Republican nominee Richard Nixon reached out to white Southerners by opposing school busing and promising that his administration would not "ram anything down your throats" and would appoint "strict constructionist" Supreme Court justices.
In 1969, Nixon White House aide Lamar Alexander wrote about the Southern strategy in a
memo
Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips openly discussed the Southern strategy in a
newspaper article in 1973:
"The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans," he wrote. "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."
Lee Atwater, who worked on
Reagan’s 1980 campaign, explained in an interview 1981. In audio, he can be heard describing how in 1954, a racial slur could be used to describe black Americans, but that "backfired" by 1968 — requiring a pivot to use more abstract language.
"So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites," he said.
Reagan used language such as
"states’ rights" and "welfare queens," which critics said was coded racist language.
Efforts by the Republican Party starting in the 1960s to win over white Southern voters have been documented by scholars
The strongest evidence that it happened comes from the Republicans who were part of that strategy. There are numerous instances of them talking about it in interviews.