Southern strategy

For the British strategy in the American Revolutionary War, see Southern theater of the American Revolutionary War.
The Southern United States as defined by the Census Bureau

In American politics the Southern strategy was a Republican Party electoral strategy to increase political support among white voters in the South by appealing to racism against African Americans.[1][2][3] As the civil rights movement and dismantling of Jim Crow laws in the 1950s and 1960s visibly deepened existing racial tensions in much of the Southern United States, Republican politicians such as presidential candidate Richard Nixon and Senator Barry Goldwater developed strategies that successfully contributed to the political realignment of many white, conservative voters in the South who had traditionally supported the Democratic Party. The strategy also helped to push the Republican Party much more to the right relative to the 1950s.[4] By winning all of the South a presidential candidate could obtain the presidency with minimal support elsewhere.[5][6]

The phrase "Southern strategy" refers primarily to "top down" narratives of the political realignment of the South which suggest that Republican leaders consciously appealed to many white Southerners' racial grievances to gain their support.[7] This top-down narrative of the Southern Strategy is generally believed to be the primary force that transformed Southern politics following the civil rights era. The scholarly consensus is that racial conservatism was critical in the post-Civil Rights Act realignment of the Republican and Democratic parties,[8][9] though several aspects of this view have been debated by historians and political scientists.[10][11][12][13][14]

The perception that the Republican Party had served as the "vehicle of white supremacy in the South", particularly during the Goldwater campaign and the presidential elections of 1968 and 1972, made it difficult for the Republican Party to win back the support of black voters in the South in later years.[4] In 2005, Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman formally apologized to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for exploiting racial polarization to win elections and for ignoring the black vote.[15][16]

  1. ^ Boyd, James (May 17, 1970). "Nixon's Southern strategy: 'It's All in the Charts'" (PDF). The New York Times. Retrieved August 2, 2008.
  2. ^ Carter, Dan T. From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution 1963–1994. p. 35.
  3. ^ Branch, Taylor (1999). Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963–65. New York: Simon & Schuster. p. 242. ISBN 978-0-684-80819-2. OCLC 37909869.
  4. ^ a b Apple, R. W. Jr. (September 19, 1996). "G.O.P. Tries Hard to Win Black Votes, but Recent History Works Against It". The New York Times. Archived from the original on June 12, 2022.
  5. ^ Black & Black 1992, p. 306.
  6. ^ Black & Black 1992, p. 312.
  7. ^ Aistrup, Joseph A. (1996). The Southern Strategy Revisited: Republican Top-Down Advancement in the South. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 978-0-8131-4792-5.
  8. ^ Lisa Bedolla, Kerry Haynie (2013). "The Obama coalition and the future of American politics". Politics, Groups, and Identities. 1: 128–133. doi:10.1080/21565503.2012.758593. S2CID 154440894. It is generally believed to be the primary force that transformed the once overwhelmingly Democratic South into a reliable GOP stronghold in presidential elections (Aistrup 1996; Black and Black 2003)
  9. ^ Crespino, Joseph (2007). In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution. Princeton University Press. p. 10. Whatever the shortcomings of the southern strategy thesis, on one score it has been exactly right: it has placed white reaction against the modern civil rights movement at the center of the conservative resurgence since the 1960s.
  10. ^ Julian E. Zelizer (2012). Governing America: The Revival of Political History. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-1-4008-4189-9. younger Southern historians such as Matthew Lassiter, Kevin Kruse, and Joseph Crespino objected to claims about Southern Exceptionalism while agreeing on the centrality of a racial backlash.
  11. ^ Lassiter, Matthew D. (2006). The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South. Princeton University Press. pp. 4–7. ISBN 978-1-4008-4942-0.
  12. ^ Cite error: The named reference Feldman was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  13. ^ Lassiter, Matthew D.; Crespino, Joseph (2010). The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism. Oxford University Press. pp. 25–. ISBN 978-0-19-538474-1.
  14. ^ Kruse, Kevin Michael (2005). White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-09260-7.
  15. ^ Rondy, John (July 15, 2005). "GOP ignored black vote, chairman says: RNC head apologizes at NAACP meeting". The Boston Globe. Reuters. Archived from the original on January 12, 2012.
  16. ^ Allen, Mike (July 14, 2005). "RNC Chief to Say It Was 'Wrong' to Exploit Racial Conflict for Votes". The Washington Post. Retrieved October 14, 2013.