it: “When you’re spending 60 percent of your time talking about birth control and Obamacare, not a lot of men are paying attention to you.”4
Where the Democrats have managed to win elections with poor results among white working-class men—President Obama won reelection with a stunningly low 38 percent of the overall white vote—Democrats like Frank Houston, a Democratic Party chairman in Michigan’s affluent Oakland county, worry that the losses among white men must be contained to some degree, lest the party rely too heavily on its “ascendant coalition” of women, gays, and minorities.
“There’s a whole cadre of us—of young, white men political leaders in Oakland County—who are saying, ‘We can’t just write off 30-year-old to 40-year-old guys, let alone anyone who’s older,’” Houston said.5 The writer of the Times feature, Jackie Calmes, reminded readers that Democrats often win the votes of fewer than four out of ten white men in elections, and that they haven’t won a majority of white men since it was done by Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
And yet, this very cohort was once the bedrock of Franklin Roosevelt’s Democratic coalition that won five consecutive presidential elections between 1932 and 1952, and seven out of nine elections between 1932 and 1964. During that era, it would have sounded exotic to suggest that the Republican Party—a motley coalition of upper-crust business and financial types and Northeastern elites, along with a small-but-intense coalition of ideological conservatives—could break through with this demographic, let alone come to own it. Yet that is precisely what happened over the last half century.
And that brings us back to Richard Nixon. It was Nixon’s 1968 campaign that first shifted this well-worn pattern and his 1972 landslide victory that made the reversal permanent. Many factors, policies, and decisions played a role in this transformation. But two key approaches paved the way:
• The Southern Strategy: An approach that took shape among Nixon advisor Harry S. Dent Sr.—a veteran of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign—and the shrewd young political operative Kevin Phillips.
• The Silent Majority: A phrase Nixon first used to refer to a broad spectrum of American voters in a 1969 speech about the Vietnam War.
These approaches—one electoral, the other rhetorical—helped make possible not only Nixon’s electoral victories but also the wholesale transformation of the Republican Party, and, indeed, of the American political landscape. They made up a landscape that, with some alterations, remains in place today.
The Republican Party has deeply internalized the concept of the silent majority, and the party’s ideological commitments and communication style have been directly shaped by it. Inevitably, the identification of this majority involved a separating of the electorate into us-versus-them camps. But what made Nixonian polarization so remarkable was that the “us” comprised a huge majority. Perhaps that’s why Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, called this sorting of desirable and undesirable voters “positive polarization.”6 While the men spoke in polarizing terms, their words did not serve to narrow but to expand their political base—at least until Watergate intervened.
But the coining of the term “silent majority,” and its derivatives, was only the rhetorical portion of the Nixon polarization strategy. On the electoral side, he and his team also found a way to draw sharp lines while expanding their political support. They did so by looking to the beleaguered South. Nixon’s Southern strategy forged the most dramatic political realignment since the New Deal and changed the Republican Party forever. The presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush are unimaginable without it, and later presidential candidates, like John McCain and Mitt Romney, would also rely on the South as their electoral bedrock.
The Southern Strategy
The Southern strategy’s genesis was as simple as arithmetic and as methodical as typical political calculation. Ever since Reconstruction, the South had been a “solid” bet for the Democratic Party, as white Southerners voted steadfastly against the party of Lincoln and the liberal Republican architects of Reconstruction, black suffrage, and civil rights. No region of the country was such a lock: in every presidential election from 1876 to 1964—a span of eighty-eight years—the South went Democratic. There is no parallel for this kind of long-running regional dominance by a major party. Even in elections where the Republican Party won the White House smashingly—in 1924, with Calvin Coolidge; in 1928, with Herbert Hoover; and in 1952 and 1956, with Dwight Eisenhower—it did so without the South.7
But by 1968, the Democrats had reached a crossroads with their disparate coalitions. They maintained the support of Southern “Dixiecrats,” but this support was threatened by their growing electoral reliance on the North, particularly on blacks, who had come north by the millions in the Great Migration starting around 1910—and then, from the 1940s on, in the Second Great Migration. In the early sixties, the civil rights movement changed the calculus. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, along with desegregation and growing national support for the civil rights movement, threatened the South with a political and social revolution rivaling anything since secession. Many Southern whites saw their way of life under attack, and more than a dozen Southern governors and senators boycotted the 1964 Democratic Convention. Most of the Alabama delegation refused to pledge support for the Lyndon Johnson/Hubert Humphrey ticket. Some were already talking about becoming Republicans.8
“We have lost the South for a generation,” President Johnson is said to have told an aide after signing the landmark 1964 civil rights legislation. If anything, LBJ was being overly optimistic: the South began drifting away from the Democratic party immediately. The Southern strategy’s dry run came later that year, with Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. Goldwater was far to the right of most American voters in 1964, and, though an honest and thoroughly decent human being, he was a crude politician. In one of the greatest presidential routs in history, Goldwater was trounced around the country, but not in the five core states of the Deep South: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. Goldwater won them all, in addition to his home state of Arizona. Johnson took everything else.9
By 1968, the Democratic Party’s turmoil was driving white Southerners en masse to the GOP. If the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts weren’t enough, there was the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. The convention chaos, marked by infighting between the liberal mainstream of the party and its more militant left wing, convinced many working-class Americans—especially in the South—that the Democrats could no longer be trusted with national leadership.10 As longtime Democratic advisor Ted van Dyk put it in a 2008 Wall Street Journal article, “Democratic presidential candidates have not since 1968 been able to restore the party that was broken that year.”11 That remains true even today, recent Democratic wins notwithstanding.
Richard Nixon and his advisors thought they saw the outline of a new political alignment. Their goal was to capitalize politically on the alienation of Southern whites resulting from the civil rights movement and Washington liberalism generally—which seemed bent on forcing radical change on the South. Aware that many Southern whites would cast protest votes against Democratic candidates, Nixon and his advisors hoped to convert this demographic into a solid base of loyal Republican supporters. Their timing was good: demographic changes since World War II made the South highly amenable to such a strategy. By 1970, the South was less than 20 percent black.12 At the same time, white transplants relocated to the South—many of them Republicans already, lacking any generational loyalty to Democrats.13 Nixon and his team did not just pursue the Southern strategy among voters but also among political leaders, wooing prominent southern Democratic politicians into the Republican Party. These included former South Carolina senator Thomas A. Wofford,14 Texas attorney general Will Wilson,15 future Mississippi senator Trent Lott16—and most important, South Carolina senator and former Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond.17
