Since several of you have been to lame to actually look up what the Southern Strategy was, and quesation that any such thing exists, here is what Wikipedia says about it:
Although the phrase "Southern strategy" is often attributed to Richard Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips, he did not originate it,[1] but merely popularized it.[2] In an interview included in a 1970 New York Times article, he touched on its essence:
From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.[3]
While Phillips was concerned with polarizing ethnic voting in general, and not just with winning the white South, this was by far the biggest prize yielded by his approach. Its success began at the presidential level, gradually trickling down to statewide offices, the Senate and House, as legacy segregationist Democrats retired or switched to the GOP. The strategy suffered a brief apparent reversal following Watergate, with broad support for the Southern Democrat Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election. But Ronald Reagan proclaiming support for "states' rights" at the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964's Freedom Summer--his first Southern campaign stop after winning the 1980 Republican presidential nomination--is often cited as evidence of the Republican Party building upon the Southern Strategy again.[4][5] Although another Southern Democrat Bill Clinton was twice elected President, winning a handful of Southern states in 1992 and 1996, he won more votes outside the South and could have won without carrying any Southern state. In 1968, Nixon lost a majority of southern electoral votes; his 1972 victory, both Reagan victories, and the victory of George H. W. Bush in 1988 could have been won without carrying any Southern state.[6]
From 1948 to 1984 the Southern states, traditionally a stronghold for the Democrats, became key swing states, providing the popular vote margins in the 1960, 1968 and 1976 elections. During this era, several Republican candidates expressed support for states' rights, which was a signal of opposition to federal enforcement of civil rights for blacks and intervention on their behalf, including passage of legislation to protect the franchise.[7]
Some have argued that this phenomenon had more to do with the economics than it had to do with race. In The End of Southern Exceptionalism, political scientists Richard Johnston of the University of Pennsylvania and Byron Shafer of the University of Wisconsin wrote that the Republicans' gains in the South corresponded to the growth of the upper middle class in that region. This group felt that their economic interests were better served by the Republicans than the Democrats. According to Johnston and Shafer, working-class white voters in the South continued to vote for Democrats until the 1990s. In summary, Shafer told The New York Times, "[whites] voted by their economic preferences, not racial preferences".[8] Many Republican political campaign operatives, such as Ken Mehlman who openly discussed how Republicans exploit racial tension for Republican electoral benefit, disagree with this assessment.[9]
In recent years, the term "Southern strategy" has been used in a more general sense, in which cultural themes are used in an election — primarily but not exclusively in the American South. In the past, issues such as busing, or states' rights appealed to white angst about integration. Today, appeals to conservative values name cultural issues such as gay marriage, abortion, and religion. This has also been viewed as the Southernization of American politics.
