The Southern Strategy Revisited

The 1994 elections represented a watershed year for southern Republicans. For the first time since Reconstruction, they gained control of a majority of national seats and governorships. Yet, despite these impressive gains, southern Republicans control only three of twenty-two state legislative chambers and 37 percent of state legislative seats. Joseph A. Aistrup addresses why this divergence between the national and subnational levels persists even after GOP national landslides in 1972, 1980, 1984, 1988, and 1994. Explanations for this divergence lie in the interaction between the Republicans' "Southern Strategy" -a set of coherent ideological tactics designed to lure southern whites to support GOP candidates-and the Republicans' top-down party development efforts. Aistrup analyzes the historical evolution of the Republican Southern Strategy from Goldwater in 1961 to the "Contract with America" in 1994. Examining the roles of ideology, intra party politics, gerrymandering, and Democratic incumbency in Republican top-down advancement, he predicts the extent to which these will remain significant obstacles to GOP success in subnational elections after 1994. Aistrup reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the Southern Strategy as it relates to candidate ideology and examines the influences of Republican victories in national and statewide offices on the party's subnational advancement. He shows a clear connection between Republican presidential success and southern Republican advancement in local elections.

The Southern Strategy is traditionally understood as a Goldwater and Nixon-era effort by the Republican Party to win over disaffected white voters in the Democratic stronghold of the American South. To realign these voters with the GOP, the party abandoned its past support for civil rights and used racially coded language to capitalize on southern white racial angst. However, that decision was but one in a series of decisions the GOP made not just on race, but on feminism and religion as well, in what Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields call the "Long Southern Strategy." In the wake of Second-Wave Feminism, the GOP dropped the Equal Rights Amendment from its platform and promoted traditional gender roles in an effort to appeal to anti-feminist white southerners, particularly women. And when the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention became increasingly fundamentalist and politically active, the GOP tied its fate to the Christian Right. With original, extensive data on national and regional opinions and voting behavior, Maxwell and Shields show why all three of those decisions were necessary for the South to turn from blue to red. To make inroads in the South, however, GOP politicians not only had to take these positions, but they also had to sell them with a southern "accent." Republicans embodied southern white culture by emphasizing an "us vs. them" outlook, preaching absolutes, accusing the media of bias, prioritizing identity over the economy, encouraging defensiveness, and championing a politics of retribution. In doing so, the GOP nationalized southern white identity, rebranded itself to the country at large, and fundamentally altered the vision and tone of American politics.

The Origins of the Southern Strategy is a detailed study of the rise of two-party competition in South Carolina during the mid-twentieth century. In 1950, when the study begins, there was for all practical purposes no functioning Republican party in that state, nor was there much of one anywhere in the deep South. During the two decades covered by this study, the interplay between two clear factions--economic and racial conservatives--shaped the growth of the party. Bruce H. Kalk amply demonstrates the implications of these developments for the rightward shift in national politics and charts their effect on the resurgence of assertive economic conservativism, as a new southern base became the core of the Republican party's presidential strategies after 1968.

In The Long Southern Strategy, Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields trace the consequences of the GOP's decision to court white voters in the South. Over time, Republicans adopted racially coded, anti-feminist, and evangelical Christian rhetoric and policies, making its platform more southern and more partisan, and the remodel paid off. This strategy has helped the party reach new voters and secure electoral victories, up to and including the 2016 election. Now,in any Republican primary, the most southern-presenting candidate wins, regardless of whether that identity is real or performed. Using an original and wide-ranging data set of voter opinions, Maxwell and Shields examine what southerners believe and show how Republicans such as Donald Trump stoke support inthe South and among southern-identified voters across the nation.

