Nixon Wins Presidency Using Southern Strategy Based on Racial Resentment

Richard Nixon won the presidency with a strategy devised by political consultant Kevin Phillips that explicitly targeted white racial resentment to break up the New Deal coalition. Phillips, who worked on Nixon’s campaign, told journalists during the election that ’the whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who.’ In an internal memo to Nixon, Phillips wrote that ’the fulcrum of re-alignment is the law and order/Negro socio-economic revolution syndrome, and [Nixon] should continue to emphasize crime, decentralization of federal social programming, and law and order.’ White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman later noted that Nixon ’emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognized this while not appearing to.’ The strategy used coded language like ’law and order,’ ‘silent majority,’ and ‘states’ rights’ to appeal to white voters opposed to civil rights without explicitly racist appeals. The approach successfully captured George Wallace voters who had supported segregation, with Phillips writing that ’three quarters or more of the Wallace electorate represented lost Nixon votes.’ This marked the beginning of the Republican Party’s systematic use of racial dog whistles—coded appeals that activate racial resentment without overt racist language—as a central electoral strategy.