The Southern Strategy

The Southern Strategy refers to the deliberate Republican effort beginning with Richard Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign to appeal to white Southern voters who had abandoned the Democratic Party after Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips described the logic plainly in his 1969 book 'The Emerging Republican Majority': the party that aligned with white racial resentment in the South would dominate American politics for a generation. The strategy operated through coded language — 'states' rights,' 'law and order,' 'forced busing,' opposition to 'welfare' — that communicated racial appeal without using explicit racial terms. This was the mechanism Lee Atwater described explicitly in a 1981 interview: '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.' Ronald Reagan's August 1980 appearance at the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi — near where civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were murdered in 1964 — and his declaration there, 'I believe in states' rights,' are read by historians such as Rick Perlstein as a deliberate signal to Southern white voters. The Southern Strategy provided the electoral vehicle that made the Religious Right politically viable. White evangelical Southerners who had left the Democratic Party over civil rights were available for mobilization by Weyrich, Falwell, and others who could organize them into a political bloc. Critics argue that the coded racial language of the Southern Strategy and the religious language of the Religious Right addressed the same constituency.

Themes this entry appears in

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

Connections from The Southern Strategy

• influenced → Reagan Election (1980) (1980) — In August 1980, Ronald Reagan spoke at the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi — near where civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered by Klan members with local law enforcement complicity in 1964. He told the crowd, 'I believe in states' rights.' 'States' rights' was the language of segregationist resistance to federal civil rights enforcement. Historians such as Rick Perlstein read the choice of location and language as a deliberate signal to the white Southern constituency the Southern Strategy had been cultivating since 1968: the Republican Party understood their grievances and would not actively oppose them. The Moral Majority, built from the same white Southern evangelical constituency, had been working to register those voters. Reagan's campaign fused the Southern Strategy's racial appeal with the Religious Right's moral-cultural framing — the two streams of white Southern backlash politics completing their merger in a single candidacy. He carried every former Confederate state except Carter's Georgia.
• influenced → Tea Party Movement / Evangelical Overlap (2009) — The Tea Party movement that erupted in February 2009 — weeks after Barack Obama's inauguration — drew its energy from multiple sources, and critics argue that its rapid organization and the character of its grievances drew on four decades of Southern Strategy infrastructure. Scholars such as Robert P. Jones argue that for part of the base, decades of coded appeals shaped how Obama-era debates were heard; critics heard that coded vocabulary in phrases such as 'taking our country back' and 'not one of us.' The evangelical overlap with the Tea Party was substantial: polling consistently showed that Tea Party supporters were disproportionately white, Southern, Protestant, and evangelical. The organizing infrastructure — the mailing lists, the church networks, the AM radio stations, the direct mail donors — had been built by the Religious Right and the Republican Party through the preceding forty years. In this reading, the Southern Strategy helped create the audience; Obama's election provided the occasion.

Connections to The Southern Strategy

• Lee Atwater influenced (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.
• Brown v. Board of Education influenced (1968) — Brown v. Board of Education (1954) triggered 'massive resistance' — a coordinated effort by Southern white political and civic institutions to defy federal desegregation orders. State legislatures passed interposition resolutions, school districts closed rather than integrate, and the political realignment of the white South began. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 accelerated the break: Southern white Democrats who had tolerated the New Deal coalition as long as it left racial hierarchy untouched left the Democratic Party en masse. Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips identified this rupture and designed the Southern Strategy specifically to capture it. The constituency the Southern Strategy mobilized was not invented by Nixon or Phillips — it was created by fourteen years of white Southern backlash to federal civil rights enforcement that Brown had initiated. Without Brown, the massive resistance movement doesn't exist; without massive resistance, the specific white Southern grievance that Nixon converted into Republican votes doesn't exist in the concentrated, electorally decisive form it took in 1968.

Sources

• The Emerging Republican Majority — Kevin Phillips (1969)
• Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right — Randall Balmer (2021), pp. 56-80
• Lee Atwater's Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy — Rick Perlstein (2012)