Southern strategy

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In American politics, the Southern strategy refers to the focus of the Republican party on winning U.S. Presidential elections by securing the electoral votes of the U.S. Southern states.

The phrase Southern strategy was coined by Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips.^[1] In an interview included in a 1970 New York Times article, he touched on its essence:

From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats."^[2]

While Phillips was concerned with polarizing ethnic votings in general, and not just with winning the white South, this was by far the biggest prize yielded by his approach. Its success began at the presidential level, gradually trickling down to statewide offices, the Senate and House, as legacy segregationist Democrats retired or switched to the GOP. The strategy suffered a brief apparent reversal following Watergate, with broad support for the racially progressive Southern Democrat, Jimmy Carter in 1976. But with Ronald Reagan kicking off his 1980 presidential campaign proclaiming support for "states' rights" in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964's Freedom Summer, the Southern Strategy was back to stay. Although another Southern Democrat, Bill Clinton, would twice be elected President, winning a handful of Southern states, he did better outside the South, and would have won without carrying any Southern State.^{[citation needed]}

For the years 1948 - 1984, the Southern states, traditionally a stronghold for the Democrats, became key swing states, providing the popular vote margins in 1960, 1968 and 1976. During this era, several Republican candidates expressed support for states' rights, which was a signal of opposition to federal civil rights legislation for blacks.^[3]

Recently, the term has been used in a more general sense, in which cultural themes are used in an election — primarily but not exclusively in the American South. In the past, phrases such as "busing" or "law and order" or "states' rights" were used as code words. Today, appeals largely focus on cultural issues such as gay marriage, abortion, and religion. Yet, the use of the term, and its meaning and implication, are still hotly disputed.

Contents 1 Pre-History of the Southern Strategy 2 Roots of the Southern Strategy 3 Evolution of the Southern Strategy 4 Failure of the Southern Strategy 5 Modern appraisal in the Republican party 6 See also 7 References 8 Furthering reading

[edit] Pre-History of the Southern Strategy

Main article: Solid South

After the American Civil War, Southern states gained seats in the House and representation in the Electoral College since blacks were fully counted, instead of being counted as only three-fifths of a person, for election purposes. Resentment stemming from the Civil War and the Republican Party’s policy of Reconstruction kept Southern whites in the Democratic Party, but the Republicans could still compete in the Southern States with a coalition of blacks and highland whites. After the North agreed to withdraw federal troops under the Compromise of 1877, and the further failure of the "Force Bill" (to protect black voting) in 1890, Southern blacks, the base of Republicans' power in that region, became increasingly disenfranchised. The white Democratic Party in the South enacted Jim Crow Laws and, through the terror of vigilantes and the Ku Klux Klan, undertook other measures to ensure and enforce black disenfranchisement. As blacks lost their vote, the Republican Party lost its ability to effectively compete.

The South became solidly Democratic until the middle of the 20th century. During this period, Republicans held only a few House seats from the South. Between 1880 and 1904, Republican presidential candidates in the South received between 35 and 40 percent of that section's vote (except in 1892, when the 16 percent for the Populists knocked Republicans down to 25 percent). From 1904 to 1948, Republicans broke 30 percent of the section only in 1920 (35.2 percent, carrying Tennessee) and 1928 (47.7 percent, carrying five states). The only important political role of the South in presidential elections came in 1912, when it provided the delegates to select Taft over Theodore Roosevelt in that year's Republican convention.

During this period, Republicans occasionally supported anti-lynching bills, which were filibustered in the Senate, and appointed a few black placeholders, but largely ignored the South. It was not until 1928 that the situation changed. In that year, Republican candidate Herbert Hoover rode the issues of prohibition and anti-Catholicism to carry five former Confederate states, with 62 of the 126 electoral votes of the section. After his victory, Hoover attempted to build up the Republican Party of the South, transferring patronage away from blacks and toward the same kind of white Protestant businessmen who made up the core of the Northern Republican Party. However, with the onset of the Great Depression, which severely impacted the South, Hoover soon became extremely unpopular, and the gains of the Republican Party in the South were lost. In 1932, Hoover received only 18.1 percent of the Southern vote for re-election. The subsequent policies of Franklin Roosevelt were very popular in the South, precluding Republican growth in the region.

