That is the narrative that we have all heard, ad nauseam.

If I recall the date correctly, conservatives were hard at work trying to undo the New Deal as early as the 1940s. A woman wrote an entire book, as I recall, about this decades-long campaign to undo the New Deal that culminated in the Reagan Revolution.

Nobody here has said anything about what caused the decline of the working class. The only thing that has been said is that the Democratic party made the conscious, calculated decision to abandon their base, the working class, and appeal to a new base, primarily college-educated voters.

I don't even know of any policy from either party that, at least since LBJ, has been made with the working class in mind. Affirmative action, abortion rights, prayer in public schools, the Defense of Marriage Act--nothing from either party, it seems, addressed the decline of the working class, the Rust Belt, etc. What caused that decline, whether it was automation, the rise of foreign competitors like Toyota, women entering the workforce in large numbers and choosing employment in non-union industries, etc. is beside the point. The point is that both major parties ignored the working class, the Democratic party purposefully, deliberately abandoned its working class base, and the culture war fire that both parties regularly added fuel to masked their eventual neoliberal demolition of the middle class as well.

If race played a major role in this whole episode I would say that it is college-educated middle class white people, not racist white Southerners, who have thrived on it. It is not uncommon to hear that white liberals/progressives are angrier than and farther to the left than black people with respect to race. A little virtue signaling, maybe?

I don't put any stock in any supposed correlation between red states and racism. Red states follow the same patterns as blue states: urban counties vote Democrat, rural counties vote Republican. Look at Illinois in the 2016 presidential election. Other than Chicago the whole state voted for Trump. One really big city--something that Arkansas and Mississippi don't have--makes the state blue. If the South was racist like we are supposed to believe it is then every county in the South would vote the same way. Voting patterns are the same in red states as they are in blue states. The difference between them is urban geography, the presence of military bases, household incomes, etc.

Again, a person can only go by the evidence he/she has. The evidence that I have overwhelmingly says that beginning in the early 1970s both major parties embraced neoliberalism at the expense of the working class--and eventually the middle class--and used the culture wars to sustain power as they both moved to the right on economic policy.

The only place where I see the behavior white Southern voters having an impact is through gerrymandering. But voters don't draw legislative districts, elected officials do it. Abandoning a party is not the same thing as being gerrymandered into a particular Congressional delegation and turnout in presidential elections.

My guess is that a look at the data would reveal that certain demographics have consistently voted the same way, that swing voters in battleground states have therefore decided elections, and that race has never been what decides how the latter group votes.