Lee Atwater

Harvey LeRoy 'Lee' Atwater (1951-1991) was the Republican Party's most influential political strategist of the 1980s and the man who most clearly articulated — in private, in 1981 — the racial mechanics of the Southern Strategy. Atwater worked under Reagan's chief political consultant John Sears in the 1970s, then rose to manage Reagan's 1984 reelection campaign and George H.W. Bush's 1988 presidential campaign. His 1988 campaign produced the Willie Horton ad — a television spot depicting a Black convicted murderer who committed assault and rape while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison during Michael Dukakis's governorship. The ad was widely condemned as a direct appeal to racial fear. Communication scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson's Dirty Politics (1992) analyzed how the Horton campaign misrepresented the furlough record and played on white racial fear. Atwater's candor about his own methods — expressed in the 1981 interview with political scientist Alexander Lamis — provides the clearest documentation of how the Southern Strategy worked. His account of the abstraction process (moving from explicit racial language to coded policy language) has become the standard analytical framework for understanding Republican racial politics from 1968 through the present. Atwater was a Southern Baptist from South Carolina and moved easily in evangelical political circles. His political operation connected the Republican Party's Southern electoral strategy to the Religious Right's organizational infrastructure — both targeting the same white Southern evangelical constituency. Atwater died of brain cancer in 1991 at age 40. Before his death, he publicly apologized for his political tactics, including specifically the Willie Horton ad, in a widely reported statement.

Themes this entry appears in

• Race & Civil Rights
• Political Strategy
• Anti-Democratic

Connections from Lee Atwater

• influenced → The Southern Strategy (1981) — In a 1981 interview with political scientist Alexander Lamis, Atwater articulated — with unusual candor — exactly how the Southern Strategy worked: 'You start out in 1954 by saying, Nigger, nigger, nigger. By 1968 you can't say nigger — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights... You're getting so abstract now that 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 interview — not published in full until 2012 — is the clearest insider documentation of the abstraction process: how racial grievance was systematically translated into coded policy language. Atwater's operation in the 1980s completed the Southern Strategy's evolution from a blunt regional appeal into a nationally deployable electoral formula. His 1988 campaign made Willie Horton, a Black convicted murderer who committed new crimes while on a Massachusetts furlough, a central theme against Michael Dukakis; the best-known Horton ad was aired by an outside PAC, and critics saw the theme as an appeal to white racial fear. Atwater's contribution was making the racial appeal simultaneously deniable and legible.

Sources

• Lee Atwater's Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy — Rick Perlstein (2012)
• Dirty Tricks: Nixon, Watergate, and the Decline of American Democracy — Walter Isaacson (1990)