Where Do Republicans Troll For Votes?

I've been watching this for a long time, so I thought I'd share some observations.

In the past year, I have read a number of articles by Republicans emphasizing that the Democratic party was the party of white supremacists. I admit that used to be the case, at least in part. The "solid south" was dominated by a racist party of white supremacy.

Not all southern democrats were obsessed with race. But those who ran for public office had to make an accommodation with racists. In those days, a southern democrat (all white people were democrats) would describe a particularly hot day by saying "I'm sweatin' like a n****r at a white folks' election." In fact, there were "white folks' elections" at least until 1944 when the US Supreme Court ruled against party primaries that excluded black voters.

The Democratic party "big tent" began to fray in the 1940's. First, President Truman integrated the armed forces by executive order. Then, northern progressive Democrats like Hubert Humphrey began speaking out. This led, at the 1948 Democratic convention, to defection of progressives (former Vice President Wallace's Progressive Party) as well as southern racists (Strom Thurmond and the States' Rights party).

That still didn't lead to Republican victory in the presidential race, but led to a concerted effort by Southern Republicans to recruit southern democrats to their party banner. That move, initiated by the chair of the Virginia republican party had only modest success, but the move expanded. By the time Richard Nixon ran for president, the "southern strategy" had already been underway for a decade.

This "southern strategy" got a boost from Brown v. Board of Education, wherein the US Supreme Court rejected the principle of "separate but equal."

Passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act led to massive defections from the democratic party, as Lyndon Johnson foretold. But it was the right thing.

Even so, the southern democratic party didn't become the minority party in the South until after integration of public schools began to really happen. That's also about the time we first heard widespread alarm at the "failure" of public schools and the creation of private, usually "Christian" "academies" unaffected by Brown.

Until that time, the Republican party had been largely a regional party confined to the North and Midwest and widely understood to favor the interests of northern industrialists and financiers.

How could Republicans become a truly national party? Elementary. Play the race card. In a recently uncovered audio recording of a 1981 interview, Lee Atwater, the Carl Rove of his generation, candidly revealed the strategy:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

There were dangers with this strategy. Many Republicans genuinely relished identification with the party of the Great Emancipator - the party of Abraham Lincoln. But the challenge facing the party was in many respects similar to the challenge that faced the Federalist Party as the electorate expanded: how to get voters from the lower classes when the organizing principle of the party was to further the economic and political interests of the wealthy and powerful?

The answer? Play the race card.

Ronald Reagan did it in 1980 when he opened his campaign for the presidency at a rally in Philadelphia, Mississippi, site of the lynching of three civil rights workers seeking to register blacks to vote. When he attacked "welfare queens," everyone got the message. It was Lee Atwater's message.

More recently, when Mitt Romney inveighed against the "47%" and talked about "moochers" and "dependency," it was the same theme: "the Democrats want to tax you hard-working white workers for the benefit of those lazy, shiftless blacks and hispanics and other aliens."

That was the message. It was heard loud and clear by many of Romney's supporters. It was also heard loud and clear by all citizens of color and other groups (e.g. Jewish citizens) despised by white racists and militant evangelical Christians.

It didn't work, at least for president.

It did work in North Carolina, for state offices. But the resulting victory for voters answering to the racist dog whistle, will work to the detriment of working people across the state.

Well before the election - in fact, last September - Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates focused his gaze on the "welfare queen" idea and how this is becoming a losing proposition for Republicans.  Not only because of racism, though it is clear that African Americans, Hispanics and Oriental Americans have no trouble decoding the racist message of Republican candidates.

Then, too, there's the demography thing.