Southern Strategy

In American politics, the southern strategy was the Republican Party's policy to gain political support in the South by appealing to the racism against African Americans harbored by many southern white voters.

As the Civil Rights Movement and dismantling of Jim Crow laws in the 1950s and 1960s visibly deepened pre-existing racial tensions in much of the Southern United States, Republican politicians such as presidential candidate Richard Nixon and Senator Barry Goldwater developed strategies that successfully contributed to the political realignment of many white, conservative voters in the South to the Republican Party that had traditionally supported the Democratic Party. It also helped push the Republican Party much more right.

In academia, "southern strategy" refers primarily to "top down" narratives of the political realignment of the South, which suggest that Republican leaders consciously appealed to many white southerners' racial resentments in order to gain their support. This top-down narrative of the southern strategy is generally believed to be the primary force that transformed southern politics following the civil rights era. This view has been questioned by historians such as Matthew Lassiter, Kevin M. Kruse and Joseph Crespino, who have presented an alternative, "bottom up" narrative, which Lassiter has called the "suburban strategy". This narrative recognizes the centrality of racial backlash to the political realignment of the South, but suggests that this backlash took the form of a defense of de facto segregation in the suburbs, rather than overt resistance to racial integration, and that the story of this backlash is a national, rather than a strictly southern one.

The perception that the Republican Party had served as the "vehicle of white supremacy in the South," particularly during the Goldwater campaign and the presidential elections of 1968 and 1972, made it difficult for the Republican Party to win the support of black voters in the South in later years. 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.

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