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In reply to the discussion: The GOP will not revert to "normal" after Trump. [View all]sop
(10,156 posts)Last edited Tue Jun 11, 2019, 07:47 PM - Edit history (2)
is considered by many to be the foundation for the modern-day Republican party. The "Southern Strategy" is often attributed to Nixon's political strategist, Kevin Phillips, but Phillips didn't coin the phrase, he only popularized it. Phillips, Nixon's campaign adviser in 1968, and Lee Atwater, Reagan's campaign adviser in 1980, discussed how Republicans could "win the vote of racists without sounding racist themselves."
In an interview with The New York Times, Phillips gave his analysis on black voting: (From The NYT, 1970) "From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats."
Lee Atwater gave a recorded interview in 1981 where he spoke about the Southern Strategy: (from The Nation, 2012) "You start out in 1954 by saying, 'N****r, n****r, n****r.' By 1968 you cant say 'n****r,' that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states rights, and all that stuff, and youre getting so abstract. Now, youre talking about cutting taxes, and all these things youre talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'N****r, n****r.'"
https://www.thenation.com/article/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/
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