One of the most cited articles online when discussing “The Southern Strategy” is the entry by L. Sue Baugh at Britannica.com. A process you may have encountered is that a defender of some of the misconceptions about the Republican Southern Strategy will head to Google. The first search result is Wikipedia, and if your counterpart has at least enough shame not to link to a Wikipedia page, our diligent researcher will choose the second Google result, this Britannica article. Britannica sounds legit, right? Proof by authority complete! Unfortunately, this article doesn’t carry much weight, containing no real evidence other than linking to other subject pages on Britannica.com. But even if we overlook this, the arguments presented are flawed enough to discredit the piece on their own merits. Let’s take a deeper look.

The very first “sentence” of the renowned Britannica.com article reads:

This is a clear partisan tell to Baugh’s bias, suggesting deviation from Democratic control as immoral while definitionally blind to any Democratic maintenance of that control. This definition, however biased it is, provides Baugh’s thesis, which she must prove: Did the Republicans subtly endorse racial segregation, racial discrimination, and the disenfranchisement of black voters?

Baugh gives a brief overview of political history prior to the 1960s, but it is mainly for background information and doesn’t address her thesis. Her first major claim about the Republican Southern Strategy was in regard to 1964, with Barry Goldwater: 

The first issue to be addressed is that this is a misrepresentation of Barry Goldwater. To imply that Goldwater was trying to exploit white resentment is to say you don’t understand Barry Goldwater. He continually pushed to persuade others that segregation was wrong, including supporting previous civil rights acts that he believed were more in line with the Constitution. He also believed the attorney general could do more to fight discrimination, and did not think everything regarding civil rights should be left to the states. 

Much of Goldwater's views were shaped by the plight of the American Indian. Goldwater gave more than 100 speeches on the subject at a time when it was not politically fashionable.¹ Goldwater became frustrated with the federal oversight of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. More often, they got in the way, and he was able to see more progress on the state or even personal level. 

Barry Goldwater was, in no way, an example of “subtly [endorsing] racial segregation, racial discrimination,” or “the disenfranchisement of black voters.” He spoke out to the opposite effect throughout his political career, including in 1964, and directly to southern audiences.

But the more pressing issue is the characterization of the broader trend. Baugh writes:

Goldwater was the obvious beneficiary of protest votes from the South, just as the South had led protest campaigns in the past (the Democratic Party did not even put Lyndon Johnson on the ballots in Alabama), and although Goldwater won five of the Deep South states, it proved to not reflect a trend.

Goldwater won Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. In the next six elections, covering twenty years, the results from these states fell into only two categories: They were either mostly lost by Republicans, or they were won by Republicans in years where they won in complete landslides.

1968: George Wallace wins four of the five states, Nixon wins South Carolina.
1972: Nixon wins every state in the nation except Massachusetts and Washington, DC.
1976: Carter wins all five of the states in question
1980: Reagan wins forty-four states, not including one of the five, Georgia. The other four states were some of Reagan's narrowest victories. 
1984: Reagan wins every state in the nation except Minnesota and Washington, DC
1988: Bush wins forty states
1992: The five states are split: three for Bush, two for Clinton

Simply going through the elections, a “southern strategy” doesn’t seem like a meaningful explanation for anything, especially considering that Republicans also won California every presidential election after 1964 until 1992. Apart from 1964, the South went Republican when almost every other state did, usually for very obvious reasons, not having anything to do with the ghost of racial segregation in the Deep South.

Baugh’s next example is Richard Nixon. In her single paragraph on Nixon, she manages to get nearly everything wrong. Let’s take this one sentence at a time:

Baugh mentions Kevin Phillips, but doesn’t provide any evidence, a quote, or an explanation. This probably works to her benefit, since most of the time the evidence surrounding Kevin Phillips is misrepresented. We will cover those examples in other articles, so for now, we’ll stick strictly with her brief but false claim. The “southern strategy” developed by Phillips was largely not used, according to Phillips himself in his book, or more obviously, in what the Nixon campaign actually promoted, which was often overtly targeted at black voters.²

Phillips' time at the Nixon administration started a few months before the 1968 election, which, as previously mentioned, saw Nixon lose the “Deep South” to George Wallace. Phillips' time on staff was brief, and he left in early 1970.³ It’s absurd to believe Republicans in the following decades were going back to a strategy articulated by Phillips when even Phillips abandoned the theory. This is most clearly proven by the Republican presidents that followed, continuing to make attempts to appeal to black voters. So, in no way can it be said that Phillips’ strategy “consolidated the Republican hold on the entire South.” 

