Southern strategy

Introduction

Although the phrase "Southern Strategy" is often attributed to Nixon's political strategist Kevin Phillips, he did not originate it but popularized it. In an interview included in a 1970 New York Times article, Phillips stated his analysis based on studies of ethnic voting:

From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.

While Phillips sought to increase Republican power by polarizing ethnic voting in general, and not just to win the white South, the South was by far the biggest prize yielded by his approach. Its success began at the presidential level. Gradually, Southern voters began to elect Republicans to Congress and finally to statewide and local offices, particularly as some legacy segregationist Democrats, such as Strom Thurmond, retired or switched to the GOP. In addition, the Republican Party worked for years to develop grassroots political organizations across the South, supporting candidates for local school boards and city and county offices as examples, but following the Watergate scandal Southern voters came out in support for the "favorite son" candidate, Southern Democrat Jimmy Carter.

From 1948 to 1984, the Southern states, for decades a stronghold for the Democrats, became key swing states, providing the popular vote margins in the 1960, 1968 and 1976 elections. During this era, several Republican candidates expressed support for states' rights, a reversal of the position held by Republicans since the Civil War. Some political analysts said this term was used in the 20th century as a "code word" to represent opposition to federal enforcement of civil rights for blacks and to federal intervention on their behalf; many individual southerners had opposed passage of the Voting Rights Act.

Background

Reconstruction to Solid South

During Reconstruction, the Republican Party built up its base across the South and controlled each state except Virginia, but from a national perspective, the Republicans gave priority to its much better established Northern state operations. Southerners distrusted the scalawags, found the carpetbaggers distasteful, and lacked respect for the black component of their Republican Party in the South. Richard Abbott says that national Republicans always "stressed building their Northern base rather than extending their party into the South, and whenever the Northern and Southern needs conflicted the latter always lost". In 1868, the GOP spent only 5% of its war chest in the South. Ulysses S. Grant was reelected and the New York Tribune advised it was now time for Southern Republicans to "root, hog, or die!" (that is, to take care of themselves).

During the 1876 United States presidential election, the Republican ticket of Rutherford B. Hayes and William A. Wheeler (later known as members of the comparably liberal "Half-Breed" faction) abandoned the party's pro-civil rights efforts of Reconstruction and made conciliatory tones to the South in the form of appeals to old Southern Whigs.

In a series of compromises, such as the Compromise of 1877, the Republicans withdrew military forces that had propped up their last three state governors and in return gained the presidency for Hayes. All the southern states were now under the control of the Democrats, who increased their control of virtually all aspects of politics in the ex-Confederate states during the ensuing decades. There were occasional pockets of Republican control, but they were usually in remote mountain districts.

After 1890, the white Democrats used a variety of tactics to reduce voting by African Americans and poor whites. The rise of primaries in the electoral system allowed for the 15th Amendment to be circumvented using a white primary. Winning the Democratic primary was tantamount to winning the election during the period of the solid south. From 1890 to 1908, the white Democratic legislatures in every Southern state enacted new constitutions or amendments with provisions to disenfranchise most blacks and tens of thousands of poor whites. Provisions required payment of poll taxes, complicated residency, literacy tests and other requirements which were subjectively applied against blacks. As blacks lost their vote, the Republican Party lost its ability to effectively compete in the South.

Internal Republican politics

According to Boris Heersink and Jeffery A. Jenkins, blacks did have a voice in the Republican Party, especially in the choice of presidential candidates at the national convention. They argue that in 1880–1928 Republican leaders at the presidential level adopted a "Southern Strategy" by "investing heavily in maintaining a minor party organization in the South as a way to create a reliable voting base at conventions", causing federal patronage to go to Southern blacks as long as there was a Republican in the White House.

