Political Parties, Geography, and Demographics: The Old Days and the New

Painting with a big brush is sloppy, but sometimes it helps to sort things out. Let's look at the major political parties in the old days and today.

The New Deal coalition of FDR pasted together liberal forces rooted in the Northeast, centered in his home state of New York, and southern, white conservatives who had inherited a dislike of the "Bloody Shirt" Republicans tracking back to the "War of Northern Aggression."

The mid-Twentieth Century GOP contained two wings. One was conservative on matters of foreign, social, and economic policy and was rooted in the mid-west. Its most prominent spokesman was Senator Robert "Mr. Conservative" Taft, of Ohio. Its values had been largely embraced by the 1936 Republican presidential candidate, Alf Landon, of Kansas. With the disastrous electoral loss of that year, a more moderate wing of the Party emerged ascendant, accepting most of FDR's innovative policies, such as Social Security, unemployment compensation, and a minimum wage. The presidential candidates of the 1940s and 1950s, Tom Dewey (1944,1948)and Dwight Eisenhower (1952, 1956) reflected that ideology.

But both the northern/liberally dominated coalition of FDR and the moderate domination of the New York based GOP were fragile and open to challenge. Within the Democratic ranks, fissures broke out during the 1948 campaign of FDR's successor, Harry Truman, when South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond bolted the party and led the short-lived "Dixiecrats" in revolt. The southern Democrats were deeply disturbed over the northern, liberal emphasis on civil rights and what they derogatorily labeled "social engineering"--a panoply of policies which reached into and interfered with their personal lives.

Many conservative Republicans, too, were unhappy with what they saw as their moderate wing's cozying up too closely with the National Democrats. Arizona's senator, Barry Goldwater led the revolt in 1964 with his clarion call for "A Choice, Not an Echo!" While the nation appeared unready for the "Choice" and he carried only five states, including his own, in the general election against LBJ, tellingly, all four of the other states were located in the deep south.

At the same time many pundits were proclaiming the GOP's demise, a young Goldwaterite, Kevin Phillips, was convinced that his Republican Party could rise again if it made some basic changes. After surveying the political landscape, Phillips noted that the most volatile section of the nation was the deep and outer South, the eleven states of the old Confederacy. His reasoning, simply put was this: Many Republicans in the early 1960s had been opposed to the civil rights movement, and particularly to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 because they envisioned newly enfranchised Blacks as inexorably voting Democratic, thus strengthening the opposition party. But Phillips put a different slant on it. He argued that the Dixiecrats had been a "way station" for disaffected Democrats in 1948, and that as Goldwater later demonstrated, they were now ready to change party allegiance, if the Republicans played their cards right.

Rather than lamenting the growth of Black voting strength in the South, Republicans should encourage it. His reasoning was fourfold. First, since Blacks did not constitute more than about 25% of the population in any southern state, and often much less, they could not muster a majority in any of those states. Second, as Blacks increased their voting strength, they would gradually take control of the state Democratic Party apparatus. Third, their ascendancy in the Party would leave the traditional, dominant, white Democrats with nowhere to turn--except the Republican Party. Fourth, the Republicans should play down civil rights and "social engineering" in order to win over that crucial bloc of voters. Finally, he reasoned that if the South fell into the Republican column, it would tip the party scales and create what he called "The Emerging Republican Majority," the title of his later book. In 1967, he took his plan to Richard Nixon's New York law partner, John Mitchell, who was captivated by Phillips' ideas. He, in turn, sold Nixon on them, and when Nixon ran in 1968, with Mitchell as his campaign manager (later attorney general), the Phillips plan became known as "the southern strategy."

Thus, the stage was set for 1980, and the coming of the conservative Ronald Reagan, who capitalized on the Phillips groundwork and rode the backs of "Reagan Democrats" to victory. By the end of his eight years, the once "Solid South" had become a bastion of Republican Party strength.

Jumping ahead to today, it may be argued that the "southern strategy" which worked so well for the Republicans in the late Twentieth Century was ill-fated because it was based on the false notion of a permanent non-white minority. Where once, in the 1960s, roughly one out of every eleven Americans was non-white, today, particularly with the sharp rise in the Hispanic population, that number is one-third. Indeed, by 2050, it is projected that whites will no longer be a majority at all! How revealing it is that all of the original GOP candidates this year were white men, whereas the two "finalists" in the Democratic Party are a woman and a black man. Perhaps the time has come for a new, more inclusive strategy.