Southern strategy

Southern strategy, in the political history of the United States, a campaign strategy of the Republican Party, actively pursued from the 1960s, that initially sought to increase and preserve support from white voters in the South by subtly endorsing racial segregation, racial discrimination, and the disenfranchisement of Black voters. The strategy has also involved directly promoting conservative views on immigration, taxes, social welfare programs, law enforcement, and states’ rights.

The Southern strategy proved successful. By the late 1970s, the regular political leadership of most Southern states had switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.

Historical background of the Southern strategy

Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, the Democratic Party had been the dominant political force in the country, helping to elect Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt four times and Pres. Harry S. Truman once. Republicans faced formidable obstacles in their efforts to regain the presidency and congressional majorities, particularly in the solidly Democratic South. White Southern voters associated the Republican Party with the post-American Civil War Reconstruction era and the promotion of equal civil rights for Black people. The Democratic Party, on the other hand, supported the South’s traditional racist policies, including segregation, discrimination, and the nearly universal disenfranchisement of Black voters.

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Yet, in the late 1930s, the Democratic Party began to break into regional factions over the issues of segregation and state versus federal power. At its national convention in 1948, the Democratic Party alienated many Southern politicians and voters by adding to its platform a plank by which it committed itself to “continuing its efforts to eradicate all racial, religious and economic discrimination.” In protest, several delegates from the Deep (or lower) South, led by South Carolina Gov. Strom Thurmond, walked out of the convention and formed a splinter group called the States’ Rights Democratic Party, popularly known as the Dixiecrats. As a Dixiecrat, Thurmond ran for president against Truman and carried several Southern states. Although Truman won the 1948 election, the leaders of the national Democratic Party came to recognize that strongly promoting civil rights would cost them white support in the South.

Some historians also credit the Republican Party in the West with helping to frame the elements of the Southern strategy after the 1940s. In that region, the party had already shifted to more conservative and racially biased views as compared to Republicans in the east, who at the time largely supported civil rights. Western and Southern politicians found that they shared similar desires for bans on immigrants of particular ethnicities (exemplified in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which put an end to many years of the immigration of Chinese nationals to the western United States) as well as for lower taxes, a smaller federal government, and reduced government spending. With a surge in population in the West after World War II, Western Republicans became a more influential political force.

Although Republicans won the White House in 1952, Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower refused to dismantle Roosevelt’s big government New Deal programs. More alarming to Southern whites was the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which declared racially segregated public schools to be unconstitutional, and the Court’s subsequent order requiring district courts and local school authorities to integrate schools “with all deliberate speed.” (Notably, violent protests erupted when Black teenagers attempted to attend a white high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957–58. Arkansas’s governor responded by closing all Little Rock public high schools, and other Southern cities followed suit, often subsidizing white students’ attendance at private, segregated academies, which were not bound by the Brown ruling. As a result, many Southern schools remained almost completely segregated until the late 1960s.)

The Southern strategy since the 1960s

The major Democratic-sponsored national civil rights legislation of the 1960s, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, were vehemently opposed by Southern Democrats and are frequently cited as the immediate cause of the South’s shift of allegiance from the Democratic to the Republican Party. The resentment among white voters provoked by federal civil rights mandates was successfully exploited in the 1960s in the Republicans’ early Southern strategy. For example, as the Republican candidate in the U.S. presidential election of 1964, Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater argued against the Civil Rights Act as an unconstitutional overreach by the federal government, insisting that policies related to civil rights, desegregation, and voting rights should be properly left to the states. Although Goldwater lost the presidential election to incumbent Democratic Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson, he won Arizona and five states in the Deep South, reflecting a significant change in the South’s political landscape.

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Republican Richard Nixon and his advisor Kevin P. Phillips are often credited with having developed the Southern strategy that consolidated the Republican hold on the entire South. Elected president in 1968 and 1972, Nixon knew that Republicans could no longer speak of segregation and white rule directly without alienating moderate voters. (Such openly racist rhetoric was left to people such as Democrat George Wallace, who ran as an independent presidential candidate in 1968.) Instead, they began using coded phrases such as “law and order” (suggesting intolerance of antiwar and civil rights protests), the “silent majority” (referring to white Southerners), and “states’ rights” (indicating opposition to federal civil rights mandates) to tap into racial and political resentment and to reduce the political power of Black people. Nixon straddled civil rights issues by enforcing some federal desegregation laws while using the courts to slow down school desegregation, particularly by means of mandatory busing. He also courted white evangelical Christian voters, which effectively shifted the Republican Party even further to the right. Evangelicals championed so-called “family values” and opposed women’s rights, gay rights, and the right to abortion. In the meantime, Black voters in the South were shifting their allegiance to the Democratic Party, which was now aligned with national efforts to end racial and economic discrimination.

Following his election as president in 1980 and 1984, Republican Ronald Reagan further emphasized the Southern strategy regarding law and order and states’ rights and strongly implied that Black people were unworthy of government assistance—including by promoting the racist stereotype of the “welfare queen.” He also strengthened Republican ties to white evangelical Christians. Later Republican presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush followed Reagan’s strategy in defeating their Democratic opponents. After Republicans won a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1994, House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia set an exceptionally combative tone that exacerbated political polarization between Republicans and Democrats throughout the country (see partisanship).

By 2016, the Southern strategy had given Republicans control of nearly every state governorship and legislature in the South. When Donald Trump won the Republican presidential nomination that year, he exploited the divisions fostered by the Southern strategy and went on to win the entire South, much of the West, and, narrowly, several Midwestern states. Trump made promises of immigration bans a central part of his campaign and greatly restricted immigration from Mexico and from Muslim-majority countries following his election as president. He also embraced some of the more radical, white supremacist elements of the far right. Since 2016, Trump has effectively extended the political and cultural divisions created by decades of the Southern strategy.