In American politics, the Southern strategy refers to a Republican Party strategy in the late 20th century of gaining political support for presidential candidates in the Southern United States by appealing to regional racial tensions and history of segregation.[1][2]
The Democratic Party in the South defended slavery before the American Civil War. After regaining power in state governments in the 1870s, Democrats imposed white supremacy. At the end of the century, southern states passed new constitutions and laws making voter registration and voting more difficult, resulting in disenfranchising most blacks and many poor whites. The South became a one-party region, maintaining political exclusion of minorities well into the 1960s. The Solid South and its political power in Congress was achieved at the expense of African Americans. In the years after World War II, African Americans pressed for civil rights. White Southern Democrats gradually stopped supporting the national party following its adoption of the civil rights plank of the Democratic campaign in 1948 (against which the Dixiecrats formed), support for the African-American Civil Rights Movement, passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, and push for desegregation.
In the mid 1960s, a period of social turmoil, Republican Presidential candidates Senator Barry Goldwater[3][4] and Richard Nixon worked to attract southern white conservative voters to their candidacies and the Republican Party.[5] Barry Goldwater won the five formerly Confederate states of the Deep South (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina[6][7]) in the 1964 presidential election, but he otherwise won only in his home state of Arizona. In the 1968 presidential campaign, Nixon won Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee, all former Confederate states, contributing to the electoral realignment of white voters in some Southern states to the Republican Party. After federal civil rights legislation was gained via bipartisan votes, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965, more than 90 percent of black voters registered with the Democratic Party. The VRA provided tools to end their decades-long disenfranchisement by southern states. Hundreds of cases have been litigated to change election systems, such as at-large voting, that have prevented even significant minorities from electing candidates of their choice for city and county positions.
As the twentieth century came to a close, most white voters in the South had shifted to the Republican Party. It began to try to appeal again to black voters and rebuild the political relationship that had lasted through the 1920s, though with little success.[5] In 2005, Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman formally apologized to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a national civil rights organization, for exploiting racial polarization to win elections and ignoring the black vote.[8][9]