The use of wedge issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and immigration has become standard political strategy in contemporary presidential campaigns. Why do candidates use such divisive appeals? Who in the electorate is persuaded by these controversial issues? And what are the consequences for American democracy? In this provocative and engaging analysis of presidential campaigns, Sunshine Hillygus and Todd Shields identify the types of citizens responsive to campaign information, the reasons they are responsive, and the tactics candidates use to sway these pivotal voters. The Persuadable Voter shows how emerging information technologies have changed the way candidates communicate, who they target, and what issues they talk about. As Hillygus and Shields explore the complex relationships between candidates, voters, and technology, they reveal potentially troubling results for political equality and democratic governance. The Persuadable Voter examines recent and historical campaigns using a wealth of data from national surveys, experimental research, campaign advertising, archival work, and interviews with campaign practitioners. With its rigorous multimethod approach and broad theoretical perspective, the book offers a timely and thorough understanding of voter decision making, candidate strategy, and the dynamics of presidential campaigns.

Scholars, journalists, writers, and pundits have long regarded the South as the nation's most politically distinctive region. Its culture, history, and social and economic institutions have fostered unique political ideas that intrigue observers and have had profound political consequences for the nation's citizens, politicians, and policymakers. Writing Southern Politics is the most comprehensive review of the large body of post–World War II literature on southern politics. Since the publication of V.O. Key Jr.'s landmark work, Southern Politics in State and Nation (1949), scholars have produced an astounding number of books, monographs, professional journal articles, and research papers addressing elements of continuity and change in southern politics. The contributors to this book sort through the literature, identifying major themes, examining areas of scholarly disagreement, and making the key dimensions and contours of the region's politics understandable. Individually, the essays in this volume identify and clarify the key writing and research in selected subfields of southern politics, including religion, race, women, and political parties. Collectively, the essays identify and discuss the major components of and trends in southern politics over the past half century. The contributors, some of the foremost scholars in the field, have been heavily involved in researching and writing about southern politics during the past three decades and have observed the development of many of the research projects that form the foundation of southern political literature. In many instances, their own writings are included in the body of literature they discuss, bringing unique skills, research, and perspectives to their original essays. In addition to reviewing existing literature, Writing Southern Politics also includes suggestions for a future research agenda. Not all aspects of the region's dramatic fifty-year transformation have been fully explored, and the continuation of this development ensures new avenues to examine. The discussion of past research and writing is an invaluable tool for understanding the trends in southern politics over the past half century. By examining these trends and developing an agenda for future research, the authors provide a roadmap for identifying the changes that will likely shape the region over the next half century.

The pressures of contemporary electioneering force political professionals into "campaign mode"--a state of mind that merges a visceral drive to win elections with a deep-seated habit of strategic thinking. Wise political professionals know the basic rules of electoral strategy and how to read the political terrain. Campaign Mode examines the strategic histories of five successful congressional candidates--Ohio's Ted Strickland, Georgia's Bob Barr, California's Loretta Sanchez, Tennessee's Harold Ford, Jr., and Pennsylvania's Rick Santorum. The authors--both of whom have advised major political figures--combine original interviews, survey data, historical investigation, and first-hand observation of the candidates to reveal the inner workings of electoral politics. They demonstrate that campaigns do matter and show readers how to think like political professionals.

Is divided government—a Republican president and a Democratic Congress—the product of diminished competition for seats in the U.S. House of Representatives? In this groundbreaking study, Gary C. Jacobson uses a detailed analysis of the evolution of competition in postwar House elections to argue that the problems Republicans face in seeking House seats are political rather than structural. With abundant graphic illustration, he shows that divided government is only one piece of a much broader electoral pattern that is creating new opportunities as well as new barriers to partisan change in the House, He examines shifts in the incumbency advantage, campaign finance practices, the "swing ratio," and other related phenomena, but he turns up little evidence that they are to blame for divided government. More important, he argues, are trends in partisan opposition: the quality of candidates, campaigns, issues, and career strategies. As individual candidates and campaigns have become more important in winning elections, the weakness of Republican House candidacies has prevented the party from taking more seats away from the Democrats. Jacobson contends that the House is not nearly as insulated from electoral change as recent elections might suggest. The notion that House elections are no longer capable of reflecting popular preferences is, he concludes, simply wrong.