The Southern Strategy

What is the Southern Strategy?
The Southern Strategy is the name given to a Republican electoral strategy. The idea is to get the racist white population of the South to vote en block for the Republican candidate. This loses the minority votes but the number of votes lost is outnumbered by the votes gained from racist whites.

Democratic incumbent Lyndon Johnson faced off against Republican nominee Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election. Goldwater's platform used a lot of racial dog whistle politics. Goldwater not only lost the election but failed to carry any region in the country except for the South which voted overwhelmingly for Goldwater. Republicans then realized that if they were to get the South to vote for them en mass while winning just a small handful of other states they could win the election. This was tested with Richard Nixon's campaign. Nixon's victory signaled the beginning of the Southern Strategy as an official Republican doctrine. For the strategy to remain effective, Republican strategists have to keep the racist white vote constantly agitated about racial issues so that they turn out for elections. Generally, a successful Southern Strategy does not leave a large margin for error. This is an example of a 50% +1 strategy. Lee Atwater, George Bush, Sr.'s campaign manager, once famously said of the Southern Strategy:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

Even though the Republican party has officially apologized for the use of the Southern Strategy, the electoral map below shows that they still employ this strategy to this day with the addition of the Mid-West to the traditional South. Note that even though McCain failed to win the election, his strongest base of support was in the South with the notable exceptions of Virgina and North Carolina.

 2008 Presidential Electoral Map per Wikipedia

Shifting demographics in the US, especially in the South, due to an increase of immigration from Latin America as well as population migration from northern states to the South may soon render this strategy obsolete. When voter turnout is higher than average, it becomes progressively harder to use the Southern Strategy effectively.