But as the party realignment started to take place over the last century, as the national Democratic Party abandoned its segregationist stance in favor of support for the civil rights movement, Republicans saw an opening: to appeal to the racial resentment of voters, especially (though not only) in the South and Southwest, who felt abandoned by the Democrats, and to break up the “New Deal” coalition that had helped Democrats since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
This change didn’t happen overnight—it took years. Under Eisenhower, the GOP poured more resources into the South, establishing party structures in places of the country where there had never been a Republican on the ballot before. Goldwater was the first Republican presidential nominee who showed that the seemingly impossible could be done: that the “Old South” could be won by a Republican. Granted, his loss in the 1964 presidential election would go down in the history books as one of the most devastating defeats in U.S. history, but he did win five states in the Deep South—something no Republican had done before.
When Nixon ran for the second time in 1968 (he had lost to JFK in 1960), he and his party had learned from Goldwater’s mistakes. While his open extremism was off-putting to a majority of voters anywhere except the heart of the old Confederacy, Nixon and his advisors devised a strategy to pander to Southern—and suburban—Whites in general, pairing old racism with dog whistles and the racialized language of “law and order.”
He couldn’t win the “Old South,” because the arch-segregationist George Wallace running on the American Independent Party ticket would sweep those up, but he did narrowly win the general election—thanks to Strom Thurmond, the segregationist senator of South Carolina, a former Democrat who had become a Republican in 1964. Thurmond helped him win the Republican nomination and the presidency by vouching for the Nixon/Agnew ticket to other former Southern Democrats. It was Reagan, who later cemented the alliance between White Southerners and the GOP.
This so-called “Southern Strategy” would not only remake the GOP but the entire political landscape of the U.S. And, as was emphasized in a recent town hall event, Thurmond’s efforts are echoed, albeit in a subtler way, in that of another prominent figure of South Carolina politics today—Nikki Haley.