Nixon was fiercely criticized for this approach in 1968, but nonetheless won the election. Critics argued the language used in this strategy was a thinly veiled appeal to racists and an ugly response to the successes of the civil rights movement.

Nixon’s campaign put a heavy emphasis on law and order and states’ rights to attract white voters concerned about racial integration. The southern strategy was the plan used effectively by Nixon to increase voting among white voters in the south. “I think this is what he did in 2016 – he’s just becoming more blatant and open of who he is and what he’s doing,” Wright said. Wright pointed to when neo-Nazis marched through Charlottesville and the president defensively said there were “very fine people” both among the marchers and the counter-marchers. He’s making a political calculus that by stoking the worst parts of the American psyche that he can somehow gain political leverage from that,” said Isaac Wright, a Democratic strategist who specializes in rural campaigns and southern voters. Yet as tensions over police and protests have increased across America, Trump has increasingly made these arguments the centerpiece of his campaign in the closing months of the election. It’s not a carbon copy, and the president has mixed this angle with other pitches to voters. With such rhetoric, the president is taking a page or two out of the 1960s “southern strategy”: the playbook Republican politicians such as Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater used to rally political support among white voters across the south by leveraging racism and white fear of people of color.īut Trump’s own version of the southern strategy is an updated one for 2020. And Trump has also called the BLM movement a “symbol of hate”.

Why the southern strategy is fake