Donald Trump’s Southern Strategy
The Southern Strategy is a Republican electoral strategy designed to increase political support among white voters by appealing to their racism and bigotry. Likewise, the Trump administration’s electoral approach has adopted the same divisive ideology — which has been quite useful thus far. By playing on those same racial tensions, Trump has been successful in driving a wedge between rural white voters and people of color.
As I’ve discussed many times in my work, the racially-charged, divisive approach to politics that we see today isn’t new. Much of the language that is a constant in our society became popularized with the Southern Strategy employed by Republicans in the 1960s. It’s not hard to notice the similarities in the rhetoric as the motivations behind the rhetoric are also similarly clear.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the civil rights movement and the dismantling of many Jim Crow laws deepened the existing racial tensions in much of the Southern United States — later spreading among rural voters nationally. At the time, Republicans such as Senator Barry Goldwater and then-presidential candidate Richard Nixon developed region-specific strategies that contributed to the political realignment of a large portion of white conservative voters who had traditionally supported the Democratic Party. It also helped push the Republican party further to the right. A push…
