The Southern Strategy
How a Party Went Hunting Where the Ducks Are: The Documented Record of the G.O.P.'s Courtship of the White Segregationist Vote, 1961–2005
In November 1961, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona addressed a regional gathering of Southern Republican leaders in Atlanta. The party, he told them, was not going to win Black voters as a bloc in 1964 or 1968, and so it ought to "go hunting where the ducks are." In the same appearance, he characterized school integration as a matter for the states, saying he did not want his party to assume that enforcing integration was the federal government's role.
The remark was not a slip. It was a strategy, articulated in public, three years before Goldwater became his party's nominee for president. What followed constitutes one of the most thoroughly documented political maneuvers in American history: the votes, the campaigns, the memos, the taped interviews, and finally the apology, delivered from the chairman's own podium four decades later.
"Southern Strategy" refers to the Republican Party's deliberate effort, beginning in the early 1960s, to win the votes of white Southerners (a bloc that had voted Democratic since Reconstruction) by positioning the G.O.P. as the party of resistance to federal civil-rights enforcement, first explicitly and later through coded appeals. The term is not a partisan invention. It was used, embraced, and explained by the strategy's own architects …
PHOTO: MARION S. TRIKOSKO, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (PUBLIC DOMAIN)