Baugh continues:

The “code words” thesis falls apart on two fronts: the candidate’s overt record and the weakness of the examples themselves. A voter looking for subtle support for segregation would first have to ignore the candidate's numerous and explicit endorsements of civil rights, voting rights, and racial equality. The argument collapses further when the specific examples are scrutinized, which is why proponents of this theory rarely discuss Nixon’s statements in detail. When examined in context, his supposed “code words” often convey the opposite of the meaning that critics like Baugh imagine.

Here are some examples from Nixon:

Nixon wrote a syndicated column targeting Southern newspapers as part of his lead-up to the 1968 election. From a Nixon column dedicated to the topic of law and order: “From mob rule it is but a single step to lynch law and the termination of the rights of the minority.” Nixon added, “In short, if the rule of law goes, the civil rights laws of recent vintage will be the first casualties.⁴

The claim that Nixon was referring to “white southerners” when he used the phrase silent majority is a strange conspiracy which requires the writer and reader to not understand the basic nature of the 1968 and 1972 election. Nixon first used the phrase “silent majority” in response to the mounting anti-Vietnam War protests. The line was used in a television address on November 3, 1969, which was solely about the Vietnam War. While this was the first time Nixon used that exact phrase, he did use this general theme in his 1968 campaign, both in ads and in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. Nixon defined these “forgotten Americans,” very specifically, and he wasn’t targeting just “white southerners.” Here is the relevant section:

On to Baugh’s next sentence:

Conflating mandatory busing with “civil rights issues” and Nixon rejecting it as some kind of deference to racial segregation, once again, requires a basic misunderstanding of the nature of the issue. Nixon’s handling of mandatory busing demonstrates his focus on what was effective, peaceful, and what made sense. In one example, Nixon wanted children to finish out the school year, rather than be forced to switch schools in the middle of the year.⁵ Does this really count as straddling civil rights? Nixon’s record on desegregation speaks loudly through his results. There was more desegregation in southern schools under Nixon than by all other presidents combined.

Somehow, this still doesn’t pass the left-wing purity tests, and is nevertheless described as “slowing down.” 

Nixon indeed opposed forced busing, as most politicians, including democrats, did eventually. It simply did not make sense to force parents to send their children, sometimes long distances, to new schools just to force statistical integration. Nixon's proposed moratorium on forced busing overwhelmingly passed in the Senate 63-15, with support from both leading 1972 Democratic Party candidates, McGovern and Humphrey.

Baugh concludes her section on Nixon:

Baugh’s conclusion reveals the extent of her obvious bias. Her dismissive reference to “so-called ‘family values’” signals a clear prejudice, and her claim that appealing to Christian voters was a notable rightward shift ignores a constant of American politics. Every president in every American election has tried to appeal to Christian voters. Pointing out that Nixon also did is silly. 

Nixon did not move the party “further to the right” than the previous Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater. Nixon did not oppose women’s rights, nor did he capitulate on the issue. He signed Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. His administration boasted that they quadrupled the number of women appointed to senior government positions.⁶ Nixon did oppose what Baugh likely considered “gay rights,” but this wasn’t a major issue of the time, and Nixon’s position on the matter was probably near universal. 

The “right to abortion” was only just emerging after the Roe v. Wade decision, a ruling delivered by a court shaped by Nixon’s judicial appointments (which was likely not Nixon’s intention). The issue of abortion is, however, the closest Baugh comes to making a good point. Although the nation’s changing views on abortion did align the South more closely with the Republican Party, this development is distinct from, and does not aid her thesis of a racially motivated “Southern Strategy.”

In case you were curious, there was a Democratic president elected in 1976, named Jimmy Carter, that had a very clear “Southern Strategy,” who you can read about here.

In Baugh’s most egregious falsehood, she claims the following:

Reagan did not connect race to complaints about the “welfare queen.” His legitimate complaint was that some people were abusing the system, outright committing fraud to steal welfare. If you think this is strongly implying something about race, then maybe it’s you who’s racist. 

In reality, Reagan was actively trying to dispel stereotypes around welfare. He told a Mississippi audience:

Baugh’s central accusation that Republicans subtly endorsed segregation and disenfranchisement is presented without a shred of supporting evidence. An assertion of this magnitude, offered as authoritative history, demands proof, none is provided. Instead, the reader is asked to engage in an act of partisan mind-reading and dismissal by interpreting vanilla conservative principles as being motivated by definitionally evil forces.

It is a tale that ignores what was actually said and done, and instead relies on what the accuser thinks someone was thinking. This is not historical analysis; it is a conspiracy theory in search of a villain.