Talk:Southern strategy

A Two-Party South?

There is a claim in "The Vital South: How Presidents Are Elected" that the book "A Two-Party South?" by Alexander Heard states "Southern Republicans helped to nominate William McKinley in 1896, William Howard Taft in 1908 and 1912, Warren G. Harding in 1920, Calvin Coolidge in 1924, Hoover in 1928, and Alfred Landon in 1936. They backed the losing efforts of Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft in the 1940s."

I cannot find the book online so I will request it at my college library. It will arrive sometime in late August. I am putting this here as a reminder to myself. https://www.worldcat.org/title/1347166 Jon698 (talk) 18:09, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

@Jon698: I think you'll find that a frequent charge was that Southern Republican delegates were not exactly chosen legally -- I think the term that was often used was "rotten boroughs." The idea was that when Republicans held the presidency, patronage jobs in the South would go to Republicans, who would then back Republicans at the national level even though Republicans had no real organizations in the Southern states. When Democrats held the presidency, the "rotten boroughs" would choose Republican delegates who hoped to get patronage jobs when Republicans won. When Taft lost in 1952, it was in part because the convention voted to strip him of about 40 delegates from the Southern states on the grounds that they had not been selected in accordance with the rules. Without those delegates, Taft's defeat and Eisenhower's win were foregone conclusions. Billmckern (talk) 01:50, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

Formatting

Would this be a better way to format the page? https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Southern_strategy&diff=prev&oldid=1177361973 It would make it easier to read about activities at the presidential and other offices easier to read. Jon698 (talk) 08:58, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

I kind of think it flows better chronologically (without the Presidential heading)....but I don't feel that strongly about it either way.Rja13ww33 (talk) 17:06, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Book "Long" Southern Strategy

I haven't seen this book mentioned in the article, has it been discussed before? It was written by political scientists, Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields.

• 1. WaPo review by Curtis Wilkie "The Long Southern Strategy” describes a more extensive plot, an unbroken arc of more than a half-century begun by Barry Goldwater’s “Operation Dixie” in 1964, in which the GOP played on white prejudices to transform the old “Solid South” — once essential to the Democratic coalition — into a bastion contributing to national Republican victories. For the purposes of their argument, Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields concentrate on the patriarchal, evangelical-fundamentalist Southern population that has been cultivated by the Republican Party. African Americans rarely appear in these pages; they are not considered prey for the GOP. Instead, the authors focus on the party’s targets — white Southern men — cherished as God-fearing Protestants, protective of Southern womanhood and family values, and filled with missionary zeal to impose American military hegemony on the rest of the world....The Long Southern Strategy has lasted 55 years and has mostly succeeded, interrupted only by the election of two Democrats who were themselves Southern Baptists, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and one other Democrat, Barack Obama. The master plan led to Donald Trump, not exactly a role model for evangelical-fundamentalists, but a politician who championed their gut issues and won every Southern state but Virginia in 2016. - Angie Maxwell "The long Southern strategy had finally come to fruition, and it is still working today. The GOP’s partisan conversion of Southern white evangelicals is so complete that no longer must a Republican candidate hold authentic religious beliefs to secure their support. Nowhere is this clearer than in Southern white evangelical support for Donald Trump. Indeed, only 38 percent of white evangelicals living in the South identified Trump as a Christian, but 84 percent of them still voted for him. Understanding the full range of the GOP’s efforts in the South since Nixon clears up any confusion as to how Trump, a man whose personal life seems to violate every moral precept avowed by most Southern white conservatives, secured their unyielding allegiance. Trump has wielded the GOP’s Southern playbook with precision: defending Confederate monuments, eulogizing Schlafly at her funeral and even hiring Reagan’s Southern campaign manager, Paul Manafort. Trump, in many ways, is no anomaly. He is the very culmination of the GOP’s long Southern strategy."

