Most Americans have heard the story of the “Southern strategy”: The Republican Party, in the wake of the civil rights movement, decided to court Southern white voters by capitalizing on their racial fears. Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater first wielded this strategy in 1964 and Richard Nixon perfected it in 1968 and 1972, turning the solidly Democratic South into a bastion of Republicanism.
But this oversimplified version of the Southern strategy has a number of problems. It overstates how quickly party change occurred, limits the strategy solely to racial appeals, ignores how it evolved and distorts our understanding of politics today.
In reality, the South swung back and forth in presidential elections for four decades following 1964. Moreover, Republicans didn’t win the South solely by capitalizing on white racial angst. That decision was but one in a series of decisions the party made not just on race but on feminism and religion as well. The GOP successfully fused ideas about the role of government in the economy, women’s place in society, white evangelical Christianity and white racial grievance, in what became a “long Southern strategy” that extended well past the days of Goldwater and Nixon.
Over the course of 40 years, Republicans fine-tuned their pitch and won the allegiance of Southern whites (and their sympathizers nationwide) by remaking their party in the Southern white image.
Goldwater’s campaign did launch the Southern strategy, originally called “Operation Dixie,” by directly and aggressively championing his vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. As a result, the senator won five Deep South states, including 87 percent of the vote in Mississippi. But this blunt appeal may have done more harm than good, because, other than his native Arizona, these were the only states Goldwater won.
Four years later, understanding the risks of such an overt campaign against civil rights, Nixon’s team instead coded their racial appeals. The “silent majority” of white Southerners that the candidate needed to attract understood that Nixon’s call for the restoration of “law and order,” for example, was a dog whistle, signaling his support for an end to protests, marches and boycotts, while his “war on drugs” played on racialized fears about crime. Nixon also adopted a stance of “benign neglect” on civil rights enforcement, a message that his advocates, such as Democrat-turned-Republican Sen. Strom Thurmond, bluntly conveyed to Southern whites on his behalf. As Thurmond put it, “If Nixon becomes president, he has promised that he won’t enforce either the Civil Rights or the Voting Rights Acts. Stick with him.”