The Southern Strategy

The “Southern Strategy” is generally held to be something Nixon did in US politics, to scoop up racist votes in the US South for the Republican party. Thus attributing racism to Republicans.

But it is hard to see this supposed racist “Southern strategy” in the actual electoral history of the South. In Nixon's first presidential win, in 1968, the South went for Wallace. Nixon was not competitive in the South. In his second, in 1972, he carried the South, but he also carried everything else except Massachusetts. No “Southern strategy” could have made much difference; he had that region in the bag. George McGovern had no more appeal in the South than elsewhere, without racism being a factor. And in the midterms in 1970—the Democrats won those midterms in the Southern races, and expanded their seat count If there was a Republican Southern strategy under Nixon, then it was a failure. The majority of Senate seats from the South stayed in Democratic hands into Clinton's presidency.

The Democrats, in the meantime, have pursued their own “Southern strategy” since well before the Civil War. When slavery was still a thing, they were the party of slavery. When racial segregation was still a thing, they were the party of racial segregation. This became by Al Smith's day an awkward coalition, of northern immigrants, Catholics, and leftists, with southern conservatives. The latter found common cause with the Northerners pretty much only on racial segregation, and it mattered so long as that was their key issue. The Republicans, founded on the abolition of slavery, just were not going to play ball on that one.

Racial segregation and this coalition was pretty much busted by Eisenhower, with his appointment of anti-segregation judges. Brown vs. Board of Education came on his watch. It was the first act of the “activist” Warren court, which pursued the theme through the Sixties. Earl Warren was Eisenhower's appointee. He seems to have been appointed for this purpose. Eisenhower's Justice Department filed in favour of the plaintiffs. As a general, Eisenhower had previously insisted on the racial integration of troops under his command.

Then it was Eisenhower who sent in the armed forces to enforce desegregation in Little Rock in 1957. The battle had been joined.

This forced a crisis for the Democrats. It exposed their fault lines. I guess the northern Democrats then faced a choice: stick with their southern wing, or take the same route. My guess is that popular opinion by this time made sticking with segregation politically untenable in the North, now that Eisenhower had made it an issue. Hold the south, and they lose the North to the Rockefeller and Lindsey and Percy Republicans. They chose to endorse desegregation in turn. But through the Sixties, there was still higher support proportionally for desegregation among Republicans than Democrats. Ed Brooke, Republican of Massachusetts, was for some time America's only black senator.

As of the mid Sixties, voting on race or segregation was not really possible any longer, since both parties had now aligned against segregation. So neither was running a “southern strategy” on this basis. But it was still the Democrats who stuck with a kind of southern strategy, trying to keep in the good books of the guys who used to vote segregationist. They kept running Southerners for president, hoping thereby to preserve their base: Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Al Gore. Not surprising, and nothing sinister; it seemed that only when they did so could they win elections—right up to Barack Obama. I thought it was a poor political move to nominate Kerry; they were departing from their winning formula. But that race still had two prominent Southern candidates, John Edwards and Wesley Clark. And one was chosen as the VP candidate.

It is not clear to me whether, in the end, the South pulled away from the Democratic Party, or the Democratic Party, over time, pulled away from the South. Jim Webb, last time around, could not seem even to get a hearing. Dems started to mock Southerners openly.

In the meantime, the Republicans did not run any Southerners for president. George H.W. Bush briefly represented Texas in the house, but did anyone think of him as a Texan rather than a New Englander? The Republican southern breakthrough came only with his son George W. And since him, we've had McCain, a westerner, Romney from the northeast, with some midwestern and western roots, Trump from New York City.

Has there been any difference, since the Sixties, in the position of the two parties on segregation? The last hiccup of the issue that I remember was the school busing controversy in the Seventies. At the time, Jimmy Carter for the Dems stood out as suggesting he was in favour of de facto neighbourhood segregation; as he put it, on people preserving the “ethnic purity of their neighbourhoods.”

And that's the last I heard of any of it.