Oh, we do. We also understand that under Nixon the Republicans instituted the Southern Strategy, which was a concerted attempt to woo "Dixiecrats" (Democrats in the South whose continued allegiance to the increasingly progressive Democratic party was based mainly on long-standing resentment of Reconstruction and Emancipation) by appealing to racism. Nixon went after Native American, African-American and other civil rights groups to make it clear that the Dixiecrats should support the Republicans, and it worked. However, it worked at the cost of betraying the principles of people like Abraham Lincoln in the service of political expediency.
The Democrats adopted a "big tent" strategy to unify various progressive groups (minorities seeking civil rights, unions seeking protection for workers, etc) under their banner, and the Southern Strategy was the counter -- pulling away the right-wing Dixiecrats by reshaping the Republican party into a place they'd feel welcome. It helped that Nixon himself was hugely racist and therefore had no moral qualms about the strategy (the number of racist epithets he uses on the White House tapes is truly astounding -- he apparently either forgot he was recording the conversations or just assumed nobody but him would get to listen to them).