The southern strategy aimed at working class whites in the south. | Photo courtesy of DonkeyHotey/Flickr.com
The Republican Party ought to be scared, if not completely terrified at what this most recent presidential election signified. The 2012 election marked the official end of the southern strategy and its viability in presidential politics. More simply put, the Republican campaign strategy of appealing to old white voters no longer works as that demographic narrows in terms of electoral influence.
The southern strategy was a political strategy that aimed to influence working class whites in the south to flip from being the “solid south,” in reference to the Democratic Party’s dominance in southern politics, into reliable Republican votes. This strategy relied on utilizing racial animosity still rampant in the south. It was initiated by Barry Goldwater in 1964 and was first successfully used by Richard Nixon in the 1968 election when he won his presidential bid.
Democrats passed the Voting Rights Act in 1964 which outlawed discriminatory voting practices that had been responsible for the widespread subjugation of African Americans in the U.S. According to a Boston Globe article, President Johnson eloquently told an aide as he signed the bill, “We have lost the South for a generation.” Johnson predicted correctly that the solid Democratic South would be taken over by Republicans for at least a generation. Disaffected whites in the south who were against integration efforts led by Democrats became potential voters for Republicans.
Former Republican Party Chairman, the late Lee Atwater, summed up the southern strategy in an interview for the book “The Two Party South,” “As to the whole southern strategy that Harry S. Dent, Sr. and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South.”
Atwater went on to state a more frank and offensive admission of the racist nature of the southern strategy, “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N—–, n—–, n—–.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘n—–’ — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
The southern strategy became the dominant tactic in Republican electoral politics for a generation. The strategy worked. Republican presidential candidates won seven out of 10 presidential elections between 1968 and 2008.
Barack Obama’s win in 2008 began to show the cracks in the Republican “solid south.” Once-considered southern Conservative states, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida all went solidly towards Obama. Other southern states moved towards being potentially competitive such as Georgia which was won by McCain by only 5.2 percent points, according to Georgia election officials.
The 2008 election came early in respect to the official end of the southern strategy. However, it gave a glimpse towards future weakening Republican electoral prospects if the party didn’t begin to appeal towards a broader demographic base.
President Obama’s re-election signaled the beginning of a new, more diverse era in politics. The CNN exit polls showed the winning coalition for President Obama consisted of winning every demographic group except voters over 45, whites and men. The gender gap is now at historic levels with 55 percent of women and 45 percent of men voting for Obama. Romney attracted 45 percent of women and 52 percent of men. Whites backed Romney by a substantial margin with 59 percent of whites voting for him and 39 percent voting for President Obama.
Hispanics, however, voted for the president by a 71 percent margin. According to the census, Hispanics are the fastest growing demographic group in the country and whichever political party carries their favor will become the dominant party.
In 2012, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Census Bureau had, for the first time in American history, stated births of minority children was higher than births of children of white descent. “Among the roughly four million children born in the U.S. between July 2010 and July 2011, 50.4 percent belonged to a racial or ethnic group that in previous generations would have classified them as minorities, up from 48.6 percent in the same period two years earlier.”
The United States is on track to becoming a majority-minority country by mid-century, meaning that white Americans will eventually become a plurality rather than being a majority. Republicans will no longer be able to run on a strategy of winning only the white vote. Republican Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) described the Republicans’ problem in a Washington Post article, “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”
It’s comforting to see such a vile political strategy go the way of the dinosaur. We should be celebrating diversity instead of exploiting xenophobia and racial animosity for electoral gain. Indeed, the future electorate in America will only continue to grow more diverse. The intransigence of Republicans to broaden their appeal to other demographics is damning their party to electoral irrelevance.
Alex Caraballo can be reached at alex.caraballo@spartans.ut.edu
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