Southern strategy
Based on Wikipedia: Southern strategy
The Bargain That Reshaped American Politics
In 1970, a Republican strategist named Kevin Phillips gave an interview to the New York Times that would become infamous. His words were blunt: Republicans would never get more than ten to twenty percent of the Black vote, and they didn't need more than that. What they needed, Phillips explained, was for Black voters to keep registering as Democrats in the South. The more they did, the faster white Southerners would abandon the Democratic Party.
"That's where the votes are," he said.
This was the Southern strategy laid bare—not whispered in backrooms, but stated plainly in the nation's newspaper of record. It wasn't a secret plan uncovered by investigative journalists. It was an openly acknowledged approach to winning elections by exploiting racial division.
The Southern strategy refers to the Republican Party's deliberate effort, beginning in the 1960s, to win white Southern voters by appealing to their resentment of civil rights advances. It worked spectacularly well. And it fundamentally transformed both major political parties, American electoral geography, and the nature of political discourse for generations to come.
Understanding the Solid South
To understand why the Southern strategy mattered, you first need to understand what it overturned.
For nearly a century after the Civil War, the American South was politically monolithic. White Southerners voted Democratic so consistently that the region earned a nickname: the Solid South. This wasn't about progressive values or economic populism. It was about memory and resentment.
The Democratic Party had been the party of the Confederacy. The Republican Party was the party of Lincoln, of emancipation, of Reconstruction. For white Southerners, voting Republican felt like a betrayal of ancestors who had fought and died for the Lost Cause.
This loyalty persisted even when it made little logical sense. Poor white farmers in Alabama voted for the same party as wealthy industrialists in Birmingham, despite having almost nothing in common economically. The glue holding them together was racial solidarity and historical grievance.
The numbers were staggering. Between 1902 and 1950, every single United States Senator from the South was a Democrat. Every one. Republicans held only about three percent of state legislative seats across the region in 1948. In five Southern states, they held zero seats.
How the Democrats Lost Their Grip
The cracks appeared in 1948.
President Harry Truman, facing reelection, did something unprecedented for a Democratic president: he embraced civil rights. His Committee on Civil Rights had published a groundbreaking report called "To Secure These Rights," recommending federal legislation to end segregation and protect voting rights.
At the 1948 Democratic National Convention, the party's platform included support for civil rights. Southern delegates were furious. Thirty-five of them walked out—thirteen from Alabama and all twenty-two from Mississippi.
These defectors formed the States' Rights Democratic Party, quickly nicknamed the Dixiecrats. They nominated Strom Thurmond, the segregationist governor of South Carolina, for president. Their platform was explicit: they supported racial segregation, poll taxes, and opposed anti-lynching legislation.
The Dixiecrats hoped to win enough Southern electoral votes to throw the election into the House of Representatives, where they could bargain. They failed. Truman won reelection anyway, and the Dixiecrats dissolved.
But they had proven something important: Southern white voters would abandon the Democrats if pushed hard enough on race.
Truman would be the last Democratic presidential nominee to win a majority of white votes in the South.
Goldwater's Gamble
The transformation accelerated in 1964 with Barry Goldwater.
Goldwater, an Arizona senator, was a different kind of Republican. He was a Western conservative, skeptical of federal power in all its forms. Crucially, he had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964—not because he personally supported segregation, he claimed, but because he believed the federal government had no constitutional authority to regulate private businesses.
The distinction mattered to constitutional scholars. It did not matter to Southern voters.
What they heard was a Republican telling them that Washington had no right to force integration. Goldwater's campaign swept through the Deep South. At the Republican National Convention, 270 of 279 Southern delegates supported him—accounting for nearly a third of his total support.
Goldwater lost the general election in a landslide to Lyndon Johnson. But he won five Deep South states: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. These were states that had voted Democratic in every presidential election since Reconstruction. Goldwater also won his home state of Arizona, and nothing else.
The message was clear. A Republican could win the South by opposing civil rights. And the South had a lot of electoral votes.
Nixon's Refinement
Richard Nixon learned from Goldwater's defeat. The problem wasn't the strategy—it was the execution. Goldwater had been too explicit, too ideological, too easy to paint as an extremist.
Nixon would be subtler.
In 1968 and again in 1972, Nixon pursued what became the definitive version of the Southern strategy. He spoke of "law and order" in cities wracked by civil unrest. He championed "states' rights"—a phrase that had become coded language for opposition to federal civil rights enforcement. He promised to appoint "strict constructionist" judges who would roll back the Warren Court's expansive civil rights rulings.
Nixon didn't use racial slurs. He didn't explicitly attack Black Americans. But his message was perfectly calibrated for white Southerners who felt threatened by the changes of the 1960s.