In 1948, after Truman had desegregated the Army, a group of Southern Democrats known as Dixiecrats split from the Democratic Party in reaction to the inclusion of a strong civil rights plank in the the party's platform, following a floor fight lead by Minneapolis Mayor (and soon-to-be Senator) Hubert Humphrey. They formed the States' Rights Democratic, or Dixiecrat, Party, and nominated Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for president; he won four Southern states. The main plank of the States's Rights Democratic Party was maintaining segregation and Jim Crow in the South. The Dixiecrats, failing to deny the Democrats the presidency in 1948, soon dissolved, but the split lingered. (In 1964, Thurmond was one of the first conservative southern Democrats to switch to the Republicans).

In addition to the splits in the Democratic Party, the population movements of World War II had a significant effect on the makeup of the South. The addition of many Northern transplants significantly bolstered the base of the Republican Party in the South. In the post-war Presidential campaigns, Republicans did best in the fastest-growing states of the South with the most Northern settlers. In the 1952, 1956 and 1960 elections, Virginia, Tennessee and Florida went Republican all three times, while Louisiana went Republican in 1956, and Texas twice voted for Eisenhower and once for Kennedy. In 1956, Eisenhower received 48.9 percent of the Southern vote, and he became the second Republican in history (after Grant) to get a plurality of Southern votes. However, the states of the Deep South remained loyal to the Democratic Party, which had not officially repudiated segregation. Indeed, the "Yankee transplant" does not explain the Republican rise in the "Deep South" states. Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and North Carolina actually lost Congressional seats from the 1950s to the 1970s, while Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana remained static. The racial turmoil in these states precluded many businesses from relocating there.

Many of the so-called states' rights Democrats were attracted to the 1964 presidential campaign of Republican Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Goldwater was notably more conservative than previous Republican nominees, such as Dwight D. Eisenhower. Goldwater's principal opponent in the primary election, Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, was widely seen as representing the more moderate (and pro-Civil Rights), Northern wing of the party (see Rockefeller Republican, Goldwater Republican). Rockefeller's defeat in the primary is often seen as a turning point towards a more conservative Republican party, and the beginning of a long decline for moderate and especially liberal Republicans. Goldwater’s primary victory is also seen as a shift of the center of Republican power to the West and South.

In the 1964 presidential race, Barry Goldwater ran a very conservative campaign, part of which emphasized on "states' rights." While Goldwater, as a libertarian conservative, later was sharply critical of the religious conservatives who came to dominate the GOP, his 1964 campaign was a magnet for them. As a conservative, Goldwater broadly opposed strong action by the federal government. In his state of Arizona, Barry Goldwater had been a co-founder of the state NAACP and had led the campaign to desegregate the state’s public schools. However, although he had supported all previous federal Civil Rights legislation, after much consideration, Goldwater made the decision to oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964. His stance was based on his view that the act was an intrusion of the federal government into the affairs of states and, second, that the Act interfered with the rights of private persons to do business, or not, with whomever they chose. In addition, Goldwater's primary delegate slate from the South had no blacks, but was filled instead with white segregationists. All this appealed to racist white Southern Democrats, and Goldwater was the first Republican to win the electoral votes of the Deep South states (Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina) since Reconstruction. However, this vote proved devastating to Goldwater’s campaign everywhere outside the south (besides Dixie, Goldwater won only in Arizona, his home state) contributing to his landslide defeat in 1964. A Lyndon B. Johnson ad called "Confessions of a Republican," which ran in the North, associated Goldwater with the Ku Klux Klan. At the same time, Johnson’s campaign in the Deep South publicized Goldwater’s full history on civil rights. In the end, Johnson swept the election.

At this time, Senator Goldwater’s position was at odds with most of the prominent members of the Republican Party, dominated at that time by so-called East Coast Establishment. A higher percentage of the Republican Party supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than did the Democratic Party, as they had on all previous Civil Rights legislation. The Southern Democrats often opposed their Northern Party mates--and their presidents (Kennedy and Johnson) on civil rights issues.

