Southern strategy
In American politics, the Southern strategy was a Republican Party electoral strategy to increase political support among white voters in the South by appealing to racism against African Americans. As the civil rights movement and dismantling of Jim Crow laws in the 1950s and 1960s visibly deepened existing racial tensions in much of the Southern United States, Republican politicians such as presidential candidates Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater developed strategies that successfully contributed to the political realignment of many white, conservative voters in the South who had traditionally supported the Democratic Party so consistently that the voting pattern was named the Solid South. The strategy also helped to push the Republican Party much more to the right. By winning all of the South, a presidential candidate could obtain the presidency with minimal support elsewhere.
The phrase "Southern strategy" refers primarily to "top down" narratives of the political realignment of the South which suggest that Republican leaders consciously appealed to many white Southerners' racial grievances to gain their support. This top-down narrative of the Southern Strategy is generally believed to be the primary force that transformed Southern politics following the civil rights era. The scholarly consensus is that racial conservatism was critical in the post–Civil Rights Act realignment of the Republican and Democratic parties, though several aspects of this view have been [|debated] by historians and political scientists.
The perception that the Republican Party had served as the "vehicle of white supremacy in the South", particularly during the Goldwater campaign and the presidential elections of 1968 and 1972, made it difficult for the Republican Party to win back the support of black voters in the South in later years. In 2005, Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman formally apologized to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for exploiting racial polarization to win elections and for ignoring the black vote.
Introduction
Although the phrase "Southern Strategy" is often attributed to Nixon's political strategist Kevin Phillips, he did not originate it but popularized it. In an interview included in a 1970 New York Times article, Phillips stated his analysis based on studies of ethnic voting:While Phillips sought to increase Republican power by polarizing ethnic voting in general, and not just to win the white South, the South was by far the biggest prize yielded by his approach. Its success began at the presidential level. Gradually, Southern voters began to elect Republicans to Congress and finally to statewide and local offices, particularly as some legacy segregationist Democrats, such as Strom Thurmond, retired or switched to the GOP. In addition, the Republican Party worked for years to develop grassroots political organizations across the South, supporting candidates for local school boards and city and county offices as examples, but following the Watergate scandal Southern voters came out in support for the "favorite son" candidate, Southern Democrat Jimmy Carter.
From 1948 to 1984, the Southern states, for decades 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, a reversal of the position held by Republicans since the Civil War. Some political analysts said this term was used in the 20th century as a "code word" to represent opposition to federal enforcement of civil rights for blacks and to federal intervention on their behalf; many individual southerners had opposed passage of the Voting Rights Act.
Background
Reconstruction to Solid South
During Reconstruction, the Republican Party built up its base across the South and controlled each state except Virginia, but from a national perspective, the Republicans gave priority to its much better established Northern state operations. Southerners distrusted the scalawags, found the carpetbaggers distasteful, and lacked respect for the black component of their Republican Party in the South. Richard Abbott says that national Republicans always "stressed building their Northern base rather than extending their party into the South, and whenever the Northern and Southern needs conflicted the latter always lost". In 1868, the GOP spent only 5% of its war chest in the South. Ulysses S. Grant was reelected and the New York Tribune advised it was now time for Southern Republicans to "root, hog, or die!".During the 1876 United States presidential election, the Republican ticket of Rutherford B. Hayes and William A. Wheeler abandoned the party's pro-civil rights efforts of Reconstruction and made conciliatory tones to the South in the form of appeals to old Southern Whigs.
File:ElectoralCollege1920.svg|thumb|upright=1.3|1920 presidential election map showing Democrat James M. Cox winning only the Solid South and Republican Warren G. Harding prevailing in the electoral college. From the time of Reconstruction until the Civil Rights Era, the Southern states consistently supported the Democratic candidate for president.
In a series of compromises, such as the Compromise of 1877, the Republicans withdrew military forces that had propped up their last three state governors and in return gained the presidency for Hayes. All the southern states were now under the control of the Democrats, who increased their control of virtually all aspects of politics in the ex-Confederate states during the ensuing decades. There were occasional pockets of Republican control, but they were usually in remote mountain districts.
File:The color line still exists—in this case cph.3b29638.jpg|thumb|upright|Editorial cartoon by Thomas Nast from the January 18, 1879 issue of Harper's Weekly criticizing the use of literacy tests. It shows "Mr. Solid South" writing on the wall: "Eddikashun qualifukashun. The Blak man orter be eddikated afore he kin vote with us Wites." The Republican Nast often satirized the Democratic Party by caricaturing its adherents as poor, ignorant, and violent.
