Michael Steele and the Southern Strategy

David Weigel, at The Washington Post, asked me to comment on Michael Steele’s view of the so-called Southern Strategy.

Speaking at DePaul University on April 20, RNC Chairman Michael Steele urged Republican leaders to work with the Tea Parties. He has the right approach, to which I would add the fact, per my article on BigGovernment.com, that The Republican Party began as a Tea Party Movement.

Steele then went on to say:

“We have lost sight of the historic, integral link between the party and African-Americans. This party was co-founded by blacks, among them Frederick Douglass. The Republican Party had a hand in forming the NAACP, and yet we have mistreated that relationship. People don’t walk away from parties. Their parties walk away from them. For the last 40-plus years we had a ‘Southern Strategy’ that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South. Well, guess what happened in 1992, folks, ‘Bubba’ went back home to the Democratic Party and voted for Bill Clinton.”



Chairman Steele makes an interesting point, but he is accepting as true the Democrat version of events. The theme of Back to Basics for the Republican Party is that celebrating our party’s heritage is not just for minority outreach but for all Republicans to appreciate that the GOP has been a great force for good ever since being founded in 1854 to oppose the Democrats’ pro-slavery, anti-freedom agenda. I drew on that record of achievement in writing the historical information on the RNC website, also posted as Heroes and Heroics.

Chairman Steele’s analysis of the so-called “southern strategy” is a bit too simplistic and could use some historical context. Since the end of Reconstruction the GOP scarcely existed in most of the South until the 1950s. In fact, in 1952 the Republican Party was so weak there that Dwight Eisenhower had to rely on “Veterans for Eisenhower” organizations to conduct much of his campaign in the region.

So firm was the Democrat grip on the white southern vote that prior to Richard Nixon’s 1960 campaign, no Republican presidential candidate had ever done much campaigning in the South. That year he broke new ground by deciding to campaign in every state. Prior to legislative advances of the civil rights movement — initiated by the GOP’s 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts — few African-Americans could vote in the Democrat-controlled South. As a result, Nixon’s campaigning in southern states was perforce directed toward the people who could vote there, mostly the whites.

Regarding his decision to campaign in the South as some kind of cynical ploy is to ignore Nixon’s civil rights achievements while serving as Eisenhower’s vice president. He was instrumental in breaking the Democrat filibuster against the 1957 Civil Rights Act and called for racial integration of public schools long before John Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson did.

As I often say in my speeches, “The more we Republicans know about the history of our party, the more the Democrats will worry about the future of theirs.” See www.grandoldpartisan.com for more information.