The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics

by Angie Maxwell, Todd Shields

The Southern Strategy was but one in a series of decisions the GOP made not just on race, but on feminism and religion as well, in what Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields call the "Long Southern Strategy."

The Southern Strategy is traditionally understood as a Goldwater and Nixon-era effort by the Republican Party to win over disaffected white voters in the Democratic stronghold of the American South. To realign these voters with the GOP, the party abandoned its past support for civil rights and used racially coded language to capitalize on southern white racial angst. However, that decision was but one in a series of decisions the GOP made not just on race, but on feminism and religion as well, in what Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields call the "Long Southern Strategy."

In the wake of Second-Wave Feminism, the GOP dropped the Equal Rights Amendment from its platform and promoted traditional gender roles in an effort to appeal to anti-feminist white southerners, particularly women. And when the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention became increasingly fundamentalist and politically active, the GOP tied its fate to the Christian Right. With original, extensive data on national and regional opinions and voting behavior, Maxwell and Shields show why all three of those decisions were necessary for the South to turn from blue to red.

To make inroads in the South, however, GOP politicians not only had to take these positions, but they also had to sell them with a southern "accent." Republicans embodied southern white culture by emphasizing an "us vs. them" outlook, preaching absolutes, accusing the media of bias, prioritizing identity over the economy, encouraging defensiveness, and championing a politics of retribution. In doing so, the GOP nationalized southern white identity, rebranded itself to the country at large, and fundamentally altered the vision and tone of American politics.

Genres: Politics, History, Nonfiction, American History, Race, Womens

560 pages, Hardcover

First published June 24, 2019

About the author

Angie Maxwell is the Director of the Diane Blair Center of Southern Politics and Society, an associate professor of political science, and holder of the Diane Blair Endowed Professorship in Southern Studies at the University of Arkansas. Maxwell is a Truman Scholar and received her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas. Her research and commentary have been featured in Henry Louis Gates’ Reconstruction on PBS and on MSNBC’s “The Reid Report” and “The Cycle.” Maxwell is the author of The Indicted South: Public Criticism, Southern Inferiority, and the Politics of Whiteness (UNC, 2014) which won the V. O. Key Award for best book in southern politics and the C. Hugh Holman Honorable Mention for best book in southern literary criticism. She is the co-editor of Unlocking V. O. Key, Jr. (Arkansas, 2011), The Ongoing Burden of Southern History (LSU, 2013), and The Legacy of Second Wave Feminism in American Politics (Palgrave, 2018), and editor of the new edition of Ralph McGill’s A Church, A School (South Carolina, 2012). Her recent articles have appeared in Southern Cultures, Presidential Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Black Studies, American Behavioral Scientist, Race and Social Problems, Politics, Groups, and Identities, Social Science Quarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, Vox, and Huffington Post. Her new book, The Long Southern Strategy will be published in June by Oxford University Press.

Reviews

[William Cooper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” is one of the more important stories in American politics in the last 60 years. It's little understood. This well-researched book helps.

The strategy exemplifies how party leaders (on both sides) strategically attract blocs of disparate voters with little regard for political principles or policy coherence. Many southern Democrats were angry after their party, led by President Lyndon Johnson, passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial segregation.

Nixon and the Republicans pounced on the opportunity.

Using thinly veiled racist rhetoric, they appealed to these southern voters. As author Ferrel Guillory explains, “In his 1968 campaign and afterward, Nixon used coded language, political symbolism and court interventions as signals to southern white voters.”

Maxwell and Shields explain how the effort focused not just on race but on feminism and religion, too.

It worked.

Nixon won two presidential elections with a larger Republican party behind him. And the Republicans, in turn, used their electoral wins to pass laws (like pro-business legislation) that mattered little to these former southern Democrats.

If you want to understand today's Republican party (to the extent that's possible) the Southern Strategy is a good place to start. This book helps explain the origins of the intense red-blue divide that so dominates contemporary American politics.

[Online-University of-the-Left · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book, although a sociological statistics mentality will help you get through the sections using data and surveys to prove their points. But it details the major shift in US politics in the late 1950s onward by studying Southern Identity and then breaking it down to three core features--clinging to racialized hierarchy, promoting 'Southern Belle anti-feminism and toxic masculinity, and finally, reinforces them both with biblical fundamentalist irrationatism. And one does not have to live in the South to have this identity, nor does every white Southerner fit the mold. Enough to explain the strength o the GOP in the South, and that if Trump hadn't come along, they would have invented him. Bottom line? We're in for long culture war as part of or politics, one that we require a new American narrative.