Southern states sent delegations to Republican conventions that accounted for one-fourth of the overall number despite the Democratic dominance of the region. These delegates were viewed as rotten boroughs and gave their support to the incumbent or the frontrunner. Mark Hanna started to lobby southern Republicans in favor of William McKinley in 1895, and McKinley came to the 1896 Republican National Convention with control of all of the southern delegations, which accounted for almost half of the votes required to win, except for Texas. The issue of southern delegates exploded in 1912, when William Howard Taft used his 83% control of Southern delegations to defeat Theodore Roosevelt at the convention. Delegate allocation by state was altered after this election to be based on how well the party did electorally in those states. Southern delegate sizes fell from 23% of the total delegates in 1912, to 18% in 1916.

The mixed-race Black-and-tan faction's control of Republican parties in the south was ended by the Lily-white movement and according to V. O. Key Jr. by 1949, black Republicans only held power in the Mississippi affiliate. Alabama, Arkansas, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia sent entirely white delegations to the 1920 convention. The Georgia Republican Party was restructured in 1921, with Warren G. Harding's involvement, as a model for other southern states and this restructuring replaced the black majority state committee with one that only had two black members. Texas sent its first entirely white delegate in 1928. At the 1964 convention the Georgia delegation was entirely white for the first time in fifty years.

G. Alexander Heard stated that "the southern oligarchies have greatly bolstered the conservative wing of the Republican party". Eisenhower's victories in southern states increased their delegation sizes to account for 21% of the total delegates at the 1956 convention, the highest since the rule change. By 1964, a candidate that could unify delegations from the west and south would hold four-fifths of the required number of delegates for the nomination, taking power away from more liberal Republicans in the northeast. 270 of the 279 southern delegates gave their support to Barry Goldwater, 31% of his overall support.

World War II and population changes

In 1932, less than 10% of the voting population in the peripheral south and less than 20% in the deep south lived in metropolitan areas. By 1956, metropolitan areas accounted for less than 40% and 30% respectively. This rose to around 60% and 40% respectively by 1976. Florida became the first urbanized state in the south in the 1930s. Republicans, such as John Tower and Howard Baker, performed well in these urban areas.

The President's Committee on Civil Rights, organized by Truman, published To Secure These Rights: The Report of the President's Committee on Civil Rights in 1947. This report recommended the passage of civil rights legislation and ending segregation. The southern delegates planned on conducting a walkout during the roll call vote on the party's platform, which included support for civil rights, but Sam Rayburn, chair of the convention, instead used a voice vote as he believed a walkout would ruin Truman's presidential campaign. Only 35 of the 278 southern delegates, thirteen from Alabama and the entire twenty-two member Mississippi delegation, left the convention on July 15. The remaining southern delegates gave their support to Senator Richard Russell Jr. on the presidential ballot.

The States' Rights Democratic Party met in Birmingham, Alabama, and nominated Strom Thurmond and Fielding L. Wright as its presidential ticket. The party supported racial segregation, poll taxes, and opposed anti-lynching legislation. They planned on winning the entirety of the south's 127 electoral votes in order to force a contingent election in the US House of Representatives. Thurmond ran using the Democratic ballot line in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. The Dixiecrats were unsuccessful as Truman won reelection and they only received 39 of the south's electoral votes, only winning in states without Truman on the ballot. Failing to deny the Democrats the presidency in 1948, soon dissolved, but the split lingered. Truman was the last Democratic presidential nominee to win a majority of the white vote in the south.

In addition to the splits in the Democratic Party, the population movements associated with World War II had a significant effect in changing the demographics of the South. Starting during World War II, lasting from 1940 to 1970, more than 5 million African-Americans moved from the rural South to medium and major Northern industrial cities as well as mainly coastal munitions centers of the West during the Second Great Migration for jobs in the defense industry and later economic opportunities during the post-World War II economic boom.

