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So my name keeps coming up in my TL in connect with what Candace Owens said in relation to the Southern Strategy, so I think it is probably useful to put forth what I *actually* believe, since it has been several years. 1/
Most importantly, the Southern Strategy was very much real. This isn't something cooked up in the Princeton History Department to disparage conservatives. The GOP really did attempt to win over rural Southern whites by backing off civil rights protections. 2/
And it paid dividends. The *rural* South shifts in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and its in response to Democratic and Republican moves on Civil Rights. 3/
That said, I do think the narrative over the Southern Realignment(s) has gotten sort of lazy, and people are allowed to use shortcuts that cause them to gloss over important facts and nuances. 4/
Like, Nixon is a legitimately complex figure on civil rights, with sometimes contradictory impulses on school integration and affirmative action. It's beyond what can realistically be fleshed out on Twitter, but the nuances are genuine. 5/
Most egregiously though, even in peer reviewed academic journals, you'll see comments about the movement of Southern Whites into the Republican Party after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But this movement starts decades earlier. 6/
You can see it even in the 1920s, but as the South became wealthy and started to urbanize, it increasingly voted Republican. And as the Democrats liberalized on Civil Rights, the glue that held many of these wealthy voters in the Democratic Party disappeared. 7/
But the first Republican to carry the South was Ike in 1956, and Nixon came close in '60. Republicans almost won the 1962 Alabama Senate race. BUT BUT BUT none of this is to claim that the completion of the realignment was an organic event. 8/
They definitely "went hunting where the ducks were" to borrow Goldwater's phrase. My major point here is simply that there was a lot of buildup to what we saw in the 70s and 80s, and that the story of how the Rs went from 20% to 50% is just as important as 50% to 70%. /fin
