Lost the game
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With a post-Watergate POD, your mission is not to prevent the GOP's Southern Strategy, but to get most commentators and GOP establishment officials to consider it a failure, not to be repeated after Nixon makes use of it.
AHC: Southern Strategy considered a failure
- Thread starter Lost the game
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Something ugly to happen during the 1980 presidential campaign, that costs the Republican party dearly.
Ford wins in 1976. Reagan/Rumsfeld lose in 1980. Kemp/Swaggart lose in 1984. Robertson/Gingrich lose in 1988. The final straw is the loss of Trent Lott in 1992.
When the GOP gets elected in 2004, they focus on a populist strategy, as opposed to their attempts to run social conservatives in the 80s to early 90s.
When the GOP gets elected in 2004, they focus on a populist strategy, as opposed to their attempts to run social conservatives in the 80s to early 90s.
Depends on what though. If we get a heavily social liberal Democrat in stating 1980 (say Udall) and people following in his footsteps, though 24 years of lefty Democrat dominance (barring something that leads to a new party forming or something), will change the GOP radically.
History Learner
Banned
I really see no way to do this, the Black vote was too against the GOP heavily by then while the dissatisfaction of Southerners with the Democrats made them too big a prize to ignore. Had Nixon lost in 1968, maybe then you could've got the GOP to avoid it as a strategy while the AIP could linger around for a time.
AIP probably would not be too successful in CD and state elections.
History Learner
Banned
For sure, even with the Southern Strategy, Southerners were still sending Democrats to Washington into the 1990s. Ironically, this might result in a "New Deal Coalition" retained type scenario.
This is probably the ultimate repudiation of the "Southern Strategy." It happened OTL.
My take on the Southern Strategy is that it just flat-out didn't actually work that well lol. Then the South swerved Republican for other reasons (ie, affluent suburbs springing up that regardless of their views on race, didn't behave that differently from affluent suburbs in the North and West - because it's not like hating on government programs by falsely claiming they only help blacks is a uniquely Southern thing), and then everyone (Republicans included) concluded that the Southern strategy was a great success.
Sean Trende, a remarkably well-respected elections analyst (on both sides of the aisle) has a pretty interesting read on it. I don't completely agree with it, but it's certainly more nuanced and fair than the typical "all Southern whites refused to support what we wanted because they're all racist" narrative that tries to explain the political development of the South. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/a...standing_the_southern_realignment_107084.html
Social issues had the effect of pushing the entire South to the right and civil rights is clearly one of those, but there's a LOT of social issues (like say, hardcore Christians caring about "acid, amnesty, and abortion"). And even then, many many many white Southerners stuck with the Democratic Party. The part of the South that most dramatically left the Democratic Party first were the new affluent (and almost entirely white) suburbs of the South, which quickly became some of the most hardcore conservative voters in America. Jesse Helms's base was affluent white suburbs, not working-class whites. It was similarly those rich, white suburbs of Atlanta that in 1992, elected Georgia's only Republican, Newt Gingrich.
The Southern-strategy-did-everything-argument is an especially appealing narrative for some today, because it's those affluent white suburbanites who are the demographic most decisively turning AWAY from the Republican Party today. Newt Gingrich's old district in Georgia voted for Romney by 20 points and is now a solidly blue district (a massive shift like that cannot be explained by demographic change, which is far slower than everyone thinks). The idea that all of the political changes in the South can be attributable to a campaign trick by Ronald Reagan pretty conveniently allows those newly woke voters "blame" Ronald Reagan on working-class whites, when it was people like their neighbors and friends (aka, rich, suburban, and white) who tilted the South towards Reagan against the desires of most working-class Southern whites. And obviously, the idea of monolithic racial groups completely erases the impact of economic class (and how class and race can intersect).
It's also appealing to partisan liberal Democrats in America, because a tendency of all partisans is to assume everyone on their side is a feckless, weak moron, and everyone on the other side is diabolical, brilliant, and super-competent (because this explains why their seemingly obvious ideas just don't win out all the time). It's challenging for someone to go "yeah, our opponents are idiots and made crude racist appeals that didn't work out for them, just totally debasing themselves", because then they have to answer how they managed to lose elections to those "idiot" opponents. I suppose the right-wing equivalent of that is conservatives who believed that the USSR was some super-evil, super-competent force that was cleverly sabotaging conservatism everywhere and America in places like Vietnam with the mystical power of Communism, ignoring both the flaws of American policy in Vietnam and the many uh, many many incompetencies of the Soviet Union.
EDIT: It's also important to note that Richard Nixon himself actually believed his Southern Strategy had failed and said that the path forward for the GOP...would be attracting more minority and youth voters lol. So uh, OTL, the Southern Strategy was literally considered a failure by the guy who tried it. https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/...ontested/contested_box_49/Contested-49-54.pdf
lol, now that I think about it, the best way to keep the Southern strategy considered a failure is to avoid Watergate and keep Richard Nixon as President until 1976. Because Richard Nixon considered his 1970 Southern strategy a failure. If viewed as an extremely successful two-term President, then Nixon would probably have the political capital to make sure the Republican candidate in 1976 was honestly someone who agreed with his views on this and most other issues.
My take on the Southern Strategy is that it just flat-out didn't actually work that well lol. Then the South swerved Republican for other reasons (ie, affluent suburbs springing up that regardless of their views on race, didn't behave that differently from affluent suburbs in the North and West - because it's not like hating on government programs by falsely claiming they only help blacks is a uniquely Southern thing), and then everyone (Republicans included) concluded that the Southern strategy was a great success.
Sean Trende, a remarkably well-respected elections analyst (on both sides of the aisle) has a pretty interesting read on it. I don't completely agree with it, but it's certainly more nuanced and fair than the typical "all Southern whites refused to support what we wanted because they're all racist" narrative that tries to explain the political development of the South. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/a...standing_the_southern_realignment_107084.html
Social issues had the effect of pushing the entire South to the right and civil rights is clearly one of those, but there's a LOT of social issues (like say, hardcore Christians caring about "acid, amnesty, and abortion"). And even then, many many many white Southerners stuck with the Democratic Party. The part of the South that most dramatically left the Democratic Party first were the new affluent (and almost entirely white) suburbs of the South, which quickly became some of the most hardcore conservative voters in America. Jesse Helms's base was affluent white suburbs, not working-class whites. It was similarly those rich, white suburbs of Atlanta that in 1992, elected Georgia's only Republican, Newt Gingrich.
The Southern-strategy-did-everything-argument is an especially appealing narrative for some today, because it's those affluent white suburbanites who are the demographic most decisively turning AWAY from the Republican Party today. Newt Gingrich's old district in Georgia voted for Romney by 20 points and is now a solidly blue district (a massive shift like that cannot be explained by demographic change, which is far slower than everyone thinks). The idea that all of the political changes in the South can be attributable to a campaign trick by Ronald Reagan pretty conveniently allows those newly woke voters "blame" Ronald Reagan on working-class whites, when it was people like their neighbors and friends (aka, rich, suburban, and white) who tilted the South towards Reagan against the desires of most working-class Southern whites. And obviously, the idea of monolithic racial groups completely erases the impact of economic class (and how class and race can intersect).
It's also appealing to partisan liberal Democrats in America, because a tendency of all partisans is to assume everyone on their side is a feckless, weak moron, and everyone on the other side is diabolical, brilliant, and super-competent (because this explains why their seemingly obvious ideas just don't win out all the time). It's challenging for someone to go "yeah, our opponents are idiots and made crude racist appeals that didn't work out for them, just totally debasing themselves", because then they have to answer how they managed to lose elections to those "idiot" opponents. I suppose the right-wing equivalent of that is conservatives who believed that the USSR was some super-evil, super-competent force that was cleverly sabotaging conservatism everywhere and America in places like Vietnam with the mystical power of Communism, ignoring both the flaws of American policy in Vietnam and the many uh, many many incompetencies of the Soviet Union.