[edit] Roots of the Southern Strategy

Lyndon Johnson knew that his endorsement of Civil Rights legislation would endanger his party in the South, but he did it anyway. The national Democratic party turned its back on segregation, and also abandoned segregationist voters in the South. In the election of 1968, Richard Nixon saw the cracks in the Solid South as an opportunity to tap into a group of voters that had heretofore been beyond the reach of the Republican Party.

The United States was undergoing a very turbulent period in 1968. The founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and most influential member of the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. His death was followed by black rioting throughout the country. King’s policy of non-violence was being challenged by more radical blacks and by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. There were protests, often violent, against the Vietnam War. The drug subculture was causing alarm in many sectors. Nixon, with the aid of Harry Dent and then South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who had switched parties in 1964, ran on a campaign of states' rights and "law and order." Many liberals accused Nixon of pandering to racist Southern whites, especially with regards to his "states' rights" and "law and order" stands.^[4]

The independent candidacy of George Wallace, a former Democratic governor of Alabama, partially negated the southern strategy. With a much more explicit attack on black civil rights, Wallace won all of Goldwater's states (except South Carolina), as well as Arkansas and one of North Carolina's electoral votes. However, Nixon picked up Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida, while Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey won only Texas. In 1972, Nixon swept the South, winning over 70 percent of the popular vote in the Deep South states and Florida, and over 60 percent in all the other states of the former Confederacy.

Despite his appeal to southern whites, Nixon parlayed a wide perception as a moderate into wins in other states, taking a solid majority in the electoral college. He was able to appear this way to most Americans, because the strategy often consisted of code words -- "states' rights," "busing" -- and others that meant nothing to most Americans, but were emotionally charged for those in the South.

[edit] Evolution of the Southern Strategy

As civil rights grew more accepted throughout the nation, basing a general election strategy on appeals to "states' rights" as a naked play against civil rights laws would have resulted in a national backlash. In addition, the idea of "states' rights" superficially took on the patina of a broader meaning than simply a reference to civil rights laws, eventually encompassing federalism as the means to forestall Federal intervention in the culture wars.

On August 4, 1980, Ronald Reagan, as a candidate, delivered a speech near Philadelphia, Mississippi at the annual Neshoba County Fair. Reagan excited the crowd when he announced, "I believe in states' rights. I believe we have distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended to be given in the Constitution to that federal establishment."^[5] He went on to promise to "restore to states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them." Philadelphia was the scene of the June 21, 1964 murder of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, and Reagan's critics alleged that the presidential candidate was signaling a racist message to his audience.^[6]

Charges of racism have been lodged in subsequent Republican races for the House and Senate in the South. The Willie Horton commercials used by supporters of George H.W. Bush in the election of 1988 were considered by many to be racist. Other examples include the 1990 re-election campaign of Jesse Helms, which attacked his opponent's alleged support of "racial quotas," most notably through an ad in which a white person's hands are seen crumpling a letter indicating that he was denied a job because of the color of his skin. Most professional academics—historians, political scientists, sociologists, culture critics, etc.––as well as Democratic Party supporters -- argue that support for what conservative acolytes depict as a new "Federalism" in the Republican Party platform is, and always has been, nothing but a code word for the politics of resentment, of which racism provides the fuel.

Bob Herbert, a New York Times columnist, reported of a 1981 interview with Lee Atwater, published in Southern Politics in the 1990s by Prof. Alexander P. Lamis, in which Lee Atwater discusses politics in the South:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say 'nigger'—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger.".^[7]

Herbert wrote in the same column, "The truth is that there was very little that was subconscious about the G.O.P.'s relentless appeal to racist whites. Tired of losing elections, it saw an opportunity to renew itself by opening its arms wide to white voters who could never forgive the Democratic Party for its support of civil rights and voting rights for blacks."^[8]

[edit] Failure of the Southern Strategy

There are many people who challenge the opinion that the Southern Strategy was responsible for large GOP political gains in the South. Several facts appear to support this challenge, such as:

• Democrat Jimmy Carter's victory in every Southern state except for Virginia in the 1976 Presidential election, years after the emergence of the Southern Strategy.

• The first Southern state to give the GOP control of both its governorship and its legislature was Florida, and it did not do this until 1998, long after the original architects of the Southern Strategy had left the GOP.^[9] However, it should be noted that the Southern Strategy was mainly targeted at electing presidential candidates, and that Democrats at the state level were much more conservative than the likes of George McGovern, Michael Dukakis or John Kerry. (One of the originators of the Southern Strategy, Kevin Phillips, had even become openly supportive of Democratic political candidates by then.)

• Georgia did not see its first post-Reconstruction GOP governor until 2002.

• Until 2005, Louisiana had been represented since Reconstruction by two Democratic Senators.

• Arkansas has two Democratic Senators, a Democratic governor, three out of four of their U.S. representatives are Democrats, every statewide office is held by a Democrat, and their state legislature is Democratic.

• The move to the Republican Party on the part of southern whites had more to do with whites voting for their economic interests than racism. Wrote Clay Risen in a review of The End of Southern Exceptionalism, a scholarly work by Richard Johnston and Byron Shafer, "In the postwar era...the South transformed itself from a backward region to an engine of the national economy, giving rise to a sizable new wealthy suburban class. This class, not surprisingly, began to vote for the party that best represented its economic interests: the Republican Party."^[10]

[edit] Modern appraisal in the Republican party

The southern strategy was used during the 1988 election, during the Willie Horton controversy. It has been used as recently as the 2000 election. During this election, George W. Bush political strategist Karl Rove was alleged to have conducted a push poll, suggesting to conservative Republican South Carolina primary voters that primary opponent John McCain had fathered an "illegitimate black child."^[11]

Following the 2004 re-election of President George W. Bush, which saw a low number of African Americans voting for Bush and other Republicans, Ken Mehlman, the Chairman of the Republican National Committee and Bush's campaign manager, delivered several speeches at meetings with African American business, community, and religious leaders in which he apologized for his party's use of the Southern Strategy in the past. Said Mehlman, "By the '70s and into the '80s and '90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out. Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong."^[12] However, many prominent Republican and conservative commentators denounced Mehlman for his apology, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity among them.^[13]

In the 2006 race for Tennessee's Senate seat a controversial political advertisement paid for by the Republican National Committee featured a series of characters facetiously offering their support for black Democratic candidate Harold Ford, Jr. One character was a white woman who claimed to have met Ford at a Playboy party. At the end of the ad, she requested that Ford call her. Critics accused the RNC of race baiting by playing on negative views of mixed-race relationships.^[14]

[edit] See also

• Reconstruction
• Red state vs. blue state divide
• Politics of the Southern United States
• Conservative coalition

[edit] References

[edit] Furthering reading

• The Southern Strategy Revisited: Republican Top-Down Advancement in the South, by Joseph A. Aistrup.
• The Rise of Southern Republicans, by Earl Black and Merle Black.
• From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994 (ISBN 0-8071-2366-8), by Dan T. Carter.
• The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, The Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of Southern Politics (ISBN 0-8071-2597-0), by Dan T. Carter.
• A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (ISBN 0-8078-2819-X), by David L. Chappell.
• The Emerging Republican Majority (ISBN 0-87000-058-6), by Kevin Phillips.
• Nixon's Southern strategy 'It's All In the Charts' by James Boyd, New York Times, May 17, 1970
• RNC Chief to Say It Was 'Wrong' to Exploit Racial Conflict for Votes by Mike Allen of the Washington Post
• GOP:'We were wrong' to play racial politics by Richard Benedetto of USA TODAY
• Why The GOP's Southern Strategy Ended
• White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (ISBN 0-691-09260-5) by Kevin M. Kruse.
• Dixie Rising: How the South is Shaping American Values, Politics, and Culture (ISBN 0-15-600550-6) by Peter Applebome.