Roots (1950s–1972)

Eisenhower and Kennedy

In the 1952 United States presidential election, Eisenhower placed first in 39 southern congressional districts, four in the Deep South. Only six Republicans were elected to the US House from the south, with five of them representing districts within the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Republicans made a net gain of one seat in the 1954 election, but did not win any additional seats for the rest of the decade. There were only 15 Republican candidates for the US House in the entirety of the South in 1958.

Tower's victory over interim appointee William A. Blakley in the 1961 United States Senate special election in Texas was made possible by a split among Democrats and a lack of liberal support for the conservative Blakley. This win made Tower the first Republican elected to the US Senate from the south since the end of Reconstruction. In the senate, he voted with southern Democrats in opposition to civil rights legislation. Tower was succeeded by Phil Gramm, a Republican who left the Democratic Party. The Democrats maintained control of Texas' other senate seat until 1993.

1964 election

In the early 1960s, leading Republicans including Goldwater began advocating for a plan they called the 'Southern Strategy', an effort to make Republican gains in the Solid South, which had been pro-Democratic since the aftermath of the American Civil War. Under the Southern Strategy, Republicans would continue an earlier effort to make inroads in the South, Operation Dixie, by ending attempts to appeal to African American voters in the Northern states, and instead appeal to white conservative voters in the South. As documented by reporters and columnists, including Joseph Alsop and Arthur Krock, on the surface the Southern Strategy would appeal to white voters in the South by advocating against the New Frontier programs of President John F. Kennedy and in favor of a smaller federal government and states' rights, while less publicly arguing against the Civil Rights movement and in favor of continued racial segregation.

Congressman and Republican National Committee chairman William E. Miller concurred with Goldwater and backed the Southern Strategy, including holding private meetings of the RNC and other key Republican leaders in late 1962 and early 1963 so they could decide whether to implement it. Overruling the moderate and liberal wings of the party, its leadership decided to pursue the Southern Strategy for the 1964 elections and beyond.

Many states' rights Democrats were attracted to Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign. Goldwater was notably more conservative than previous Republican nominees, such as President Eisenhower. Goldwater's principal opponent in the primary election, Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, was widely seen as representing the more moderate, pro-Civil Rights Act, Northern wing of the party (see Rockefeller Republican and Goldwater Republican).

In the 1964 presidential election, Goldwater ran a conservative, hawkish campaign that broadly opposed strong action by the federal government. Although he had supported all previous federal civil rights legislation, Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act and championed this opposition during the campaign. He believed that this act was an intrusion of the federal government into the affairs of state; and that the Act interfered with the rights of private people to do business, or not, with whomever they chose, even if the choice is based on racial discrimination.

Goldwater's position appealed to white Southern Democrats and Goldwater was the first Republican presidential candidate since Reconstruction to win the electoral votes of the Deep South states (Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina). Outside the South, Goldwater's negative vote on the Civil Rights Act proved devastating to his campaign. The only other state he won was his home one of Arizona and he suffered a landslide defeat. A Lyndon B. Johnson ad called "Confessions of a Republican", which ran in Northern and Western states, associated Goldwater with the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). At the same time, Johnson's campaign in the Deep South publicized Goldwater's support for pre-1964 civil rights legislation. In the end, Johnson swept the election.

Nixon

Johnson was concerned that his endorsement of civil rights legislation would endanger his party in the South. In the 1968 election, Richard Nixon saw the cracks in the Solid South as an opportunity to tap into southern voters who had historically been beyond the reach of the Republican Party. George Wallace had exhibited a strong candidacy in that election, where he garnered 46 electoral votes and nearly 10 million popular votes, attracting mostly Southern Democrats away from Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey had the worst performance for a Democratic presidential nominee in the South since the 1868 election.

The notion of Black Power advocated by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leaders captured some of the frustrations of African Americans at the slow process of change in gaining civil rights and social justice. African Americans pushed for faster change, raising racial tensions. Journalists reporting about the demonstrations against the Vietnam War often featured young people engaging in violence or burning draft cards and American flags. Conservatives were also dismayed about the many young adults engaged in the drug culture and "free love" (sexual promiscuity), in what was called the "hippie" counter-culture. These actions scandalized many Americans and created a concern about law and order.

