When encountering a lazy defender of the myths surrounding the Southern Strategy, they will sometimes opt to spam links, accompanied by the line “this is well documented.” But, embarrassingly, their links are often to Students of History, Britannica, or, if they are especially without shame, Wikipedia. If nothing else, let this be a demonstration of why you shouldn’t use Wikipedia on contentious topics.

The Wikipedia page on the Southern Strategy is a very long abomination, and it would be difficult to address every problem, but we will start our response with the first sentence, along with examples provided that ostensibly support this primary claim. The opening sentence reads:

They commit the classic bias on the subject, defining it as if there was no Democratic “Southern strategy,” as we’ve covered in more depth elsewhere. But even aside from that, this first sentence is not substantiated throughout the rest of the page, nor in its citations. Unfortunately, many people will only read the opening paragraph, possibly only the first sentence, and assume there is meaningful support for the assertion.

First, let’s go through the three citations attached to this opening claim, which should give you an idea of the quality of citations in general.

This citation is to a New York Times interview of Kevin Phillips in May 1970, soon after Phillips left his short stint with the Nixon administration.¹ In the interview, Phillips gives his analysis on everything from wishing the GOP would drop the “dead horse” of laissez-faire economics, to what he called the “catastrophe” of Nixon’s presidential victory, where Phillips viewed millions of dollars as being wasted turning what should have been a certain victory into a near defeat. But the section in question, which is quoted further down on the Wikipedia page, is his commentary on “Negroes and the G.O.P.”  

The most direct implication from his statement is that more black voters on the Republican side may do more harm than good, due to white voters being driven away. This allows us to fully verify that this strategy was not used. This should already have been obvious from his derision of the campaign as a “catastrophe.” Additionally, the cited article itself says Phillips's ideas “did not prevail” in the atmosphere of the 1968 campaign. But the definitive proof that Phillips’ implied advice was not followed was the campaign material itself. Since Phillips' analysis was that Nixon should not aim to add black voters to the Republican side, then the proof that this strategy wasn’t used, is the Nixon campaign continuing to target black voters in every election.

Fun comparison:
In a strategy that played an enormous role in unraveling the civil rights movement, Lyndon Johnson explained to Bill Moyers, on tape on August 7th 1964, how he was going to retain the Southern border states for the 1964 election: “It can’t do us a bit of good to seat them [The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (integrated)]; nothing good can come of it. We’ve already got the n***** vote. We’ve already got the liberal vote. But we’ve got a fighting chance in Texas.” We’ll explore this particular context at length in the near future.

In this citation, Dan T. Carter says that Nixon “sought to evolve a political strategy that would bring Wallace voters into the Republican Party yet would not make Nixon appear to capitulate to the darker side of the third-party movement.”²

This is not an example that Republicans were “appealing to racism against African Americans,” as it is Dan T. Carter making a statement, and not even a particularly definitive statement.

One can, for example, try to appeal to Wallace voters through the shared view of anti-communism, or anti-crime, or anti-drugs, or any number of other appeals. If Nixon was looking at Southern voters, these voters are likely to agree with Nixon on a number of the biggest issues of the day, and the absolute most needlessly dangerous strategy would be for Nixon to try to appeal to them on issues surrounding racism, since it would cost him voters in every other region.

This was specifically addressed within the Nixon administration. Speechwriter William Safire advised Nixon in a memo against going after the percentage of Wallace voters that were “hard-line racists,” saying “we can’t get these people, and we should forget them,” to which Nixon responded, “excellent analysis,” and “very perceptive.”³

Carter’s use of the phrase in saying that Nixon would form a strategy “yet would not make Nixon appear to capitulate to the darker side” [emphasis added] may be intended to imply that Nixon wanted to appeal to this darker side but simply did not wish to appear to do so. However, Carter neither makes this clear nor provides any evidence.

This quote is not evidence of appeals to racism. It’s an innocuous statement, itself without citation, by Dan T. Carter, that Nixon sought Wallace voters without wanting to appear racist. Carter does provide a citation in the preceding paragraph, which still doesn’t support the claim that appears on the Wikipedia page, but could be misinterpreted to that effect. Carter states:

From the way it is presented, one might think that Carter is citing an actual poll. In the source, The Real Majority, page 182-183, the authors query what might have happened if Wallace was not on the ballot, stating that there are mixed opinions on whether Nixon or Humphrey would have won. The cited authors, Scammon and Wattenberg, come down on the side that Nixon would have won:

Is this an honest portrayal from Dan T. Carter? He describes what are clearly broad estimations as “the most salient figures that emerged following the 1968 election.” Why does Carter change the way the figures are presented, making them sound more refined? He says “slightly more than three of every five in the North would have voted for Nixon,” but that’s not what his citation says. They said it would break down to “roughly” 60-40. Did Carter just invent the “slightly more” part to make it seem more like a legitimate measurement?