After 1890, the white Democrats used a variety of tactics to reduce voting by African Americans and poor whites. The rise of primaries in the electoral system allowed for the 15th Amendment to be circumvented using a white primary. Winning the Democratic primary was tantamount to winning the election during the period of the solid south. From 1890 to 1908, the white Democratic legislatures in every Southern state enacted new constitutions or amendments with provisions to disenfranchise most blacks and tens of thousands of poor whites. Provisions required payment of poll taxes, complicated residency, literacy tests and other requirements which were subjectively applied against blacks. As blacks lost their vote, the Republican Party lost its ability to effectively compete in the South.
Because blacks were closed out of elected offices, the South's congressional delegations and state governments were dominated by white Democrats until the 1980s or later. Effectively, Southern white Democrats controlled all the votes of the expanded population by which congressional apportionment was figured. Many of their representatives achieved powerful positions of seniority in Congress, giving them control of chairmanships of significant congressional committees. Although the Fourteenth Amendment has a provision to reduce the congressional representation of states that denied votes to their adult male citizens, this provision was never enforced. As African Americans could not be voters, they were also prevented from being jurors and serving in local offices. Services and institutions for them in the segregated South were chronically underfunded by state and local governments, from which they were excluded.
Republicans rarely held seats in the U.S. House from the South during the Solid South period with the party only holding two seats in Tennessee between 1947 and 1952, out of the 105 seats in the south. Republicans won 80 of 2,565 congressional elections in the south during the first half of the 20th century. Between 1902 and 1950, all US Senators from the south were Democrats. Republicans held around 3% of state legislative seats in the south in 1948, and held zero seats in five states.
Between 1880 and 1904, Republican presidential candidates in the South received 35–40% of that section's vote. From 1904 to 1948, Republicans received more than 30% of the section's votes only in the 1920 and 1928 elections after disenfranchisement.
During this period, Republican administrations appointed blacks to political positions. Republicans regularly supported anti-lynching bills, but these were filibustered by Southern Democrats in the Senate. In the 1928 election, the Republican candidate Herbert Hoover rode the issues of prohibition and anti-Catholicism to carry five former Confederate states, with 62 of the 126 electoral votes of the section. After his victory, Hoover attempted to build up the Republican Party of the South, transferring his limited patronage away from blacks and toward the same kind of white Protestant businessmen who made up the core of the Northern Republican Party. With the onset of the Great Depression, which severely affected the South, Hoover soon became extremely unpopular. The gains of the Republican Party in the South were lost. In the 1932 election, Hoover received only 18.1% of the Southern vote for re-election.
From 1860 and 1930, the Republicans controlled the U.S. Senate in thirty-one of thirty-six sessions and the U.S. House in twenty-three sessions. Between 1932 and 1992, the Republicans controlled the U.S. Senate for five out of thirty-one sessions and the U.S. House for two sessions.
Internal Republican politics
According to Boris Heersink and Jeffery A. Jenkins, blacks did have a voice in the Republican Party, especially in the choice of presidential candidates at the national convention. They argue that in 1880–1928 Republican leaders at the presidential level adopted a "Southern Strategy" by "investing heavily in maintaining a minor party organization in the South as a way to create a reliable voting base at conventions", causing federal patronage to go to Southern blacks as long as there was a Republican in the White House.Southern states sent delegations to Republican conventions that accounted for one-fourth of the overall number despite the Democratic dominance of the region. These delegates were viewed as rotten boroughs and gave their support to the incumbent or the frontrunner. Mark Hanna started to lobby southern Republicans in favor of William McKinley in 1895, and McKinley came to the 1896 Republican National Convention with control of all of the southern delegations, which accounted for almost half of the votes required to win, except for Texas. The issue of southern delegates exploded in 1912, when William Howard Taft used his 83% control of Southern delegations to defeat Theodore Roosevelt at the convention. Delegate allocation by state was altered after this election to be based on how well the party did electorally in those states. Southern delegate sizes fell from 23% of the total delegates in 1912, to 18% in 1916.
The mixed-race Black-and-tan faction's control of Republican parties in the south was ended by the Lily-white movement and according to V. O. Key Jr. by 1949, black Republicans only held power in the Mississippi affiliate. Alabama, Arkansas, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia sent entirely white delegations to the 1920 convention. The Georgia Republican Party was restructured in 1921, with Warren G. Harding's involvement, as a model for other southern states and this restructuring replaced the black majority state committee with one that only had two black members. Texas sent its first entirely white delegate in 1928. At the 1964 convention the Georgia delegation was entirely white for the first time in fifty years.
G. Alexander Heard stated that "the southern oligarchies have greatly bolstered the conservative wing of the Republican party". Eisenhower's victories in southern states increased their delegation sizes to account for 21% of the total delegates at the 1956 convention, the highest since the rule change. By 1964, a candidate that could unify delegations from the west and south would hold four-fifths of the required number of delegates for the nomination, taking power away from more liberal Republicans in the northeast. 270 of the 279 southern delegates gave their support to Barry Goldwater, 31% of his overall support.