EDIT: It's also important to note that Richard Nixon himself actually believed his Southern Strategy had failed and said that the path forward for the GOP...would be attracting more minority and youth voters lol. So uh, OTL, the Southern Strategy was literally considered a failure by the guy who tried it. https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/...ontested/contested_box_49/Contested-49-54.pdf
lol, now that I think about it, the best way to keep the Southern strategy considered a failure is to avoid Watergate and keep Richard Nixon as President until 1976. Because Richard Nixon considered his 1970 Southern strategy a failure. If viewed as an extremely successful two-term President, then Nixon would probably have the political capital to make sure the Republican candidate in 1976 was honestly someone who agreed with his views on this and most other issues.
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AussieHawker
Banned
The southern strategy was a process. The south went from racial polarised, with nearly all whites voting for Democrats, and Blacks backing Republican (if they could vote). Then it switched totally. It absolutely worked out for them, and in terms of electoral politics, the GOP has often mouthed support for tacking towards minorities. But it always ends up falling thought, since it keeps happening from Nixon to 2012. But electorally whites consistently vote and are well distributed for a winner take all electoral college. Even now Republicans could continue holding the EC by improving a few more points with white non-college voters, even as the nation diversifies.
Democrats results in the south were held up by the high floor that the Black vote post-VRA offers, meaning they can win those states as long as they don't get flattened with the white vote. Posting a map doesn't really show what is happening underneath. Democrats pre Civil rights and the post-civil rights was playing with vastly different coalitions, tacked together with lingering loyalty. Of course, Democrats would hold the working class longer, I don't think anybody denies that. But Republicans still eventually got them, despite not changing their economic policy to appease them.
Democrats would win the south consistently if whites voted like even solidly Republican states in the Great Plains. But they are even more racially polarised then that. Republican economic policy, or the Nixon corruption, or a Democratic southern means they sometimes win over enough of a minority to overcome.
It just took time. And the southern strategy started well before Nixon. Republicans were trying to build lily-white parties for a while. Later Goldwater got immediate results winning over the Deep South even as LBJ flattened him nationally. Which is also the last election that Democrats won a majority of the White vote. Democrats managed to keep it flipping back and forth, particularly with conservative home region politicians. But it was still gradually slipping away, as the former loyal voters were replaced. Presidential went first, with other federal seats following, with state legislatures still slipping away today.
And yeah suburbs can be racist. A lot of them were created literally to escape living near minorities. But the modern Southern suburbs aren't the same as the old type. They are more diverse and are made up of a lot of transplants from other regions. But now, of course, the Democrats are a better economic match, then Republicans. And Georgia-07 is hardly a 'deep blue' district. In a wave year, the Democrat only won by a 1.02 margin. They have improved somewhat with educated whites, but they still have a lot of ground to make up to make the states properly competitive.
It might be relevant to note that Eisenhower did well in the non-deep South, even though by 1956 he was, relatively speaking, the pro-Civil Rights candidate (even though he was personally unsympathetic.) In fact, I believe he won the South as a whole in 1956 and split it with Stevenson in 1952.
That's also not true, since blacks switched in 1932 to vote for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal, something that was not driven by civil rights, since the great failing of the New Deal was that so many of its programs excluded blacks (though usually implicitly). There were decades when Southern whites and blacks were voting for the same party.
Not to mention that the primary reason that Jim Crow picked up so much steam among affluent white southerners were that they were alarmed by the creation of biracial populist governments in the South that had the support of both blacks and working-class whites (which is why they resorted to mass disenfranchisement and sometimes white supremacist coups, like the one that took down the biracial North Carolina populist government). It's notable that the economic class trending hard-blue today was the same class that first trended hard-red in the 1960's...and who also gave us Jim Crow in the 1890's.