Nixon's advisers recognized that they could not appeal directly to voters on issues of white supremacy or racism. White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman noted that Nixon "emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognized this while not appearing to". With the aid of Harry Dent and South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who had switched to the Republican Party in 1964, Nixon ran his 1968 campaign on states' rights and "law and order". Liberal Northern Democrats accused Nixon of pandering to Southern whites, especially with regard to his "states' rights" and "law and order" positions, which were widely understood by black leaders to symbolize Southern resistance to civil rights. This tactic was described in 2007 by David Greenberg in Slate as "dog-whistle politics". According to an article in The American Conservative, Nixon adviser and speechwriter Pat Buchanan disputed this characterization.

Nixon met with southern Republicans and party chairmen, including John Tower and Thurmond, on May 31, 1968, in Atlanta, Georgia, and promised to slow integration efforts and forced busing. Ronald Reagan entered the 1968 primary late and attempted to gain the support of the southern delegations, with Nixon stating that "it was Ronald Reagan who set the hearts of many Southern Republicans aflutter", but the delegations had committed to Nixon and Thurmond helped maintain their support for Nixon. Southern delegates accounted for 46% of the delegates needed to win the nomination at the 1968 convention. Nixon received his highest level of support from the south, which gave him 74% of their vote and accounted for 33% of his overall support.

1976 election

Carter, the first major party presidential candidate from the deep south since Zachary Taylor, won every southern state except for Virginia in the 1976 presidential election. Carter's campaign operated on a strategy that was based around winning the south. His campaign manager, Hamilton Jordan, wrote that the south "provided us with a base of support that cannot be taken for granted or jeopardized" as the "Republicans cannot win if they write off the South". However, the campaign did not publicly emphasize the importance of the south with Jordan stating that it would "be harmful nationally if we were perceived as having a South strategy".

Patrick Caddell stated that televisions ads by the Carter campaign in the south "were blatant-waving the bloody rebel flag". To avoid being viewed as a liberal in the south Carter campaigned with Wallace and voice opposition to welfare and support for balanced budgets and national defense. He also campaigned with segregationist senators James Eastland and John C. Stennis.

Ford's poor performance in the south, winning only 9% of its electoral votes, greatly increased the amount of support he needed in the rest of the country to win. However, Carter only won the white vote in Georgia, Arkansas, and Tennessee.

Evolution (1970s and 1980s)

Reagan

After his accession to the presidency Ford selected Nelson Rockefeller, rather than George H. W. Bush, to serve as his vice president. Bryce Harlow stated that Bush would have been better for party unity, but that Rockefeller would receive better coverage from the media and make Ford a stronger candidate in the 1976 election. Conservatives, including Reagan, opposed the selection as Rockefeller "might inherit the presidency" according to Lou Cannon.

Ford was the first incumbent Republican president to face significant primary opposition since Taft in 1912. Reagan's campaign was performing poorly following defeats in New Hampshire, Florida, and Illinois. In North Carolina, Ford was backed by moderate Governor James Holshouser while Reagan was backed by Helms and Thomas F. Ellis. North Carolina was Reagan's first victory during the 1976 primary and he also won Texas, Alabama, and Georgia. However, he failed to win in Tennessee due to comments suggesting he might not support continuation of the TVA. One-third of Reagan's delegate support at the convention came from the south.

John Sears, Reagan's campaign manager in 1976, proposed that he moderate his policies to prevent being seen as another Goldwater. On the day Reagan won the New Hampshire primary he replaced Sears with William J. Casey, who shifted to more conservative messaging.

Reagan's victories in the south solidified his control of the Republican nomination. Lee Atwater and Carroll A. Campbell Jr. managed his successful campaign in South Carolina despite John Connally having the support of Thurmond and Governor James B. Edwards. Reagan won the entire south with him taking over 60% in North Carolina, over 70% in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and Louisiana, and over 80% in Mississippi.

