I've never been sold on the idea of a southern strategy in the first place. The only real support for it comes from the musings of one particular person, and it exploded from there.
From my blog.
The most insidious explanation for Democrat losses is "the Southern Strategy", which is a severe insult against all Southerners as ignorant racists. ...
... Democrat Jimmy Carter's won victories in every Southern state except for Virginia and Oklahoma in the 1976 Presidential election, years after the alleged emergence of the Southern Strategy.
Democrat Bill Clinton was able to win five southern states twice (Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia) and two states once (Georgia in 1992 and Florida in 1996). Virginia, Texas and North Carolina were won by the Republican candidates by significantly smaller margins than usual.
The first Southern state to give the GOP control of both its governorship and its legislature was Florida. It did not do this until 1998. Florida has an atypical population for a Southern state, with a large retiree population from northern states and also a large Cuban population that leans Republican due to a shared opposition to Fidel Castro.
Georgia did not elect its first post-Reconstruction GOP governor until 2002. Until 2005, Louisiana had been represented since Reconstruction only by Democratic Senators. Arkansas has two Democratic Senators, a Democratic governor, three out of four of their U.S. representatives are Democrats, every statewide office is held by a Democrat, and their state legislature is Democratic. Tennessee and North Carolina have a majority Democratic delegation in the U.S. House of representatives. Mississippi has a house delegation that is evenly split between Democrats and Republicans.
It seems that the "Southern Strategy" which is quoted so often is more the musings of one particular racist Republican and not a Republican Party policy. Nixon is supposed to be the epitome of the evil American politician, but he is still just one person.
The Southern strategy was just that, a strategy. You are saying that it didn't exist because it wasn't successful. It is not an argument that addresses whether the strategy was used by the Republicans. They could have used it and it could of had the slow success or it could have been not successful at all and it would still be a blot against the Republicans.
Rather than one racist, disgraced president, Nixon, the southern strategy is usually associated with Lee Atwater, who was Reagan's and George H. W. Bush's political consultant. He was also the chairman of the Republican National Committee. He established Republican electoral strategy for more than a decade. But by his time the Republicans had moved away from the direct, racial appeals.
The Republican electoral strategies were basically whatever worked. Yes, they tried racial politics like the Dixiecrats had used for years in the South but when they used it it was too blatant for the times, too direct. The northern part of the southern strategy was to empathize crime in the streets, drug use, welfare, busing, etc. and let the racists make the race connections without angering the non-racists. The southerners were able to also make the connection without having the direct racial appeal and the direct approach was abandoned.
The insult to southerners was that the Republicans thought that they were too stupid to understand the slightly more nuanced appeals to their racism.
The important point is not how successful the Republican racial strategy was, but that they used it. The fact that the majority of Republicans weren't racists made their use of it even more cynical.
The Republican have a hard job establishing electoral strategies. They work hard when they are in office for their primary financial backers, the very rich. They are not the party of the little guy. Yet they have to have the votes of a lot of the little guys in order to be in office to work for the very rich.
What they did was to have a succession of tempests in a teapot issues to divert attention away from their true work for the rich. You probably know them as well as anyone else here of a certain age as they say, racism, crime, forced busing, flag burning, drugs, welfare queens, illegal immigration, gay marriage, etc. They had no real intention of solving these problems that they drummed up, as an issue ran its course it meant that they had to think up new ones to replace them. Of course, they had the two all time greatest hits to fall back on, abortion and high taxes/government profligacy.
A better starting point for understanding Republican political strategy is the so-called Powell memorandum. It documents the growing awareness among the patrons of the Republican Party and occasionally the Democratic Party, the very rich, that they owned the media and could bend it to their benefit. That politics runs on money and that they have most of it. Politicians don't have to be bribed, with money the right thinking ones will win, you just need a slightly longer view. That research also depends on the money that they have, that they can buy the research that they need for their message, lower taxes on the rich, higher taxes for everyone else, suppress wages, increase profits, wages are costs, profits are holy, a universal good.
The problem is now that after thirty plus years of these crap issues we now have a generation that has grown up hearing them and believe that the whole of them constitutes a coherent, achievable foundation for governing. The Republicans of the 80's understood that their platform of issues was no more than handwaving used to divert attention from the hand in everyone's pocket. But now we have true believers that abortion is murder and that criminalizing it will stop it, that we need to return to the gold standard to stop debasing the money, that regulations are the result of evil government plotting to destroy capitalism, that there is a natural, self-regulating free market that will spontaneously erupt when the government is taken out of the market, that the government is trying to rain money on the poor so that they can behave like the idle rich, socialized medicine will destroy the country, etc.
The natural result of the Republican strategy is the Tea Party. A phenomenon that the Republicans only have themselves to blame for, a reactionary movement that is not happy with stopping progress, they want to roll it back.
Nothing shows the disconnect between the establishment of the Republican Party and the Tea Party as immigration. Immigration is one of the methods used to suppress evil wages and is therefore a favorite of the political establishment. This collided with the xenophobia of the Tea Partiers.
