NewsMax.com Wires
Saturday, Feb. 24, 2001

Republicans insist the choice of that particular location was not intended to send a message, yet no alternative explanation has ever been suggested – after all, Philadelphia, Miss., is not a natural place to start a presidential campaign.

In contrast, George W. Bush used the Republican Convention of 2000 in Philadelphia, Pa., to send a very different message of inclusion and diversity. It was a standing joke that every person of color at the convention was on the stage at one point or another.

What explains the change of strategy between the two Philadelphias, or its apparent failure? Despite Bush's rhetoric of inclusion, he got the second-lowest percentage of the black vote (to Barry Goldwater's in 1964) of any Republican presidential candidate in American history.

The key to this contradiction is that Bush's campaign marked the end of the "Southern strategy" for Republicans.

The Southern Strategy Worked

Republicans no longer need a Southern strategy, because their Southern strategy worked. The South is now the base of the Republican Party. Sure of Southern support, Bush concentrated his campaign on winning the North, not the South.

"The "Southern strategy" was a phrase concocted by political analyst Kevin Phillips more than three decades ago, and it accurately described the political situation of those years. The South, once a bastion of the Democratic Party, was up for grabs in the years between 1948 and 1984. In the close elections of 1960, 1968 and 1976, the South provided the popular vote margin for the winners.

If one examines those three elections, one finds 19 states that always went Republican and nine that always went Democratic. The 19 Republican states were in the West, not the South – 15 of them were west of the Mississippi, and Virginia was the only Southern state in the lot. The Democratic states included New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and the largest Southern state, Texas.

California and Texas Trade Places

The great political change of the last two decades has been the movement of Texas to the Republicans and California to the Democrats.

In the political world from 1960 to 1980, the 22 states that changed hands included nine of the 11 Confederate states, and three border states, together with four states in the industrial Midwest.

The 22 states that changed hands included only three Western states, the border states of Delaware, Kentucky and Missouri, nine Southern states, four industrial Midwest states, and New Jersey, Connecticut and Maine.

In this world the South was the battleground. In the 17 elections from 1880 through 1944, only twice did the 11 Confederate states not vote as a block for the Democratic Party. Since then, a solid South has appeared only four times, all for Republicans: for Nixon and Reagan in their 49-state landslides, and for Bush last year and his father in 1988.

In fact, the last Northern Democratic candidate to win any Southern states was John Kennedy in 1960. In 2000, Al Gore became the first Southern Democratic nominee not to win any states in his own section.

Rarely have the 11 Southern states been necessary to provide the electoral margin for a candidate. In fact, in the entire post-Civil War period, the only candidates who required Southern electoral votes to overcome a loss in the rest of the country were Grover Cleveland (twice), Woodrow Wilson (once), Jimmy Carter in 1976 and George W. Bush last year.

After the Civil War

That wasn't what most people thought would be the case after the Civil War. After all, the Radical Republicans knew that the first effect of the abolition of slavery by the 13th Amendment would be a great increase in Southern representation in the Electoral College, because blacks would be counted fully instead of as three-fifths of a person. Therefore, they had to have a Southern strategy, else they would lose power to people whom they considered to be actively disloyal.

The first "Southern strategy" of the Republican Party was that of Reconstruction: It combined blacks with traditional highland whites to create a competitive political system. It took President Ulysses Grant to 53.5 percent of the Southern vote in 1872, the first election in which all the "disloyal" states voted again. In 1876, Rutherford Hayes drew 40.8 percent, and with some help from the counters, carried three Southern states and the presidency. Once the Compromise of 1877, withdrawing Northern troops from the South, was agreed to, this strategy sputtered to a halt. Republicans still could challenge in the South, and it wasn't until the failure of the "Force Bill" (to protect black voting) in 1890, that the Southern blacks were left to the mercies of local whites and were disenfranchised. Between 1880 and 1904, the Republicans in the South got between 35 percent and 40 percent of that section's vote (except in 1892, when the 16 percent for the Populists knocked Republicans down to 25 percent).

In these years the Southern share of the national vote declined slowly from 22 percent in 1872 to 16 percent in 1896. William McKinley's great victory in that year opened an era in which the Republican majority in the North was so great that Southern blacks weren't needed. The South disenfranchised its blacks and many poor whites quickly, with the result that a Southern vote of 2.3 million in 1896 was down to 1.35 million in 1904, falling from one-sixth to one-tenth of the national vote.

In all the elections from 1904 through 1948, New York alone outvoted the 11 states of the old Confederacy (which had near three times as many electoral votes). These states cast between 8.7 percent and 10.7 percent of the national vote, and the Republicans broke 30 percent of the section only in 1920 (35.2 percent, carrying Tennessee) and 1928 (47.7 percent, carrying five states).

The only important political role of the South in presidential elections came in 1912, when it provided the delegates to select Taft over Theodore Roosevelt in that year's Republican convention. (In the crucial roll call for chairman of the convention, Roosevelt's candidate beat Taft's by 449 to 359 in the 37 "Northern" states but lost the old Confederate states by 199 to 52). The gap between the economies of Mississippi and Connecticut a century ago was as great as the gap between those of Britain and Bulgaria. There wasn't much incentive to do anything about it, either.

There was no need for a Southern strategy in the 1896 system, because the Republicans won elections without the South. They occasionally supported anti-lynching bills, which were filibustered in the Senate, and appointed a few black placeholders. It was not until 1928 that the situation changed. In that year, Herbert Hoover rode the issues of prohibition and anti-Catholicism to carry five former Confederate states, with 62 of the 126 electoral votes of the section. Ironically, he failed to penetrate the Deep South – the six states Al Smith won in the South included all four of Strom Thurmond's 1948 states, all five of Goldwater's 1964 Southern states, and all five of George Wallace's 1968 states.

Another event of equal importance took place in that year – the first black in three decades was sent to Congress and he was the first Northern black, Oscar DePriest of Chicago. At the beginning of the century, more than 90 percent of American blacks lived in the South, but emigration northward was beginning to mount apace, and this pushed the race issue forward.

In response to these pressures, Herbert Hoover developed the first 20th century Southern strategy for the Republican Party.

See part 2: Southern strategies from Hoover through Reagan.

Analysis by UPI political analyst Jim Chapin, a former adviser to Mark Green, New York City's public advocate.

Copyright 2001 by United Press International. All rights reserved.