As civil rights grew more accepted throughout the nation, basing a general election strategy on appeals to "states' rights", which some would have believed opposed civil rights laws, would have resulted in a national backlash. The concept of "states' rights" was considered by some to be subsumed within a broader meaning than simply a reference to civil rights laws. States rights became seen as encompassing a type of New Federalism that would return local control of race relations. Republican strategist Atwater discussed the Southern Strategy in a 1981 interview later published in Southern Politics in the 1990s by Alexander P. Lamis.

Reagan's Neshoba County Fair "states' rights" speech

In August 1980, Reagan made a much-noted appearance at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where his speech contained the phrase "I believe in states' rights". This was cited as evidence that the Republican Party was building upon the Southern strategy again. Former UN Ambassador Andrew Young stated that with his support of states' rights, Reagan was signaling that "it's going to be all right to kill niggers when [Reagan is] president." Young's remark was criticized by Carter. Two days after his appearance at the fair, Reagan appeared at the Urban League convention in New York to appeal to black voters, where he said, "I am committed to the protection and enforcement of the civil rights of black Americans. This commitment is interwoven into every phase of the plans I will propose."

Reagan's campaigns used racially coded rhetoric, making attacks on the "welfare state" and leveraging resentment towards affirmative action. Dan Carter explains how "Reagan showed that he could use coded language with the best of them, lambasting welfare queens, busing, and affirmative action as the need arose". During his 1976 and 1980 campaigns, Reagan employed stereotypes of welfare recipients, often invoking the case of a "welfare queen" with a large house and a Cadillac using multiple names to collect over $150,000 in tax-free income. Aistrup described Reagan's campaign statements as "seemingly race neutral", but explained how whites interpret this in a racial manner, citing a Democratic National Committee funded study conducted by Communications Research Group. Though Reagan did not overtly mention the race of the welfare recipient, the unstated impression in whites' minds were black people and Reagan's rhetoric resonated with Southern white perceptions of black people.

Aistrup argued that one example of Reagan field-testing coded language in the South was a reference to an unscrupulous man using food stamps as a "strapping young buck". When informed of the offensive connotations of the term, Reagan defended his actions as a nonracial term that was common in his Illinois hometown. Ultimately, Reagan never used that particular phrasing again. According to Ian Haney Lopez, the "young buck" term changed into "young fellow" which was less overtly racist: "'Some young fellow' was less overtly racist and so carried less risk of censure, and worked just as well to provoke a sense of white victimization".

Lee Atwater argued that Reagan did not use the Southern strategy or need to make racial appeals:

Bush

Southern white conservatives were plurality Democratic in 1976, with independent in second and Republican in third at 30%. The Republican figure rose to 40% in 1980, and 52% in 1984. In 1988, 60% identified themselves as Republicans while 16% identified as Democrats.

Bush selected Atwater to manage his presidential campaign in the 1988 election. Atwater obtained hundreds of southern endorsements for Bush and focused on Evangelical voters, who made up a large number of the southern electorate.

Proposals for holding the presidential primaries of southern states at once started in the 1970s in order to maintain and increase the region's influence in presidential elections. It would allow for a conservative favorite son candidate from the south to receive a lead in delegate totals and produce momentum for the other primaries. Other southern presidential candidates had fared poorly in the initial contests in Iowa and New Hampshire which allowed more liberal candidates to gain the nomination.

Alabama, Florida, and Georgia designated the second Tuesday of March as the date for their presidential primaries and the Southern Legislative Conference lobbied other states to join. 864 Democratic and 564 Republican delegates came from the southern states in the 1988 primary. Frank Fahrenkopf, chair of the Republican National Committee, stated that "Southern Democrats intended Super Tuesday to be a way to moderate their party", but that "the Democrats have handed us a tremendous opportunity to win over the disaffected majority of their party".

