Originally Posted by
budwom
Indeed...and without going into the weeds, Dick Nixon's Southern Strategy was race based beyond question.
Only indirectly, Budwom. The major contradiction in domestic US politics, after the Republican progressives began to burn out, was why conservative Southerners stuck with the Democratic Party, when the Democratic Party, especially after the 1948 Democratic convention, was clearly much more liberal. This was driven home in the Great Society programs under LBJ, which were passed in the wake of the Kennedy assasination and the overwhelming Democratic victory in 1964.
I think race is only part of this picture. Nixon had a Southern strategy, although he didn't need it in 1972 against McGovern and he didn't get many of the Deep South states in 1968 because of Wallace. The Republican strategy was based on a range of economic and social issues -- civil rights, unions, federal spending, states rights, welfare and social programs -- where the national Republicans had more in common with the Southern Democrats.
Sage Grouse
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'When I got on the bus for my first road game at Duke, I saw that every player was carrying textbooks or laptops. I coached in the SEC for 25 years, and I had never seen that before, not even once.' - David Cutcliffe to Duke alumni in Washington, DC, June 2013