The strategy worked. Nixon won the presidency in 1968. In 1972, he carried every Southern state, demolishing the old Democratic coalition.
Lee Atwater, a Republican strategist who would later run George H.W. Bush's 1988 campaign, gave a remarkably candid explanation of how the coded language worked in an anonymous 1981 interview that was later attributed to him:
You start out in 1954 by saying, "N----r, n----r, n----r." By 1968 you can't say "n----r"—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff, and you're getting so abstract. Now, you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.
This was the dark genius of the Southern strategy: finding ways to appeal to racial resentment without saying anything explicitly racist, making the racism deniable while keeping it effective.
The Long Realignment
Presidential elections were just the beginning. The transformation of the South took decades to complete.
From 1948 to 1984, the Southern states became swing states at the presidential level, providing crucial margins in tight elections. But below the presidency, Democrats remained powerful. White Southerners would vote for Nixon or Reagan for president while still electing Democratic governors, senators, and congressmen.
This split-ticket voting reflected the complicated nature of the realignment. Many Southern Democrats were themselves conservatives on racial issues. They had built up decades of seniority in Congress, giving them powerful committee chairmanships. Voters had personal relationships with their representatives.
Change came gradually, then all at once.
Some Democratic officeholders simply switched parties. Strom Thurmond, the 1948 Dixiecrat presidential candidate, became a Republican in 1964. He would serve in the Senate until 2003, when he was 100 years old.
Others retired and were replaced by Republicans. The Republican Party invested heavily in building grassroots organizations across the South, recruiting candidates for school boards, city councils, and county commissions. They developed a farm team of politicians who could eventually run for higher office.
By the 1990s and 2000s, the transformation was complete. The Solid South had flipped from solid Democratic to solid Republican. The electoral map had essentially inverted.
The Other Migration
The political realignment happened alongside demographic changes that reshaped the region.
Starting during World War II and continuing until 1970, more than five million African Americans left the rural South for cities in the North, Midwest, and West. This was the Great Migration, one of the largest internal population movements in American history.
Black Southerners left for many reasons: escaping poverty, seeking better jobs in industrial cities, fleeing the terror of Jim Crow. But the migration also changed what they were leaving behind. As Black populations decreased in some Southern areas, white voters became even more dominant.
Simultaneously, the South was urbanizing. In 1932, less than twenty percent of people in the Deep South lived in metropolitan areas. By 1976, that figure had doubled. Florida became the first urbanized state in the South during the 1930s.
These new urban Southerners were different from the rural voters who had sustained the Solid South. Many were transplants from other regions, bringing different political assumptions. Many were businesspeople and professionals more concerned with economic conservatism than racial politics. Republican candidates like John Tower in Texas and Howard Baker in Tennessee found their strongest support in these growing urban areas.
An Official Apology
In 2005, something remarkable happened. Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, gave a speech to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, better known as the NAACP.
He apologized.
"Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization," Mehlman said. "I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong."
This was an extraordinary admission from the leader of a major political party. The Southern strategy wasn't ancient history—it was recent enough that living politicians had participated in it. Ronald Reagan had launched his 1980 general election campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964, giving a speech about states' rights. George H.W. Bush had run the infamous Willie Horton advertisement in 1988, featuring a Black convicted murderer to attack his opponent on crime.
Mehlman's apology acknowledged what scholars had long documented: the Republican Party had deliberately used racial appeals to build its coalition. The party that had been founded to oppose slavery, that had passed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, that had sent troops to protect Black voters during Reconstruction—that party had chosen a different path.
Whether the apology represented a genuine change in direction or merely a rhetorical gesture remains debated. What's clear is that the legacy of the Southern strategy continues to shape American politics.
The Historical Irony
The Southern strategy represented a complete reversal of the parties' historical positions.
After the Civil War, during the period called Reconstruction, Republicans had been the party of civil rights. They controlled every Southern state except Virginia. They passed constitutional amendments guaranteeing citizenship and voting rights to formerly enslaved people. They sent federal troops to protect Black voters from white terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan.
But this commitment was always fragile.
The Republican Party's power base was in the North. When Northern priorities conflicted with Southern needs, the South always lost. In 1868, the party spent only five percent of its campaign funds in the South. After Ulysses Grant's reelection that year, a Northern newspaper told Southern Republicans to "root, hog, or die"—an old saying meaning they were on their own.
The final abandonment came in 1877. The previous year's presidential election had been disputed, with both parties claiming victory. In a series of backroom deals known as the Compromise of 1877, Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South. In exchange, they got the presidency for Rutherford Hayes.
What followed was a systematic dismantling of Black political power. Between 1890 and 1908, every Southern state rewrote its constitution to disenfranchise Black voters. They used poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and white primaries. They applied these rules selectively—barely literate white voters passed their tests while Black professionals failed.
