted and continue to do so.

Thanks again.