174 delegates were selected in the Republican primary before Super Tuesday and Bush held 35.1% of these delegates. After Super Tuesday Bush held 73.5% of the 959 delegates selected so far. Bush's victory in all but one state on Super Tuesday nearly secured him enough delegates to win the primary. Bush won a majority of the vote in all southern states except for in three states, and received 85.7% of their delegates due to the primaries being winner-take-all. Pat Robertson's campaign was weakened following a defeat in South Carolina and Super Tuesday.

Southern turnout in the Republican primaries rose from 2.1 million in 1980, to 3.8 million in 1988. Turnout in Texas rose from 527,000 to 1,015,000, in Florida from 614,000 to 901,000, and in Georgia from 200,000 to 401,000. Over 40% of southern white voters participated in the Republican primaries except for in Tennessee, North Carolina, Louisiana, and Arkansas. 97% of the Republican electorate in the primaries were white.

Willie Horton attack ads

During the 1988 presidential election, the Willie Horton attack ads run against Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis built upon the Southern Strategy in a campaign that reinforced the notion that Republicans best represent conservative whites with traditional values. Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes worked on the campaign as Bush's political strategists. Upon seeing a favorable New Jersey focus group response to the Horton strategy, Atwater recognized that an implicit racial appeal could work outside of the Southern states. The subsequent ads featured Horton's mugshot and played on fears of black criminals. Atwater said of the strategy: "By the time we're finished, they're going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis' running mate". Al Gore was the first to use the Willie Horton prison furlough against Dukakis and—like the Bush campaign—would not mention race. The Bush campaign claimed they were initially made aware of the Horton issue via the Gore campaign's use of the subject. Bush initially hesitated to use the Horton campaign strategy, but the campaign saw it as a wedge issue to harm Dukakis who was struggling against Democratic rival Jesse Jackson.

In addition to presidential campaigns, subsequent Republican campaigns for the House of Representatives and Senate in the South employed the Southern Strategy.

New York Times opinion columnist Bob Herbert wrote in 2005: "The truth is that there was very little that was subconscious about the G.O.P.'s relentless appeal to racist whites. Tired of losing elections, it saw an opportunity to renew itself by opening its arms wide to white voters who could never forgive the Democratic Party for its support of civil rights and voting rights for blacks". Aistrup described the transition of the Southern Strategy saying that it has "evolved from a states' rights, racially conservative message to one promoting in the Nixon years, vis-à-vis the courts, a racially conservative interpretation of civil rights laws—including opposition to busing. With the ascendancy of Reagan, the Southern Strategy became a national strategy that melded race, taxes, anticommunism, and religion".

Some analysts viewed the 1990s as the apogee of Southernization or the Southern Strategy, given that the Democratic President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore were from the South as were Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle. During the end of Nixon's presidency, the Senators representing the former Confederate states in the 93rd Congress were primarily Democrats. During the beginning of Bill Clinton's presidency twenty years later in the 103rd Congress, this was still the case.

Role of churches

Certain Christian denominations show strong preferences, by both membership and publicly expressed views, for certain political parties, particularly evangelicals for the Republican party and historically black churches for the Democratic Party. Additionally, voter guides are either designed for distribution by specific churches or are made easily available. Consequently, churches have played a key role in support of the Southern strategy, particularly Southern Baptists. Black Baptists, on the other hand, served as a source of resistance to Jim Crow through parallel institutions, intellectual traditions, and activism which extend into the present day.

Shifts in strategy (1990s and 2000s)

Democrats held a majority of the US House and US Senate seats in the south after the 1992 elections. However, the Republicans gained a 64 to 61 control in the US House and 13 to 9 control in the US Senate after the 1994 elections.

Richard Shelby, who was elected to the US Senate in 1986 as a conservative Democrat with a minority of the white vote, joined the Republicans after the 1994 election.

