Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields: The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics

Throughout much of its existence, the Democratic Party was heavily dependent upon the votes of the white South for its electoral success. In the last forty years, that situation has changed drastically. The erstwhile Democratic Solid South has been transformed into a Republican bastion. While many commentators still seek to explain this phenomenon in terms of race, white Southerners publicly are able to maintain political correctness by setting their change of political heart in a quite different context. This paper seeks to place the current political situation in the South in a historical context that explains how the racial issues that actually launched the downfall of the Democratic Party in that region became eclipsed by a national cultural conflict that has allowed an ever increasing number of white voters in the South to explain themselves in the transcending language of morality that comes so easily to Republicans rather than in the debasing context of race.

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The Not-So-New Southern Religion

The Long Southern Strategy ◽

10.1093/oso/9780190265960.003.0008 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 225-258

Author(s):

Angie Maxwell ◽

Todd Shields

Keyword(s):

Social Status ◽

White Supremacy ◽

White Identity ◽

The South ◽

White Southerners ◽

Southern Religion ◽

White Voters ◽

Sacred Canopy ◽

The Church ◽

Evangelical Protestant

In an effort to win southern white voters, the GOP embraced the old southern religion turning the church faithful into the party loyal. They did so because in many parts of the South, the church remains the central institution defining, organizing, and politicizing its surrounding community. A “sacred canopy” drapes over the region, where there is a common cosmology that is intractable from southern white identity, including its reverence for white supremacy and patriarchy. In general, as a block, white southerners were more evangelical, Protestant, fundamentalist, and moralist than the rest of the country. The not-so-new southern religiosity satisfies an appetite for certainty, conformity, and even social status. As a means to solidify southern white support, the Long Southern Strategy framed southern white Christianity as under attack and cast the GOP as its protector, the price of which is increased cultural defensiveness, anxiety, fear, and distrust.

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Party Leaders and Electoral Realignment: Democratic and Republican Southern Strategies, 1948–1968

The Forum ◽

10.1515/for-2017-0042 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 15 (4) ◽

pp. 631-653 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Boris Heersink

Keyword(s):

Republican Party ◽

Party System ◽

The South ◽

Party Leaders ◽

White Voters ◽

Historical Developments ◽

American Party ◽

Black Voters ◽

The Way

Abstract Political scientists who have studied electoral realignments in the American party system increasingly focus on explaining such changes as the result of major historical developments outside of the control of party leaders. Using both national parties’ approaches to the South in the period 1948–1968, I argue that while party leaders may be unable to cause or prevent a realignment, they do attempt to affect the way in which that process plays out. That is, while the shift of Southern White voters from the Democratic to the Republican Party itself was a largely inevitable process, the timing and context in which it played out was affected by competing strategies from both parties. Specifically, I show that between 1948 and 1964, Democratic leaders hedged their bets between attempting to keep white Southern voters in the party, or expel them in favor of black voters in the Northeast based on their assessments of the party’s electoral position. At the same time, between 1948 and 1968, Republican leaders struggled to balance an appeal to segregationist Southerners and voters in other regions before finding a winning formula in Richard Nixon’s 1968 ‘Southern strategy.’

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Blacks, Whites, and the Voting Rights Act: The Politics of Contextual Change

American Review of Politics ◽

10.15763/issn.2374-7781.1991.12.0.3-20 ◽

1991 ◽

Vol 12 ◽

pp. 3-20

Author(s):

Donald L. Davison

Keyword(s):

Socioeconomic Status ◽

Voting Rights ◽

Congressional Elections ◽

Voting Rights Act ◽

The South ◽

Political Equilibrium ◽

White Voters ◽

Legal Contexts ◽

Black Voters ◽

Contextual Change

This research argues that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 produced dramatic changes in the racial, political, and legal contexts of the South. By guaranteeing the franchise to 3.5 million eligible black voters the VRA contributed to a change in the racial and political equilibrium of the 505 counties covered by the V R A Within these counties, many Southern white voters responded to the mobilization of black voters by casting votes for Republican candidates in congressional elections. The change in white partisan voting patterns appears to be inversely related to socioeconomic status.

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The Not-So-New Southern Racism

The Long Southern Strategy ◽

10.1093/oso/9780190265960.003.0002 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 43-69

Author(s):

Angie Maxwell ◽

Todd Shields

Keyword(s):

Civil Rights ◽

Civil Rights Movement ◽

Vantage Point ◽

The South ◽

White Supremacist ◽

Racial Hierarchy ◽

Public Displays ◽

White Voters ◽

Do So

During and after the Civil Rights Movement, GOP leaders capitalized on white racial angst to attract southern white voters. However, in order to do so without alienating Republicans nationwide, the GOP utilized coded language as an end-around of public displays of prejudice and championed an “us vs. them” cosmology. The decline of overt, Old-Fashioned Racism seemed positive, but the decline masked the persistence of white supremacist attitudes so dominant in the South. Since whiteness functions as a vantage point, supremacy can be maintained as long as the gap between whites and an “other” is also maintained. When denigrating minorities publicly was no longer socially acceptable, the GOP manufactured a host of increasingly threatening “others.” These common enemies catalyzed both an elevation of and a clinging to whiteness, which, in turn, preserved the “not-so-new” racial hierarchy key to southern white voters that only relative measures of racial animus can expose.

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The South and the Reconstruction of American Politics

Journal of American History ◽

10.2307/1894197 ◽

1966 ◽

Vol 53 (2) ◽

pp. 227

Author(s):

Dewey W. Grantham

Keyword(s):

American Politics ◽

The South

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Southern Politics Revisited: On V. O. Key's “South in the House”

Studies in American Political Development ◽

10.1017/s0898588x1500005x ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 29 (2) ◽

pp. 154-184 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

David A. Bateman ◽

Ira Katznelson ◽

John Lapinski

Keyword(s):

House Of Representatives ◽

Political Development ◽

American Politics ◽

Truman Administration ◽

The South ◽

Southern Politics ◽

Fine Grained ◽

Temporal Dimensions ◽

Definition Of ◽

The New Deal

V. O. Key's Southern Politics in State and Nation continues to be a central text in political science, the single most important work in understanding the role of the South in American politics. This article returns to, replicates, and seeks to advance Key's analysis of southern politics in Congress, reanalyzing and extending his account of southern strategies and actions in the House of Representatives. Where Key's text was characterized by an episodic attention to issue substance, we focus directly on how southern representation varied across discrete issue areas. We generate temporally fine-grained issue-specific ideal points for members of Congress that allow us to determine how congressional preferences changed across time, generating a more refined portrait of the process by which southern Democratic members diverged from their northern counterparts. We also thicken and extend Key's account along regional and temporal dimensions, assessing how his findings change when we employ a legal-institutional definition of the South, and include the whole period from the beginning of the New Deal to the close of the Truman administration. The article concludes by detailing the significance of our finding to the study of American politics, particularly American political development.

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