The results were devastating. Black voter registration plummeted. The Republican Party, dependent on Black votes, became irrelevant in the South. Democrats took complete control.
This was the system the Southern strategy would eventually overturn—not by restoring Black voting rights, but by appealing to the same white voters who had suppressed them.
The Power of Southern Delegations
Even during their decades of electoral weakness, Southern Republicans found ways to influence national politics.
Republican national conventions allocated delegates partly based on tradition rather than electoral success. Southern states sent delegations that accounted for about one-fourth of all delegates, despite Democrats dominating the region. These delegations were often called "rotten boroughs," a term borrowed from British politics for electoral districts that no longer represented significant populations.
Southern delegates typically supported whoever was already winning—the incumbent president or the frontrunner for the nomination. This made them valuable allies for establishment candidates.
In 1912, this system exploded into controversy. President William Howard Taft controlled eighty-three percent of Southern delegates, which he used to defeat Theodore Roosevelt at the convention. Roosevelt's supporters were furious at what they saw as a rigged system. After that election, the party changed its rules to base delegate allocation more on electoral performance.
By 1964, the calculus had shifted. A candidate who could unite Western and Southern delegations would control four-fifths of what they needed for the nomination. This took power away from more liberal Republicans in the Northeast. Barry Goldwater rode exactly this coalition to the nomination.
States' Rights as Code
Perhaps no phrase better captures the linguistic transformation of the Southern strategy than "states' rights."
In American political theory, states' rights refers to the constitutional principle that powers not explicitly granted to the federal government belong to the states. It's a legitimate concept with a long history, debated since the founding.
But after the Civil Rights Movement, the phrase took on a different meaning. When Southern politicians invoked states' rights, they typically meant opposition to federal civil rights enforcement. They meant keeping the federal government from integrating schools, protecting voting rights, or enforcing equal accommodation in businesses.
This was a remarkable reversal for Republicans. Since the Civil War, the party had generally supported federal power over states when it came to civil rights. Reconstruction Republicans had used federal authority aggressively to protect Black citizens. Now, Republicans were adopting the language of their old Confederate opponents.
The phrase worked because it had surface-level legitimacy. A politician could say "states' rights" and claim to be articulating a principled constitutional position. Critics who accused them of racism could be dismissed as unfairly attacking a mainstream political philosophy.
But everyone understood the subtext. When George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor, ran for president on states' rights, nobody was confused about what he meant.
The Scholarly Consensus
Among historians and political scientists, there is broad agreement that racial conservatism drove the realignment of the parties in the South. The evidence is extensive: campaign documents, private memoranda, voting patterns, survey data, and the words of the strategists themselves.
Some aspects remain debated. Scholars disagree about the relative importance of racial appeals versus other factors like economic conservatism, religious values, and migration patterns. They disagree about whether the strategy was primarily "top-down"—driven by elite politicians making calculated appeals—or "bottom-up," reflecting genuine shifts in voter attitudes.
But the core claim is not seriously contested: the Republican Party deliberately sought to benefit from white racial resentment, and this strategy succeeded in transforming the South from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican.
The long-term consequences extended beyond electoral politics. By winning the South through racial appeals, the Republican Party became associated with those appeals. This made it extremely difficult to win back Black voters in later years. The perception that Republicans had served as what one scholar called "the vehicle of white supremacy in the South" created a partisan racial divide that persists today.
A Transformation Complete
The Southern strategy succeeded beyond what its architects could have imagined.
A region that had voted Democratic for nearly a century became reliably Republican. A party that had struggled to win ten percent of white Southern votes came to dominate every level of government across the South. The electoral map of the United States was fundamentally redrawn.
But success came with costs. The Republican Party moved substantially to the right, pulled by its new Southern base. Racial polarization became a permanent feature of American elections. The possibility of bipartisan civil rights legislation, which had produced the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act with significant Republican support, essentially ended.
The Southern strategy also created a template. If racial appeals could realign one region, similar appeals might work elsewhere. The techniques of coded language and wedge issues developed for the South could be applied nationally.
Kevin Phillips, the strategist who popularized the term, understood this. He wasn't just interested in winning the South. He was interested in "polarizing ethnic voting in general." The South was simply the biggest prize.
Today, when politicians speak of "real Americans" versus coastal elites, when they invoke crime and immigration as existential threats, when they frame elections as battles for the soul of the nation—they are using techniques refined during the Southern strategy. The specific targets may have evolved, but the approach remains recognizable.
The Solid South is gone, replaced by a different kind of solidity. And the bargain that created it continues to shape American politics, more than half a century after Kevin Phillips explained exactly how it would work.