[Drew Reilly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was expecting this to be a sort-of history of the Southern Strategy. Instead, it was an academic paper that backs up all the longstanding beliefs associated with the Southern Strategy. It was incredibly well-written, and dense in the subject matter, but overall a fantastic read.

[Alex MacMillan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ten years ago at UW-Madison, I wrote an undergraduate political science thesis, "Democracy's Externalities and American Race Policy," relying upon much of the polling data and political science scholarship that this book references to. I checked this book out to get a refresher on what I learned from Professors Byron Shafer, David Canon, and Kathy Cramer, now updated with new research findings. This academic survey of a "Long Southern Strategy" cites to valuable hard data, but is marred by the author's hatred of Southern Whites, which biases her conclusions from said data.

I do not understand how the author can bear to live and work in a southern state. She consistently analyzes the political preferences of Southern Whites with dehumanizing language, of the clinical academic kind. You would think she is Jane Goodall, conducting an anthropological survey of zoo animals. Posts on her Twitter account fully take the mask off.

As a result of her utter contempt for Southern Whites, her book consistently seeks out the least-charitable interpretations of why Southern Whites would oppose her progressive policy preferences. Whenever faced with a reasonable center-right policy preference from the modern-day, the author leaps backward to a quotation or event from ancient history to allege that said preference is tainted or rooted in racism/misogyny etc... I do not deny the existence of the ugly side of GOP politics, or the influence of the reactionary far-right within that political coalition. However, other scholarship on southern partisan realignment does not categorically tar and feather the entire White South as benighted bigots.

Her "Long Southern Strategy" thesis, that the White South are all incorrigible racists, misogynists and theocratic fascists, and that their voting preferences are entirely derived from their evil ways, is ultimately a cartoonish thesis masked by academic language. Her writing takes as a given that the Democratic Party policy platform is 100% correct and unquestionable. More impartial scholarship acknowledges a continuum of policy preferences, and that that continuum is collapsed by our two-party system into a binary choice facing voters. Black and White voters in the South have such divergent policy preferences, especially after decades of economic growth in the region, that their preferences could no longer coexist within the Democratic Party coalition.

I think this book has some valuable chapters, but encourage anyone interested in the topic to read more even-handed scholarship alongside this book:

The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South

The Rational Southerner: Black Mobilization, Republican Growth, and the Partisan Transformation of the American South

Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South

What's Going On?: Political Incorporation and the Transformation of Black Public Opinion

Richard Nixon and the Quest for a New Majority

-12/22/23

[Bookworm · Rating 2 out of 5]

A tough but informative read about what it says on the cover: the long strategy in the US South to chase white voters. Authors Maxwell and Shields trace the change and shift of these voters from the Democratic to Republican through the long history and not through the lens of any one particular election or event or person, etc. Focusing on racism, dropping the Equal Rights Amendment on the part of the GOP to appeal to "traditional" gender roles and appealing very hard to the Christian Right, we see this shift that helped lead us to the political landscape of the US South today.

As I said, it was informative and there was a lot to learn but it was also difficult to get through. It's a data/stats-heavy look at history with some anecdotes and story-telling to give us the context of what was happening in the US as this shift occurred.

I'll admit, I was disappointed. I was eager to find something that was perhaps a little more digestable after 'The Rise of Southern Republicans' but this remained a tough read for me. It seemed like this book, along with 'Rise', would have been easier if taken in the context of a class focusing on this era or at least a section within a class looking at this particular political realignment.

Got this from the library and would recommend you consume it that way unless you have a deep interest in this subject, need it for a class, etc.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very long book about the "long Southern strategy," which involved the Republican party using racism and sexism to bring white Southerners into the voting bloc they are today, beginning with Ronald Reagan, sort of, but arguably beginning with the end of the Civil War. The book is kind of a slog, although a valuable slog from the standpoint of social science--like one long research paper after another, making the author's points, with charts and statistics and methodology spelled out. This makes the book valuable as a research document but difficult for the general reader, with a lot of redundancy. One thing that I didn't like, though, was the author's attitude toward religion. Although religious conservatives with motives more political than blessed have certainly manipulated religious people and organizations for their own ends, and Republican politicians have presented themselves as born again or otherwise devout Christians more for tactical than moral reasons--which is shameful--it is also clear that the author does not understand and even has contempt for some people with sincerely held religious beliefs. Faith is something that you have to experience to truly comprehend, but should not be the subject of nonbelievers' disrespect; the author tried to be objective, probably, but her heart just wasn't in it. That failing on her part is perhaps trivial compared to the racist and sexist oppressions she describes and documents, except that it seems to be a symptom of the direction the world is moving--a position that faith is based on ignorance and superstition and needs to be cured, whereas it is the manipulation of faith for political ends that needs to be cured, and the distinction is a great gulf fixed.

