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Roots of the Southern strategy

Lyndon Johnson knew that his endorsement of Civil Rights legislation would endanger his party in the South, but he did it anyway. The national Democratic party turned its back on segregation, and also abandoned segregationist voters in the South. In the election of 1968, Richard Nixon saw the cracks in the Solid South as an opportunity to tap into a group of voters that had heretofore been beyond the reach of the Republican Party.

The United States was undergoing a very turbulent period in 1968. The founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and most influential member of the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. His death was followed by black rioting throughout the country. King’s policy of non-violence was being challenged by more radical blacks and by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. There were protests, often violent, against the Vietnam War. The drug subculture was causing alarm in many sectors. Nixon, with the aid of Harry Dent and then South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who had switched parties in 1964, ran on a campaign of states' rights and "law and order." Many liberals accused Nixon of pandering to racist Southern whites, especially with regards to his "states' rights" and "law and order" stands.[5]

The independent candidacy of George Wallace, a former Democratic governor of Alabama, partially negated the southern strategy. With a much more explicit attack on black civil rights, Wallace won all of Goldwater's states (except South Carolina), as well as Arkansas and one of North Carolina's electoral votes. However, Nixon picked up Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida, while Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey won only Texas. In 1972, Nixon swept the South, winning over 70 percent of the popular vote in the Deep South states and Florida, and over 60 percent in all the other states of the former Confederacy.

Despite his appeal to southern whites, Nixon parlayed a wide perception as a moderate into wins in other states, taking a solid majority in the electoral college. He was able to appear this way to most Americans, because the strategy often consisted of code words -- "states' rights," "busing" -- and others that meant nothing to most Americans, but were emotionally charged for those in the South.