A Legacy of Betrayal at the Heart of the GOP’s White Vote Strategy

1,439 words

Implementation of the “Southern Strategy” by Republicans to win over disaffected white voters (particularly in the South) is the most underappreciated historical event in American history. This was when the parties “switched”, defining our current political status quo. Essentially, the Southern Strategy emerged when Republican strategists realized that focusing on the resistance of white voters to desegregation and racial entitlements for non-whites could secure them the South and thus a route to electoral victory in presidential contests.

The full significance of this event is somewhat obscured in recent discourse by reference to the markedly similar “Sailer Strategy”, so-called because columnist Steve Sailer had suggested Republicans could win by focusing on issues that maximized white turnout. However the concepts are nearly identical. The primary differences are that white working class voters in Rust Belt states like Michigan and Pennsylvania put states outside the South in play for Trump in 2016. The possibilities of white identity politics thus present broad opportunities for electoral success even outside the South. Additionally, mass immigration has replaced desegregation and “civil rights” as the issue of the day.

The Southern Strategy was popularized by future Nixon political strategist Kevin Phillips, who laid out the framework in his 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority. But its first practical application was in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign focusing on opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Although the South had historic loyalty to the Democratic Party for resisting Reconstruction, the discontent felt regarding President Truman’s betrayals on desegregation and so-called “civil rights” entitlements for blacks led to a conducive climate for Southern revolt.

The strategy ultimately succeeded in Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign. However, in a pattern that would become infuriatingly familiar to white Republican voters, Nixon’s Southern Strategy rhetoric yielded little in the way of policy achievements for white voters. Nixon’s policies included the enforcement of school desegregation, the expansion of the Voting Rights Act, the initiation of affirmative action through the Philadelphia Plan, and support for minority businesses and black colleges.[1] ^[2]

It’s largely taken for granted that white Southerners are prototypical “conservatives” as we understand it today: anti-big government, low taxes and the party of the rich and their corporations. Yet, before the Southern Strategy Southerners historically voted very differently. In 1932 they helped put Democrat and arch-big government progressive Franklin Delano Roosevelt into the White House. The South also went for left-wing Democrat and Georgia peanut farmer Jimmy Carter in 1976, demonstrating that the political switch didn’t happen overnight but was a decades-long process.

Over time, more explicit appeals to white voters were “coded” to invoke the passions and priorities of the white electorate without directly implicating race. Republicans, coming as they did from elite backgrounds and wanting to fit into “polite” DC society, were deeply embarrassed by the grievances of the blue collar and middle-class whites. By the time of Ronald Reagan’s successful election bid it was no longer necessary to directly talk about race. Reagan strategist Lee Atwater infamously described it in incendiary fashion thusly:

“Y’all don’t quote me on this. 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 and all that stuff. 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 [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘nigger.’ So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back-burner.”[2] ^[2]

Atwater’s crass diminution of white racial grievance to saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger” is typically recalled by the political class as an indictment of the “racist” moral failings of the Southern Strategy. However, it speaks much more to the contempt that GOP operatives felt for the priorities of their own voters and provides clear insight into why pro-white policies aren’t implemented with the same aggressiveness as, say, tax cuts for the rich.

There is fierce debate over whether Reagan in fact employed a Southern Strategy in 1980, yet, given the coded terminology conceded by Atwater, it is generally felt that Reagan’s criticism of welfare queens and call for limited government were understood by racially conscious white voters as relief from the burgeoning welfare state siphoning tax dollars from hard-working white Americans to opportunistic blacks exploiting lavish government entitlements. Yet, once again, the white voters were largely betrayed. In 1986 Reagan signed a sweeping amnesty bill for illegal immigrants paving the demise of the white majority that elected him. [3] ^[2]

Future Donald Trump presidential campaign manager Paul Manafort served as the Southern coordinator for the 1980 Reagan campaign, providing a clear through line between the successful Republican campaigns 4 decades apart. Trump’s 2016 campaign marshaled the core of the Southern Strategy’s appeal to White grievance and expanded it into the Rust Belt in 2016 by making mass immigration and his promise to “Build the Wall” a central aspect of his campaign. White voters responded in near monolithic fashion, in what black commentator Van Jones famously termed the “white-lash.”[4] ^[2]

It’s critically important to note that in contrast to his 2016 campaign, Trump’s 2020 and 2024 campaigns are a repudiation of central elements of the Southern Strategy and therefore the preeminence of white Southern voters. Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips described this element of the Southern Strategy: “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…”

However, as we have all noted, the Trump 2020 and 2024 campaigns are obsessed with the black vote and driving it over this vaunted threshold.  Despite hype promising Trump might garner “record” and “historic” black votes, his actual 2020 share of the black vote was only 8%.[5] ^[2] This black support comes at the expense of the white vote. Trump’s share of the suburban white vote, for instance, dropped 12 percentage points from 2016 to 2020. Yet, no one seems to have learned their lesson since the Trump 2024 campaign is once again touting the phantom black Trump vote at the expense of his core white constituency.[6] ^[2]

In contrast to those who say that white voters need Trump to win in 2024, we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. If Trump wins, it will be seen as a permanent repudiation of the Southern Strategy and the preeminence of the white vote by Republicans. If he loses, it will be seen that way by Democrats.

It’s hard to find neutral, or even right-leaning, accounts on the Southern Strategy despite it being, along with World War 2, the central paradigm-defining event of the modern political landscape. A 2019 book, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics is a representative example. The book is co-authored by Angie Maxwell[7] ^[2], a white woman specializing in “Southern Studies” who seems to hate being white and being Southern. She’s an MSNBC contributor who claims to be an expert in extremely loaded and offensive topics like “Southern inferiority” and “whiteness”.[8] ^[6] Imagine if an African American studies professor deconstructed “blackness” and promoted concepts of “African inferiority.” They would be drummed out of the department. Her Twitter timeline is a nonstop stream of nauseating MSNBC wine aunt blather.

Perhaps, ultimately the Democrats had their final revenge for the success of the Southern Strategy, which helped ensure decades of GOP electoral victories. The Democrats, scorned at the loss of their once loyal white Southerners, looked to its own “Southern Strategy,” a “Far Southern Strategy.” By weakening the safeguards at the United States Southern border, and allowing the invasion of millions of Hispanic migrants, they washed the country in a flood of replacement level non-white immigration. Trump’s retreat from the Southern Strategy in 2020 and 2024 towards the black vote is an acknowledgement that, in his campaign’s view, the end of White Southern electoral dominance is nigh.

Perhaps, after decades of Republican strategies exploiting the white vote, without rewarding, or even acknowledging it, it is time that white Americans explore political strategies that leave the GOP and their rigged so-called “democracy” in the dustbin of history.

 

Notes

[1] ^[7] Kotlowski, Dean “Nixon’s Civil Rights: Politics, Principle, and Policy”

[2] ^[7] https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy

[3] ^[7] https://www.npr.org/2010/07/04/128303672/a-reagan-legacy-amnesty-for-illegal-immigrants

[4] ^[7] https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/van-jones-trump-2016-presidential-election-231048

[5] ^[7] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/30/behind-bidens-2020-victory/

[6] ^[7] https://apnews.com/article/trump-black-hispanic-americans-voters-of-color-59acadcda6cf9cb1082d4bdd9d4c4a81

[7] ^[7] https://x.com/AngieMaxwell1

[8] ^[8] https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/17/article/596255/pdf