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.