November 09 ,2012
The End of the Southern Strategy
Barack Obama’s narrow but solid reelection last week in an extremely challenging environment for an incumbent is going to have a tremendous impact on the Republican Party and its basic strategy for national power. The “Southern Strategy”, pioneered by Richard Nixon in 1968, has now been permanently broken, and the Republicans will need a new approach to winning the White House.
From the end of the Civil War in 1865 till Lyndon Johnson’s landslide reelection in 1964, the southern states had been solid Democratic states, as no Southern White was going to vote for the party of Lincoln. The Republican base was always the Northeast and Midwest, and was based on business interests. That all changed in the 1960’s when the national Democratic Party became the party of civil rights. Lyndon Johnson, a Texan, signed historic civil rights legislation in 1965 ending segregation and giving voting rights to African-Americans. Johnson remarked that with his signature, he was signing away the South for a generation. Southern Whites saw this as a massive change to their historic system, and saw national Democrats as far too favorable to African-Americans. For the Republicans, they saw an opportunity, what they came to call the “Southern Strategy”. By appealing to Southern White voters on the basis of conservatism and protection of White interests, they could peel off Southern states from the Democratic coalition. Combined with traditional Republican states in the Northeast, Midwest and West, the Republicans would have a certain path to winning the White House.
This Southern Strategy was wildly successful. After Johnson’s landslide in 1964, the Republicans won every election for the White House for the next 24 years, the only exception being Jimmy Carter in the immediate aftermath of Watergate in 1976, and he just barely won. The Republicans won landslides in 1972, 1980, 1984, and 1988.
Democrats were only able to pick the Republican lock in 1992 on the back of an extraordinarily gifted politician in Bill Clinton, a split electorate with third party candidate Ross Perot taking 19% of the vote, and perfect timing with the economy shedding jobs just as the nation voted. Clinton won easily again in 1996, but Bush won in 2000 again with the Southern Strategy and in 2004. Obama took back the White House in 2008 in the context of a massive economic collapse and the nation trapped in two unpopular wars. If the Southern Strategy was still intact, then Obama should have lost this month and Romney should be President.
So what changed? America did. This is no longer a country where 90% of the voters are White. It is now down to 73%. The rise of Latino voters, and their affinity for the Democratic Party has given them a huge boost. Secondly, White voters have changed. There are far more who are highly educated, and those educated Whites lean Democratic. It is these Whites that have changed Virginia and North Carolina and Florida from solid Republican to swing states that could go either way. Thirdly, the traditional Republican states in the Northeast and Midwest and West have turned Blue. States like New Hampshire, or Michigan (which voted Republican from 1972 to 1988), or California, which voted Republican from 1968 to 1988 and is now a solid Democratic state. The Southern Strategy was supposed to be about extending the Northern Republican Party into the South, instead, the Republican Party is now identified as a regional Southern and Western Party. It has been knocked out of the Northeast, the Midwest, and the Pacific Coast. Finally, the Republican Party has a serious problem with women. Its rhetorical hard-line on reproductive rights rub women the wrong way, particularly younger working women.
Can the Republicans change? Can they become a truly conservative party, rather than a party of old White men afraid of any change? They can, and they will have to. Our democracy depends on having two viable parties of governance, a functional one-party state is a recipe for complacency, corruption, and venality. But to get there, the Republicans must first acknowledge that the current model is broken. The very narrow popular vote loss suffered last week will likely not be enough. The Republicans will need to be hammered once or twice more before they finally give in.