[Erik Champenois · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inspired by Jaquelyn Dowd Hall's article on "the long civil rights movement," which argues that the civil rights movement should be viewed as an expansive story lasting from the 1930s and in some days continuing today, Maxwell and Shields writes about "the long southern strategy" as not just a Nixon and Reagan era turn, but as a multidecade shift for the Republican Party. The book explains this long southern strategy as one that involved not just an appeal to southern racism, but also an appeal to southern sexism and southern religion.

This book is not a conventional history of the era, but rather an extensive social science research paper focused on analyzing data on national and southern opinions and voting behavior. The authors do contextualize this coverage historically but the focus is first and foremost on the data. The authors convincingly show that southern Republicans exhibit more racist, sexist, and religiously fundamentalist opinions than do other Americans. They argue that the GOP turn to the South started with diminished support for civil rights and racially coded language in the Nixon era, but that southern support was not fully secured until these messages were supplemented by appeals to anti-feminism and the Religious Right. They take their story up to the time of Trump, showing clearly how all three strands of the southern turn have interacted in support of Trump.

In the process, the authors expose three different "myths" about American political history - the myth of post-racial America, the myth of the gender gap, and the myth of the social conservative. The falseness of the first myth is fairly obvious to anyone who follows up on current events and the authors clearly show how Trump supporters and southern Republicans exhibit higher racial resentment scores than other groupings. The second myth they expose is that there is a gender gap in politics, with women being more inclined to support Democrats and men more inclined to support Republicans. The authors clearly show that, while this holds true at the national level, it does not hold true for the south - where women are just as conservative as men. As a result, people shouldn't have been surprised that Hillary Clinton did not get more women to vote for her in the south in 2016. The third myth is the idea that social conservatives are focused only on moral issues - with the authors clearly showing how the Republican dominance of the South has made the South not just conservative on social issues but on several non-social issues as well. The affiliation of the Religious Right with the Republican Party has in some ways made the religious right more committed to being politically and ideologically Republican than to Christian ideals and morality.

The book, per its subtitle, is specifically focused on white voters in the South, and doesn't therefore look at the views and history of Black voters in the South. It also doesn't look into other values and narratives (positive or negative) impacting the identity of conservatives or the Republican Party today. Perhaps best read with other supplemental books for those wanting a more holistic understanding, this remains an important book and a must-read for anyone wanting an in depth understanding of the southern turn of the Republican Party.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whew, this was a ride. Political science with a substantial base in the history of the South, especially the relationship between Southern evangelicals and the Republican party beginning with Goldwater (really) and more officially with Nixon through to the present day.

I suspect my conservative friends and family would be offended by some of the offerings here, and I would understand that. To them, I will say I read every word of this text with a critical mind and kept their viewpoints (and right to have them) constantly in mind. With my own deep Southern heritage, my Southern Baptist grandparents, and conservative friends and family in mind, I have to admit this book felt like it got nearly everything right about the politics of the modern South.
Maxwell and Shields have written a comprehensive book that is extremely academic and very dense. The data is there, and the visualization presents substantial backing to nearly every point the authors make. I think the problem for a conservative reader of this book will be the lifting of the veil. In the South, so much is presented to us as traditional, to the point that sometimes I thought SEC rivalry football games had been going on since before Noah and the flood. In the South, you aren't supposed to know there's been a strategy to change perspectives and voting habits slowly. You are supposed to think it was always this way. That it was never about the defense of the patriarchy, but simply family values. And, as this book stresses, you are supposed to assume that the SBC was always extremely conservative and never had moderates or even liberal wings. Even suggesting that the SBC had moderates in the past has probably made my grandparents turn over in their graves.

My critiques are minor. First, Maxwell & Sheilds often forget the South is more than white evangelical conservatives. Reading this, you can get the impression that other Southerners exist, especially people of color or anyone who lives in a city. That said, the authors would tell me, "look at the title; this book isn't about them," so I get it. Second, and this is petty, but as a historian, this feels too soon sometimes. That's how political science is, but this is really a first draft of history. Nobody knows where this goes from here. Even if we can assume, and in the South, we would probably be right.