Ten of the twelve Democrats who served as Speaker or Minority Leader between 1891 and 1961 were from the south. Southerners held at least one leadership position during the Democratic control of Congress in the later half of the 20th century. The Republican leaders of the 104th United States Congress (Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, and Tom DeLay) were all from the south. Trent Lott, a southerner, replaced Alan Simpson as the party's whip in the US Senate and later became the Majority Leader in 1996.

In the mid-1990s, the Republican Party made major attempts to court African American voters, believing that the strength of religious values within the African American community and the growing number of affluent and middle-class African Americans would lead this group increasingly to support Republican candidates. In general, these efforts did not significantly increase African American support for the Republican Party. Few African Americans voted for George W. Bush and other national Republican candidates in the 2004 elections, although he attracted a higher percentage of black voters (15%) to identify as Republican than had any GOP candidate since Dwight D. Eisenhower (24%). In his article "The Race Problematic, the Narrative of Martin Luther King Jr., and the Election of Barack Obama", Dr. Rickey Hill argued that Bush implemented his own Southern Strategy by exploiting "the denigration of the liberal label to convince white conservatives to vote for him. Bush's appeal was to the same racist tropes that had been used since the Goldwater and Nixon days."

Following Bush's re-election, Ken Mehlman, Bush's campaign manager and Chairman of the Republican National Committee, held several large meetings in 2005 with African American business, community and religious leaders. In his speeches, he apologized for his party's use of the Southern Strategy in the past. When asked about the strategy of using race as an issue to build GOP dominance in the once-Democratic South, Mehlman replied,

Scholarly debates

The Southern strategy is generally believed to be the primary force that transformed the "Democratic South into a reliable GOP stronghold in presidential elections". Scholars generally emphasize the role of racial backlash in the realignment of southern voters. The viewpoint that the electoral realignment of the Republican party due to a race-driven Southern Strategy is also known as the "top-down" viewpoint. Most scholarship and analysts support this top-down viewpoint and state that the political shift was due primarily to racial issues. Some historians believe that racial issues took a back seat to a grassroots narrative known as the "suburban strategy", which Glen Feldman calls a "dissenting—yet rapidly growing—narrative on the topic of southern partisan realignment".

Around the 1990s, scholars on conservatism sought to re-examine prevailing scholarship around the southern strategy. Scholars such as Matthew Lassiter, Kevin Kruse, and Joseph Crespino advocated against the idea of "Southern Exceptionalism" while still acknowledging the centrality of a racial backlash. Matthew Lassiter says: "A suburban-centered vision reveals that demographic change played a more important role than racial demagoguery in the emergence of a two-party system in the American South". Lassiter argues that race-based appeals cannot explain the GOP shift in the South while also noting that the real situation is far more complex. Specifically, authors like Lassiter and Kevin Kruse argue that, while the origins of suburbanization began with white flight into suburbs, these suburban voters embraced free market, de facto segregation and sincere color-blind politics that made them more aligned with the Republican Party.

According to Lassiter, some political scientists and historians believe that the timing does not fit the "Southern Strategy" model. They believe that because Nixon carried 49 states in 1972, he operated a successful national strategy, rather than a regional one; the Republican Party remained quite weak at the local and state levels across the entire South for decades. Republicans first won a majority of US House seats in the South in the 1994 "Republican Revolution", and only began to dominate southern congressional elections after the 2010 elections.

Bruce Kalk and George Tindall argue that Nixon's Southern Strategy was to find a compromise on race that would take the issue out of politics, allowing conservatives in the South to rally behind his grand plan to reorganize the national government. Kalk and Tindall emphasize the similarity between Nixon's operations and the series of compromises orchestrated by Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877 that ended the battles over Reconstruction and put Hayes in the White House. Kalk says Nixon did end the reform impulse and sowed the seeds for the political rise of white Southerners and the decline of the civil rights movement.