"From now on, the 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...but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the
Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. 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." - Kevin Phillips, a Richard Nixon 1968 political strategist, in a 1970 New York Times interview
Let me illustrate something for you. I will do a rain dance in the Pacific Northwest beginning in October and continuing once a month until May and while I do my monthly rain dance the gods of weather will cry pretty tears and it will rain more often than in the months in which I do not perform my rain dance.
For those who don't know, even if I don't do a rain dance, it rains more in the Pacific Northwest during late fall, winter and early spring, than it does during late spring, summer and early fall.
So my intent to perform a feat doesn't imply that my tactic worked.
Southern Strategy
If the parties had in some meaningful way flipped on civil rights, one would expect that to show up in the electoral results in the years following the Democrats’ 1964 about-face on the issue. Nothing of the sort happened: Of the 21 Democratic senators who opposed the 1964 act, only one would ever change parties. Nor did the segregationist constituencies that elected these Democrats throw them out in favor of Republicans: The remaining 20 continued to be elected as Democrats or were replaced by Democrats. It was, on average, nearly a quarter of a century before those seats went Republican. If southern rednecks ditched the Democrats because of a civil-rights law passed in 1964, it is strange that they waited until the late 1980s and early 1990s to do so.
Here's how propagandists construct the Big Lie. They take some facts, overlook others, and the actually outright lie about the conclusions. What is the Big Lie about the Southern Strategy? Nixon did it. He flipped the South by appealing to their racism. Most of the South went for Wallace in 1968. The traditionally liberal parts of the country went for Humphrey and the rest of the nation went for Nixon. When the rest of the nation supports Nixon there are no nefarious motives assigned, but when a few Southern states follow the lead of the rest of the nation then they're doing it for the wrong reasons. What was their alternative, vote for Wallace or Humphrey and neither of those was palatable. Nixon didn't do anything.
Come 1972, the Big Lie has us believe that Nixon clamped a lock-down on the South. Well, he did the same everywhere except in Massachusetts. Now what happened in 1976, did that lock-down hold? Nope, look at all of those Democratic electoral votes in the South - a solid Democratic victory through every state which should be impossible if the Republicans had a lock on the Southern vote.
Jump forward to the Clinton years and let's see how much of a lock the Republicans have on the South. After the Reagan years, it should have been impossible for Clinton to win many of those states, remember the Southern Democrats were all Republicans now, except for the fact that evidence shows this not to be the case.
So what did happen in the South? This:
The Republican ascendancy in Dixie is associated with the rise of the southern middle class, the increasingly trenchant conservative critique of Communism and the welfare state, the Vietnam controversy and the rise of the counterculture, law-and-order concerns rooted in the urban chaos that ran rampant from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, and the incorporation of the radical Left into the Democratic party. Individual events, especially the freak show that was the 1968 Democratic convention, helped solidify conservatives’ affiliation with the Republican party. Democrats might argue that some of these concerns — especially welfare and crime — are “dog whistles” or “code” for race and racism, but this criticism is shallow in light of the evidence and the real saliency of those issues among U.S. voters of all backgrounds and both parties for decades. Indeed, Democrats who argue that the best policies for black Americans are those that are soft on crime and generous with welfare are engaged in much the same sort of cynical racial calculation President Johnson was practicing when he informed skeptical southern governors that his plan for the Great Society was “to have them ******* voting Democratic for the next two hundred years.” Johnson’s crude racism is, happily, largely a relic of the past, but his strategy endures.
Here's a piece from
RealClearPolitics which highlights how deeply ingrained the Big Lie has become:
But in the course of this argument, Bouie makes the following statement: “White Southerners jumped ship from Democratic presidential candidates in the 1960s, and this was followed by a similar shift on the congressional level, and eventually, the state legislative level. That the [last] two took time doesn’t discount the first.”
If you polled pundits, you’d probably get 90 percent agreement with this statement. And if you polled political scientists, you’d likely get a majority to sign off on it. That’s maddening, because it’s incorrect.
I’ve written at length on this, both in my book and here, but it is worth revisiting. In truth, the white South began breaking away from the Democrats in the 1920s, as population centers began to develop in what was being called the “New South” (remember, at the beginning of the 20th century, New Orleans was the only thing approximating what we currently think of as a city in the South).
In the 1930s and 1940s, FDR performed worse in the South in every election following his 1932 election. By the mid-1940s, the GOP was winning about a quarter of the Southern vote in presidential elections. . . .
Perhaps the biggest piece of evidence that something significant was afoot is Richard Nixon’s showing in 1960. He won 46.1 percent of the vote to John F. Kennedy’s 50.5 percent. One can write this off to JFK’s Catholicism, but writing off three elections in a row becomes problematic, especially given the other developments bubbling up at the local level. It’s even more problematic when you consider that JFK had the nation’s most prominent Southerner on the ticket with him.
But the biggest problem with the thesis comes when you consider what had been going on in the interim: Two civil rights bills pushed by the Eisenhower administration had cleared Congress, and the administration was pushing forward with the Brown decision, most famously by sending the 101st Airborne Division to Arkansas to assist with the integration of Little Rock Central High School.
It’s impossible to separate race and economics completely anywhere in the country, perhaps least of all in the South. But the inescapable truth is that the GOP was making its greatest gains in the South while it was also pushing a pro-civil rights agenda nationally. What was really driving the GOP at this time was economic development. As Southern cities continued to develop and sprout suburbs, Southern exceptionalism was eroded; Southern whites simply became wealthy enough to start voting Republican.
