See: southern strategy to gain southern votes.
Let me get this straight...
The Republicans were using racist "
code" words.
If you believe in things like
states rights, you're a racist?
If you are not for
affirmative action, you're a racist?
Having grown up in SoCal, apparently I am naive when it comes to code words & this southern strategy.
Not surprisingly there is disagreement between "scholars" regarding what academia claims is the southern strategy.
...."Southern strategy" refers primarily to "top down" narratives of the political realignment of the South, which suggest that Republican leaders consciously appealed to many white southerners' racial resentments in order to gain their support. This top-down narrative of the southern strategy is generally believed to be the primary force that transformed southern politics following the civil rights era. This view has been questioned by historians such as Matthew Lassiter, Kevin M. Kruse and
Joseph Crespino who have presented an alternative, "bottom up" narrative, which Lassiter has called the "suburban strategy".....
Political scientist Nelson W. Polsby argued that economic development was more central than racial desegregation in the evolution of the postwar South in Congress. In
The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South the British political scientist Byron E. Shafer and the Canadian Richard Johnston, developed the Polsby the argument in greater depth. Using roll call analysis of voting patterns in the House of Representatives, they found that Issues of desegregation and race were less important than issues of economics and social class when it came to the transformation of partisanship in the South. This view is backed by Glenn Feldman who notes that the early narratives on the southern realignment focused on the idea of appealing to racism. This argument was first and thus took hold as the accepted narrative. He notes, however, that Lassiter's dissenting view on this subject, a view that the realignment was a "suburban strategy" rather than a "southern strategy" was just one of the first of a rapidly growing list of scholars who see the civil rights, "white backlash" as a secondary or minor factor. Authors such as Tim Boyd, George Lewis, Michael Bowen, and John W. White follow the lead of Lassiter, Shafer and Johnston in viewing suburban voters and their self interests as the primary reason for the realignment. He doesn't discount race as part of the motivation of these suburban voters who were fleeing urban crime and school busing.
Gareth Davies argues that "[t]he scholarship of those who emphasize the southern strategizing Nixon is not so much wrong – it captures one side of the man – as it is unsophisticated and incomplete. Nixon and his enemies needed one another in order to get the job done." Lawrence McAndrews makes a similar argument, saying Nixon pursued a mixed strategy:
Some scholars claim that Nixon succeeded, by leading a principled assault on de jure school desegregation. Others claim that he failed, by orchestrating a politically expedient surrender to de facto school segregation. A close examination of the evidence, however, reveals that in the area of school desegregation, Nixon's record was a mixture of principle and politics, progress and paralysis, success and failure. In the end, he was neither simply the cowardly architect of a racially insensitive "Southern strategy" which condoned segregation, nor the courageous conductor of a politically risky "not-so-Southern strategy" which condemned it.
In interviews with historians years later, Nixon denied that he ever practiced a Southern strategy. Harry Dent, one of Nixon's senior advisers on Southern politics, told Nixon privately in 1969 that the administration "has no Southern strategy, but rather a national strategy which, for the first time in modern times,
includes the South.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy