In 1980, Republican candidate Ronald Reagan made a much-noted appearance at the Neshoba County Fair. His speech there contained the phrase “I believe in states’ rights” and was cited as evidence that the Republican Party was building upon the Southern Strategy again. Reagan’s campaigns used racially coded rhetoric, making attacks on the “welfare state” and leveraging resentment towards affirmative action. Dan Carter explains how “Reagan showed that he could use coded language with the best of them, lambasting welfare queens, busing, and affirmative action as the need arose”.
During his 1976 and 1980 campaigns, Reagan employed stereotypes of welfare recipients, often invoking the case of a “welfare queen” with a large house and a Cadillac using multiple names to collect over $150,000 in tax-free income. Historian Joseph Aistrup described Reagan’s campaign statements as “seemingly race neutral”, but explained how whites interpret this in a racial manner, citing a Democratic National Committee funded study conducted by Communications Research Group. Though Reagan did not overtly mention the race of the welfare recipient, the unstated impression in whites’ minds were black people and Reagan’s rhetoric resonated with Southern white perceptions of black people.
Aistrup argued that one example of Reagan field-testing coded language in the South was a reference to an unscrupulous man using food stamps as a “strapping young buck”. When informed of the offensive connotations of the term, Reagan defended his actions as a nonracial term that was common in his Illinois hometown, but Reagan never used that particular phrasing again. According to Ian Haney Lopez, the “young buck” term changed into “young fellow” which was less overtly racist: “‘Some young fellow’ was less overtly racist and so carried less risk of censure, and worked just as well to provoke a sense of white victimization”.
During the 1988 presidential election, the Willie Horton attack ads run against Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis built upon the Southern Strategy in a campaign that reinforced the notion that Republicans best represent conservative whites with “traditional values”. Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes worked on the campaign as George H. W. Bush‘s political strategists. Upon seeing a favorable New Jersey focus group response to the Horton strategy, Atwater recognized that an implicit racial appeal could work outside of the Southern states. The subsequent ads featured Horton’s mugshot and played on fears of black criminals.
Atwater said of the strategy: “By the time we’re finished, they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’ running mate”. Al Gore was the first to use the Willie Horton prison furlough against Dukakis and—like the Bush campaign—would not mention race. The Bush campaign claimed they were initially made aware of the Horton issue via the Gore campaign’s use of the subject. Bush initially hesitated to use the Horton campaign strategy, but the campaign saw it as a wedge issue to harm Dukakis who was struggling against Democratic rival Jesse Jackson.
Following George W. Bush’s re-election, Ken Mehlman, Bush’s campaign manager and Chairman of the Republican National Committee, held several large meetings in 2005 with African American business, community and religious leaders. In his speeches, he apologized for his party’s use of the Southern Strategy in the past. When asked about the strategy of using race as an issue to build GOP dominance in the once-Democratic South, Mehlman replied,
Republican candidates often have prospered by ignoring black voters and even by exploiting racial tensions […] by the ’70s and into the ’80s and ’90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African-American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out. Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.
Historical observers have suggested that the election of President Obama in the 2008 presidential election and subsequent re-election in 2012 signaled the growing irrelevance of the Southern Strategy-style tactics. Louisiana State University political scientists Wayne Parent, for example, suggested that Obama’s ability to get elected without the support of Southern states demonstrate that the region was moving from “the center of the political universe to being an outside player in presidential politics” while University of Maryland, Baltimore County political scientist Thomas Schaller argued that the Republican party had “marginalized” itself, becoming a “mostly regional party” through a process of Southernization.