This is not splitting hairs; it is likely a deliberate manufacturing of precision where none exists. Misrepresenting a rough guess as a scientific-sounding fact to strengthen a partisan narrative is bad history. It does not speak well for Dan T. Carter.

It also might interest our Wikipedia readers that in The Real Majority, Scammon and Wattenberg address the “Southern Strategy” charge against Nixon directly and unambiguously:

This Dan T. Carter citation is a clear example of how a myth becomes respected mainstream history. The process begins with a subtle distortion—a "rough guess" altered into a "salient figure." It is complete when the name of a source is stamped as a seal of approval on a conclusion that the source itself explicitly denounces as "preposterous."

Fun comparison:
If you’re one to assume appealing to George Wallace voters is de-facto evidence of racist intent, then consider that Democrats, in every election that followed 1968 for the next 12 years, very directly tried to appeal to Wallace voters, using Wallace himself to do it.

The third citation attached to the opening claim is from Taylor Branch’s book, Pillar of Fire.⁴ The citation is for page 242, initially we couldn’t find what this citation could be referring to. The page does not cover any strategies in the South. Our best guess is that the citation is referring to a brief discussion about California Proposition 14:

If this is what the citation is meant to be referring to, then once again, the citation does not even support the claim. This is not evidence of a Republican Party strategy targeting “white voters in the South by appealing to racism against African Americans.” On top of being irrelevant, the claim about Reagan is also false. Reagan did not support Proposition 14.⁵

This exact citation, Pillar of Fire, page 242, is used two other times on the page, both having to do with states’ rights: 

The citation also has no relevance to these claims, and there is no mention of states' rights on that page. Do Wikipedia editors just throw in random citations to stack the reference section and make it seem more scholarly, because it has the opposite effect when the citations are this bad. For those who think we must be missing something, you can read the entire page in question under the notes section.

After examining the citations for the very first sentence, any reasonable observer should be done taking the Wikipedia article seriously. The rest of the page is filled with points of the same caliber. Let’s run through some examples that are meant to coincide with the opening claim.

Another sign of desperation is when people turn to a speech by Ken Mehlman to the NAACP as evidence of a Southern strategy. The Wikipedia page states: “In 2005, Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman formally apologized to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for exploiting racial polarization to win elections and for ignoring the black vote.” 

And here is the direct quote from Mehlman:

The nature of this statement is clear: He was trying to reach out to black voters. One of the primary purposes of his speech was to promote an initiative to spread information on all the things Republicans have done for black Americans on the GOP website, called “Lincoln’s Legacy.” The preceding statements were a list of accomplishments from Republicans. This quote was only a caveat to the larger point, merely granting that there had been “some” Republicans in the past who exploited racial divisions. He did not specify Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr., or anyone. If Mehlman was thinking of them, he would be wrong. He was not admitting to something he did personally, nor revealing some secret information only available to Republican chairmen. This is not evidence of any kind. It’s just one Republican’s attempt to reach out to black voters by “admitting,” in a very unspecified manner, that not every Republican has always been perfect. And this is seriously presented as evidence?

The most germane part of this paragraph is the idea that there were “surface” appeals that were standard conservatism–smaller federal government–but then there was a “less [public]” argument against the civil rights movement. We really don’t know what that could mean, and following the citations doesn’t provide any more clarity. 

Joseph Alsop is exactly who the left should avoid citing when discussing the southern strategy, because it makes clear that the pejorative version of the term “Southern strategy” started as an unhinged partisan attack. Wikipedia says “as documented by reporters…” as if Alsop had some inside scoop. His inside scoop was that he was friends with John Kennedy and Nelson Rockefeller, so he went after their foremost rival, Barry Goldwater. Alsop gives no evidence, slings baseless accusations, all while recommending his friend Nelson Rockefeller to top the Republican ticket instead of Goldwater. But even aside from that, the Alsop piece makes no argument or explanation for a “less public” argument against civil rights. 

The citation of Arthur Krock’s article in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram is even more puzzling. This article reports on a debate between two Republican student groups, one made up of graduates from Harvard and the other from the University of Pennsylvania. It’s hard to articulate how meaningless this is, and on top of that, the student groups don’t even say anything particularly incendiary. The more liberal group was worried that the Republican Party would become segregationists in the South, losing any chances of winning nationally, and the more conservative group was less worried, and thought that mere conservatism, without segregation, would prevail. 

Neither of these citations supports the claim attached to them. This is apparently the Wikipedia standard. There are two more citations for this claim, but both are secondary sources that are simply pointing back to the same kind of nonsense we are already covering.