• 2. Facingsouth.org (Angie Maxwell) "There are two things in this next phase of what I call the Long Southern Strategy. They really adapted their coded racial language to fit the moment, which in the '80s became a pitch towards color blindness. Doesn't sound like a bad thing, but it's really a denial of structural racism. And then into fiscal conservatism, but not on everything — just on social programs that were aimed at leveling the racial playing field, so to speak, or welfare reform issues. The other thing that they did in rebranding the party in the Southern image, to earn these Southern white voters and cut themselves an electoral path to victory, is that they adopted a Southern style of politics, which is the politics of entertainment and big rallies, spectacle kind of politics, a real distrust of media, an us-versus-them politics. They pull some kind of George Wallace. Instead of defining yourself by what you are, you define yourself by what you're not. Sometimes they call that "positive polarization." They realized that Southern white women had been politicized by the anti-feminist movement led by Phyllis Schlafly, and then other movements like WWWW — Women Who Want to be Women [founded by Texas native Lottie Beth Hobbs] — and efforts from the Southern Baptist Convention to portray feminism as a threat to traditional gender roles. It's important to know that they had to do all three of those things, because it turns out a lot of people are just one of those three. When we measure racial resentment and modern sexism, which is a measure of just anti-feminism, and Christian nationalism, there are some people that are all three, but a lot of people are two of three or one of three. (How was former President Trump's inflammatory rhetoric and exploitation of the Southern Strategy connected with the recent violent attack on the U.S. Capitol?) "I think it's directly related. I don't think a lot of Trump's language is coded. Trump really uncoded it. He was coming after eight years of a Democrat, and it's pretty common historically for things to flip after eight years. There's also the rise of cable news and talk radio — just this perfect storm. Trump was able to go that far because people had sorted themselves accordingly. Because he didn't have to code it very much, he speaks louder and clearer to people for whom the dog whistle wouldn't work because they didn't quite hear it or didn't know what it meant. But when he says it explicitly, it can draw in whole other crowds. I know it's the first time people have breached the Capitol, but when I think about the history in the South of massive resistance, when I think about governors blocking doorways and civil rights workers getting beaten to death, people getting beaten on the bridge in Alabama, dogs being turned on people, people being assassinated — mob violence is nothing new in the South."
• 3. The Atlantic by Kevin M. Kruse and Dov Grohsgal, an associate research scholar at INCITE, Columbia University..."As the political scientists Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields chronicle in their new book, The Long Southern Strategy, the old “coded racism” continued, but in concert with newer appeals to religious conservatism and anti-feminism. (Atwater himself offered something of an apology for some of those tactics toward the end of his life.) Taken together, these approaches solidified the South for the Republicans and, as a result, secured their victories in national races. Notably, the Republican majority that emerged in these decades did so largely on the terms set forth by Phillips. Appeals to racial resentments, handled lightly, did much of the work, but the broader social issues ultimately played an even more important role. Striking a delicate balance between the two proved to be the winning strategy for the GOP. The risk for Republicans today, of course, is that President Trump has upset this balance, rejecting old dog whistles on race for full-throated racism. Unlike Nixon, who disastrously tried such a strategy in his first midterm but then dialed it back considerably in his reelection run, Trump has doubled down on the race-based themes that failed to work in his own first midterm. In doing so, he runs the risk of reversing decades of work and rendering the Republican majority a thing of history.
• 4. AP News After losing presidential races to Southern Democrats Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, Republicans tightened their hold on the South by locking up support among evangelical Christians and voters who rejected feminism, said Angie Maxwell, a political scientist at the University of Arkansas and co-author of the book “The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Votes in the South Changed American Politics.” But coded racial messaging stayed in the mix and ultimately was aimed at sympathetic voters outside the South.
• 5. CNN Notably, there was also what University of Arkansas political science professors Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields call the “Long Southern Strategy,” which was a series of decisions on religion, race and feminism that Republicans made in an effort to court White Southern voters. While the strategy began in earnest in the ’60s, political leaders reformed it over the course of several decades.

Cheers DN (talk) 07:22, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

The following citations don't reference the "long" SS, but they could be used as a kind of secondary source.

• 6. "Donald Trump has warned that if Joe Biden replaces him as president the suburbs will be flooded with low-income housing. He has backed supporters who have sometimes violently clashed with Black Lives Matter protesters across the country. The US president has even refrained from directly condemning the actions of a teenager charged with killing two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin. And Trump has also called the BLM movement a “symbol of hate”. With such rhetoric, the president is taking a page or two out of the 1960s “southern strategy”: the playbook Republican politicians such as Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater used to rally political support among white voters across the south by leveraging racism and white fear of people of color.
• 7. "In 2010, Michael Steele—the first black head of the RNC—admitted in a talk with students at DePaul University that Republicans had given minorities little reason to vote for them: “For the last 40-plus years we had a Southern Strategy that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South.” One glaring, underreported clue about the method behind the post-primary Trump madness is his selection of Paul Manafort as chair of his national campaign. Manafort’s appointment, followed by the ousting of Corey Lewandowski in June, was widely seen as a move to professionalize Trump’s disorganized campaign staff just ahead of the convention. But along with credentials earned from working with top GOP politicians (and a raft of international dictators from the Philippines to Somalia), Manafort also brought decades of experience as an overseer of the Southern Strategy. To be sure, Trump has not simply exhumed and dusted off the old Southern Strategy. He has characterized illegal immigrants rather than black Americans as a threat to white women’s safety. And he has redirected the Christian Right’s focus away from its preoccupation with a “godless Communism.” In its place, Trump has exploited the perception of Islam’s growing power abroad against a backdrop of genuinely declining white Christian influence at home, where the U.S. finds itself for the first time a minority white Christian nation. And, significantly—in a demonstration of just how successful the old strategy was—he’s discarded the dog whistle in favor of a bull horn. (By Robert P. Jones)

DN (talk) 08:03, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

Two thoughts. First the book seems like a good source to add as another academic view. Given we have sources that say academics disagree we shouldn't treat any of them as outright true, just theories put forth. The other sources bring up a bigger issue with this article in general. This article is a mess in part because it mixes that is classically called "The Southern Strategy" (the claims that Nixon deliberately used racist appeals to win over southern voters by appealing to their racism) with the longer term southern realignment which is the actual fact that southern voters largely shifted from Democrat to GOP and the various theories why. Currently Southern Realignment is directed here here but it should be a separate topic or perhaps included in the Solid South article. Specifically looking at the articles, 6 doesn't seem like a useful source. Basically the author is saying they think opposition to BLM = racism. That might be true but it's not inherently true and that's a national message, not a regional one. There are plenty of sources that will say Trump appeals to racist feelings but that is outside the scope of this article (as it stands or as part of either the TSS or TSR topics). 7 is again a TSR topic as well as evidence that the GOP largely ignored the minority vote. It doesn't admit to any of the claims of racism as ignoring the wants of a voting block is not the same as racism. Springee (talk) 12:58, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

'The Long Southern Strategy' is already a source in the article. I'm not sure it should be given more WEIGHT than the other sources.....but if there is an important point it makes that you feel is unsaid....it may warrant a brief mention.Rja13ww33 (talk) 15:43, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

References