Overall, this is a great book, but I fear it will be simply condemned as "academic jargon" and filed away like so many academic texts. Conservatives won't read it because it will threaten them to see the veil lifted, and liberals won't read it because they will never read a book that talks about a segment of the population and a region they don't want to deal with. Still, Maxwell and Shields have produced something important, even if unread by the masses.

[Mad Malic · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book 2 of 65
~~~
The Long Southern Strategy
Written: by Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields
Page Count: 540 (includes notes, index, and appendix)
~~~
“Colorblindness is a dog whistle,” Ian Haney Lopez writes. “It invokes a higher principle, yet also communicates sympathy for supposedly imperiled whites.”
~~~
Rating:

🃏🃏🃏.9 (but could easily be 5)

*I came to this rating as many of my initial thoughts came justified in the text but convoluted regurgitated political jargon made me feel like a student of political science...🤮
~~~
The Long Southern Strategy is the foremost of the now Republican blueprint for winning an election. Written by two brilliant and skilled researchers, this book will grip you in ways that will create anger, resentment, and sadness. The diabolical means by which our government can manipulate a people is astonishing.

At the core, this book exquisitely explains how the once Democratic Party is now the Republican party; however, the real message is subtle. The real message I caught was the long-winded explanation of how our, and I do say, “our” government has, for years, perpetuated sexism, classism, and racism all for political gain.