One of my favorite parts of the Wikipedia page is the random quote by Lyndon Johnson, which has no relevance to the surrounding information, but is there just for innuendo. That’s always the mark of real scholarship. Although it isn’t relevant to the main argument, we had to point it out as a demonstration of the schizophrenic nature of the page.

If this is somehow meant to be relevant to Goldwater’s strategy, which the surrounding paragraphs are about, then the notion is ridiculous. There is no conceivable way Goldwater can be described as wanting to pick the pockets of poor whites and trying to convince them that they are better than blacks.

Interestingly, the quote bears a striking resemblance to a quote by Martin Luther King Jr. 

The Johnson version of the quote was actually a second-hand account from Bill Moyers, attempting to remember something that Johnson told him decades prior. It’s possible that Moyers was misremembering the quote or had forgotten the context, but the MLK version of the quote had a very specific context. In his speech, MLK was talking about the analysis of historian C. Vann Woodward, chronicling how Jim Crow was born out of a reaction to the populist movement before the turn of the century. When the populist movement united poor whites with blacks in the South, the rich Southern Democrats, in an attempt to split the movement, created narratives to pit them against each other. The lineage of the Southern Democratic aristocracy led directly to Lyndon Johnson, not his Republican rivals.

This claim has no citation. It also happens to be false, according to everyone who was there. As far as we can tell, it was a biased assumption that never had evidence, that is routinely repeated by historians too remiss and just assume it has merit due to the fact that it is repeated. We wrote a whole article on it.

This is another dishonest portrayal. Nixon was not opposed to school desegregation, but he was opposed to forced busing. There is nothing nefarious about that. The vast majority of the country, including Democrats, came to be against forced busing. According to the citation, the “euphemism” that Dent wanted Nixon to use was “freedom of choice,” but it is not argued that this is somehow a racist appeal. What Nixon promoted was that parents should be able to choose where to send their kids. This stance is both against forced busing, but also against forced segregation. This reflected Nixon’s overall theme of trying to position himself against the fringes.

One of the largest block quotes on the Wikipedia page is of the classic Atwater Abstraction, yet it still omits enough of the quote to distort its meaning. We’ve written on this, and it continues to be one of the best examples of pure cognitive dissonance. There are many on the left that simply must believe that a Republican strategist secretly admitted that when Republicans say “tax cuts,” they really mean to say the n-word. What becomes clear from listening to the omitted parts of the quote, as well as the rest of the forty-minute interview, is that Atwater was continuously making the point that racism was a dead issue. In the infamous section quoted, he is playing through a hypothetical scenario (which is clear from him saying “Here's how I would approach that issue as a statistician or a political scientist, or as a psychologist, which I'm not…”) to demonstrate that even if Republicans were speaking in code words, it would mean the whole issue would be becoming so abstract that it only shows how much racism is a dead issue. He was not confessing to anything, and repeatedly says Reagan did not make any appeals to racism.

The paragraph on Wikipedia for this often-cited Neshoba Fair speech is oddly balanced, relatively speaking. Any unbiased reader would conclude that the accusation of Reagan’s racism in the speech is absurd. We’ve also written extensively on the topic, and made the case even more clear:

Wikipedia is fairly sloppy in its paragraph on the Willie Horton ads, even attributing them to Atwater and the Bush campaign, which did not even make the Willie Horton ad that is described (showing his mugshot).

It’s a very clear example of how the accusation of a “Southern strategy” stems from desperation and has no basis in reality. We’ve covered this issue as well:

Any honest examination of the article's foundational claims reveals a systemic rot. This is not a case of cherry-picking weak examples; the intellectual failure begins with the very first sentence and its supporting citations. After going zero-for-three on its opening sources, the article has forfeited any claim to serious consideration.

Perhaps a defense is that Wikipedia is a "good starting point" or a useful "aggregator of sources." But this utterly collapses if the starting point is facing the opposite direction of the evidence. The sources are not merely flawed; they are fraudulent in their application, either disconnected from the claims they allegedly support or, as we have seen, directly refuting them.

This intellectual bankruptcy explains a peculiar dynamic of any debate on the subject. Proponents of this myth demonstrate no confidence in their own evidence. When a source is exposed as fraudulent, they do not defend it; they simply move on to the next, hoping a sheer volume of falsehoods will create the illusion of a case.

This is a myth that mistakes the appearance of being sourced as more important than the integrity of the source itself.

The Wikipedia page on the Southern Strategy is not simply a flawed entry. The article is not a resource to be corrected; it is a case study in how partisan mythology and laziness can achieve the veneer of consensus. It is an indictment of the subject's arguments and particularly of those who rely on it.