Sez the party that ASSUMES blacks don't have photo ID and can't get it and are dependent on welfare. The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations literally permeates the democrats these days.

I think that's a mischaracterization of the position. For the photo ID, I think almost all Dems would agree to photo ID -I assume you mean for voting- if photo IDs were available for free. Reps usually balk at that. Also, on TMF, one poster who lived in Michigan actually volunteered to help poor people get photo IDs. It's not just black folks, but poor people in general. Often they didn't have their birth certificates, couldn't easily afford to get a certified copy, etc. He helped them with all of that. It's a lot more common than you appear to realize (and more common than I realized until I interacted with that poster on TMF).

Just as an example.

Dr Dope? Cool. I bailed on my PhD (physics) because I didn't want a life of writing grant proposals. I was finished with everything except the dissertation. The Count has a PhD in aeronautical engineering. LorenCobb is a PhD in mathematics. The old Atheist board attracted a lot of highly educated folks.

Oh...and to the previous post, I forgot to add that another dynamic in the polarization of the parties is the urban/rural divide. Which itself is a product largely of education (i.e. the educated tend to congregate in urban centers where jobs suited to their abilities concentrate).

I'm not sure that racism today is motivating southern voters to vote Rep. It certainly was for the next few election cycles. Today? Not sure. Certainly Trump milked it, and it was shocking how many openly-racist people came out of the woodwork. But I suspect that now it's more the urban/rural divide, and the education divide (here's Trump with his famous quote: YouTube: Trump in Nevada: 'I Love the Poorly Educated' (Associated Press)). You're right that it isn't as simple as racist/not-racist. It's a complex interplay of events, feedback loops, and the like. But there is no denying that several prominent figures (like Strom Thurmond) switched parties after the CRA. He was an unabashed racist, and could not stomach the Dem party after its POTUS jammed-through the CRA. He was not alone.

However, the Rep party gets very little black support. Just 14%, as of this article: apnews.com - Midterm elections brian p kemp stacey abrams politics US democratic party.

Rightly or wrongly, they clearly feel that they are not represented by Reps, or perhaps are not welcome in the Rep party. There was a lot of discussion on TMF about how demographics are working against the Rep party, and I recall several articles that Rep party leaders/advisers were worried about getting enough minority support as we evolve into a society where there is no racial majority (i.e. where people will decline to less than 50% of the voting public, so they need to attract other minorities to get a majority to win).