In so many words, our government used the southern ideals and culture as a political weapon. Nixon, Ford, Regan, Trump, and many more politians have used this strategy to win elections, and this continues until this very day.
~~~
There was so much to unpack, so many emotions felt reading this, and at times I felt too angry to cry. I commend the writers of this book, two people who see something sorely wrong, stepped outside of their culture—their known privilege and wrote the truth.

It takes curiosity to seek the truth and the severity of empathy to write that which everyone fears

[Kim Hill Markland · Rating 5 out of 5]

For the past several years I have been a bit perplexed by the political choices of my fellow Southerners, and more particularly my family and friends. It seems to me that they continually vote against their own interest, believe wild conspiracy theories, and show a general distrust of legitimate sources. They are staunchly Republican and view Democrats as evil. All in all it has grown down right ugly and gotten even uglier over recent years. My world view is so different from theirs. Then I happened upon this book. It is written by two University of Arkansas employees. Angie Maxwell is the Director of the Diane D. Blair Center of Southern Politics and Society and Todd Shields is Dean of the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. The University of Arkansas is my alma mater and the subject matter seem interesting, so I put it on my reading list. The book is very good. The writing is superb. The subject matter is well researched and well documented. In a nutshell Maxell and Shields describe how the Republican party, beginning during the Nixon/Goldwater years, capitalized on the racist, anti-feminist, and religious tendencies of white southerners to turn the South from blue to red. And it worked in spades. This is not a book that the average reader will enjoy. It is very detailed, almost text bookish. So, I probably won't recommend it to most of my friends. But I got a lot out of it and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys getting down in the trenches and wants to learn about this subject.

[Dave Stone · Rating 3 out of 5]

50% took a break, never got back to it
This is a very in depth book. It is information dense.
It doesn't just gloss over what happened, but gets into the who said what, and when- while giving you the background on what that same person was saying about similar issues behind closed doors or at other points in their career.
-So this is what I gleaned from the first half: The Republican party saw a chance to pick up a few million votes if they changed their platform to pander to angry white southern voters. This changed them, and that changed their voters, which changed them further, which changed their voters further. This has been a dark downward spiral even before FOX news entered the picture.
Two things kept me from finishing this book. #1. It's depressing if you give a damn about Democracy and human rights. #2. I think I can work out how it ends without watching the whole train wreck.
I was engrossed in this book, but it is so much, I just couldn't keep going non-stop. Some guys saw the chance to maximize their power at the expense of the rights and freedoms of American citizens. ...if those American citizens where of a color, or religion, or sexual orientation that angry white southern voters could be whipped up against. That is a Faustian bargain made over and over again, day by day and hour by hour and the net anger and misery has had a (are you shocked?) negative effect on America.
So, yeah. It bums me out. I need to know this in a general way but this is a big book and it goes on and on and I just couldn't make it.

[Caleb Lagerwey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was more about the political and social science research behind the Southern Strategy than a history of the Southern Strategy itself. Perhaps more investigation on my part before reading it would have helped, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Maxwell and Shields offer copious amounts of data to expand the traditional Southern Strategy story (i.e., that racism and resistance to civil rights caused the South to shift into the Republican fold from 1964-2000s) to also include sexism (i.e., opposition to the ERA) and fundamentalism (i.e., the conservative takeover of the SBC in the 1970s-1980s). While the racial story is more well known--I'm still looking for a book-length treatment of that--adding in sexism and fundamentalism was a welcome and logical addition. While the authors are clearly not conservative fundamentalists themselves, they were about as fair as outside social scientists can be, and they provided the data to back up their claims. I recommend this for students of political history, for those seeking to understand why women and poor voters often vote against their self-interest, especially in the South, and for anyone wanting more background on the 2016 Trump victory.

[Jordan Berg · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want to understand politics today, what led to this moment and how to contextualize how we end up with Trump, this is the book. This is one of the best books about politics I have read in a while.

"The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics" - Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields

It tackles the way that the triple institutions of White Supremacy, Patriarchy, and faux Christianity work together to create the Republican politics we see today.

In a lot of ways it says what many of us know, but what is different is that it gives a lot of scientific rigor to it.

This book is filled with studies and sited other works that give more than context but facts to back up these truths we know. Really important and a great read.

[Tony · Rating 3 out of 5]

Phew. This one is packed with good history and statistics, but it really drags on. The research is solid, but the writing gets wordy and repetitious. The book makes good use of charts to display much of the statistical data, but wherever there is a chart, go ahead and just skip the couple pages of commentary which just rehash exactly what the chart shows you. Even the final "conclusion" chapter is 27 pages (with more charts!).
It's a solid body of work, but it is difficult to finish in one go.

[Fraser Sherman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Picked this up for the sexism section, but while it has some good quotes and statistics, overall it's stuff I already know, though backed up by lots more polls. I decided not to continue to the other sections (race and religion). That said, this is more a mismatch of reader/book than a flaw in the authors' work — though it is very dry and number-crunchy.

[Douglas · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recommend this book to anyone that is interested in American politics. It's full of details and therefore it's a good source for facts and figures about race, religion, and gender and the narrow parameters that conservatives hold and to what extent they will go to keep the country stagnated in antebellum beliefs.

[Martha · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book really helped me understand todays politics and the modern Republican Party. Ms. Maxwell's conclusions are backed up with a wealth of statistical data that may be hard to consume, but does convince the reader that she has done ample research.

If you have ever wondered why people in Iowa fly the Confederate flag, this book is for you.

[Louisa Sholar · Rating 4 out of 5]

v good for polisci people! basically read this as a text that helps highlight the culture I grew up in in an empirical way (a loooot of public opinion poll analysis). 4 stars only because it was dense but good luck understanding American politics or the South without a firm grasp of the evangelical Christianity/racism/anti-feminism trifecta Maxwell identifies

[Cathy]

I didn't rate it because it turned out to not really be intended for me as a general audience reader. It's very academic, with tons of statistics and charts. I skimmed as much as I could. It seems very informative, just not fun to read.

[Philip · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating account of the rise of the religious right in America. It's incredibly important and I would strongly encourage anyone with an interest in that topic or the current state of US politics to add it to their reading list.

[Mills College Library]

324.72097 M4651 2019

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good, but prepare to read a long, academic paper. They do an excellent job of making their case- it is a book I need to own to reference & puts the 2016 election into greater perspective for me.

[Chris Clevenger · Rating 1 out of 5]

Seriously

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

required reading

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lotta data that bogged the audiobook down.

[Rhonda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eye-opening!

[Zach Waldis · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thorough and well researched analysis and history, though it underplays economics.

[Nick]

Excellent work on the topic. This is a very stats heavy read so be prepared for that. Actually, I found the focus on quantitative data to make for a more compelling conclusion. However the authors do a good job explaining the findings if you don't want to worry about p values. If you are interested in this subject matter, this is a great read.

[Daddio · Rating 5 out of 5]

The story of the Republican party's embrace of Southern racism and evangelical Christianity that has created one of the most solid voting blocs ever.

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

How the GOP harnessed the the trifecta of racism, misogyny and Christianity to overtake the South. Excellent writing backed up with statistics. Not biased, just factual. Really enjoyed it.