The Southern Strategy

     The southern strategy was a policy pursued by the Republican Party which sought to win political support in the South by appealing to the racism of white voters. The strategy is thought to have contributed to the political realignment of the South, which saw conservative Southern Democrats shift to supporting the Republican Party, resulting in the reliably Republican South of today.

The strategy can be traced back to the 1964 presidential election, in which Republican Senator Barry Goldwater ran a campaign that first demonstrated the strategy's viability. Goldwater ran a campaign which opposed a strong federal government, and preached the virtues of states rights. While this was not an overtly racist platform, the expectation was that this policy symbolized resistance to civil rights. In fact, Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, not for outwardly racist reasons, but because he "finds no constitutional basis for the exercise of Federal regulatory authority in [Titles II & VII of the bill]; and [he] believes the attempted usurpation of such power to be a grave threat to the very essence of our basic system of government, namely, that of a constitutional government in which 50 sovereign states have reserved to themselves and to the people those powers not specifically granted to the central or Federal Government." To many voters, this kind of language was equivalent to a disavowal of civil rights legislation, earning Goldwater the votes of many Southern conservatives who had previously vote Democrat. Ultimately, Goldwater did not manage to win the election; Johnson won in a landslide. However, Goldwater was able to win six states—Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina, and his home state of Arizona—demonstrating the feasibility of the strategy. 

     The strategy was further developed in the 1968 presidential election, which saw Richard Nixon run against Hubert Humphrey. Nixon and his advisers realized that they could not appeal directly to white supremacy, as this would alienate minorities from the party. Instead, Nixon ran on a platform of  states rights"law and order," pandering to Southern voters similar to Goldwater's campaign. However, the inclusion of a third candidate in the election, George Wallace (former Democrat), who had been much more explicit than Nixon, robbed Nixon of most of the states Goldwater had won in 1964. Ultimately, however, Nixon managed to win. 

In the following decades, the Republican rhetoric turned away from racially charged rhetoric, and focused instead on more subtlety coded language. Candidates began attacking the "welfare state" and advocating "New Federalism," which entailed granting block grants to state governments to do with as they pleased, continuing the rhetoric of states rights. Famously, Reagan said "I believe in states rights" in a speech made in Mississippi, demonstrating the continuing rhetoric of the southern strategy. And, while the Republican Party shifted to stress Christian and moral values, the same voters whom the southern strategy was targeted at remained a core base for the party.