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Currently, the South represents a strong base of the Republican Party. However, for much of American history the South represented a strong political base for the Democratic Party. The first two Republican presidential candidates, John Fremont and Abraham Lincoln, were not even on the ballot in most southern states. The Democratic South spawned Woodrow Wilson, perhaps the most progressive president in American history, and the south was a major stronghold of FDR’s four-term coalition. One theory, known as the “Southern Strategy”, is that in the 1960s, Republican Presidential candidate Richard Nixon used a political strategy of appealing to racist policies and rhetoric in order to win the support of white voters in the South. The theory continues that this strategy was continued by succeeding Republican nominees of Goldwater and Reagan, which led to a party realignment that explains the South’s current support for the GOP. However, the “Southern Strategy” theory is historically inaccurate and doesn’t factually explain how the South became predominantly Republican.
From the Nixon White House Tapes we know that Nixon was privately a vehement racist. However, this was very much hidden from Nixon’s public persona. Nixon built a public image that was supportive of the civil rights movement in his time as a legislator and executive. Nixon served as Vice President of the Eisenhower administration, which oversaw the integration of U.S. armed forces, and sent the U.S. National Guard to Little Rock, Arkansas to uphold the decision of Brown v. Board of Education. In 1957, Nixon urged President Eisenhower to sign the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which was recognized and thanked by the great Martin Luther King in a letter, “Let me say before closing how deeply grateful all people of goodwill are to you for your assiduous labor and dauntless courage in seeking to take the Civil Rights Bill a reality.” King goes on to state “I am convinced that we shall continue to make real progress toward our goal of guaranteeing rights to every American.”
From the popularity and success of the Eisenhower administration, Richard Nixon was nominated for President by the Republican Party in 1960, which he ended up narrowly losing to Sen. John F. Kennedy. The Nixon campaign strategy focused not on the South, but rather on swing states such as California, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, among others. Nixon ended up losing eleven of the fourteen southern states not only to Kennedy but to the third-party segregationist candidate, Democratic Sen. Harry Byrd, who launched an Independent bid as a result of Nixon and Kennedy’s support of the Civil Rights Movement.
In 1968, the GOP once again nominated Nixon for president, hoping a moderate candidate could defeat the fractured Democratic party caused by the LBJ presidency. The strategy of the ‘68 Nixon campaign again focused on the crucial swing states of California, Texas, Illinois, Missouri, and Wisconsin, among a few others. George Wallace, the Democratic Governor of Alabama, launched a third-party bid under the American Independent party in response to Nixon and Humphrey’s support for the civil rights movement. Wallace, similarly to Byrd, focused on the South, but was much more popular and was backed by a strong southern coalition, that Byrd did not have in 1960. Thus, Nixon had no political incentive to appeal to racist, white voters in the South, as they were safe Wallace voters. However, Nixon had much to lose had he chosen to appeal to racism in the swing states he ultimately won; Nixon’s success in the swing states resulted in his victory in 1968. However, this victory for Nixon was given little contribution from the South, which gave Wallace a total of 46 electoral votes. Nixon came in third place in Deep South states of Alabama and Mississippi, trailing Wallace by 52% and 50%, respectively. As simply as a campaign strategy, the “Southern Strategy” would not have made any strategic sense for the Nixon campaign, as it would not have influenced enough voters to win the South from Wallace and would have cost votes from the West, Midwest, and Rustbelt, which provided Nixon his victory.
The Nixon Administration continued to push progressive reform civil rights action. One of Nixon’s first actions was creating a special committee in his cabinet to better enforce the desegregation of schools in the South. Nixon also implemented the first act of federal affirmative action in the “Philadelphia Plan.” Nixon confronted unions in Philadelphia, which discriminated against African-Americans and other marginalized groups, and threatened to cut their federal contracts unless they met a specified quota. Additionally, Nixon signed the Voting Rights Act of 1970, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 which expanded their funding and power to enforce against workplace discrimination. As stated earlier, there is little doubt that Nixon was a racist individual, but to increase his electoral chances and to keep a good public opinion, he shielded his racism from the public.
The South’s transformation from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party was not a sudden occurrence caused by a single election or strategy, but occurred as a result of a generational shift between the 1960’s and the 1990’s. Of the twenty Southern Democrats who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, only one of them eventually switched to the Republican Party. It wouldn’t be until 1996 when the Republicans were voted in all those twenty senate seats. Furthermore, the Republican Party didn’t hold a majority of southern congressional seats until 1994. National Review’s Kevin Williamson said that “If southern rednecks ditched the democrats because of a civil rights law passed in 1964, it is strange that they waited until the late 1980’s and early 1990’s to do so.” The southern switch to Republican occurred between generations, as more industry moved to the South, younger generations aligned with policies that better benefited them such as tax cuts, business deregulation, pro-guns, and tariff cuts.•
