The New Southern Strategy

Encouraging racial division was the GOP strategy for half a century. Now it's all immigration.

Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead

“The whole secret to politics,” Nixon aide Kevin Phillips, the architect of the “Southern Strategy,” told author Gary Wills in 1968, is “who hates who.” But hatred is not merely organic; while it arises on its own, it can also be cultivated and directed. In his decade as the leader of the Republican Party, Donald Trump has been steadily reshaping the Southern Strategy into something different than it was. It’s still about fear and resentment, but the relative importance of anti-Black resentment and anti-immigrant resentment has flipped. And there’s good reason to believe the new strategy will endure well after Trump departs. 

The goal of the Southern Strategy as envisioned by Phillips was to cure White Southerners of their loyalty to the Democratic Party (a vestige of the Civil War era) by intensifying racial antagonism. By any measure it was a spectacular success, enabling Republicans to periodically take control of Congress and turning the South into the foundation of victory for not just Nixon but Reagan, the Bushes, and Donald Trump. 

It wasn’t just about winning states in the South; it was also about taking Southern politics, in which White voters saw hostility to Black people as central to their own political identity, and spreading it to every corner of the country. As H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, wrote in his diaries, Nixon privately “emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.” 

A thin veneer of plausible deniability was important, since very few people want to think of themselves as racist, but it was still vital to foment racial conflict at every opportunity. As Phillips told the New York Times in 1970, it was actually good for Republicans if Blacks participated in politics more, because that would frighten Whites into the arms of the GOP. “The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South,” he said, “the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.” The more politics revolved around race, the more Republicans could become the party of Whites, and the more they’d win. 

If you watch Donald Trump today, you see plenty of occasions in which he pulls out the bullhorn to remind racists that he’s still their guy. He remains a full-spectrum bigot; name a group of people apart from White men and he will have said something offensive to or about them, probably within the last couple of weeks. 

Nevertheless, the question of Kamala Harris’ race has been present but remarkably muted in this campaign, given who she’s running against. Trump has thrown some offensive remarks her way (“She happened to turn Black”), and the right-wing media are full of racist tropes used against her. But it’s nothing like it was in 2008, when Barack Obama was accused of not being American, being in thrall to a radical Black preacher, hating White people, and on and on. The candidate’s race was absolutely everywhere, every day in that campaign, in a way it isn’t in 2024. 

This year, at least from Trump and JD Vance, it’s all about immigration; the recent controversy over Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio is the distillation of the themes of the Trump campaign into a thick sludge of loathing they spread across every available surface. There is barely an issue that the Republican ticket won’t find a way to turn into an argument about the supposed “invasion” of immigrants coming to destroy America and everything she stands for. How do we solve the housing crisis? Deport the immigrants! What about health care? The illegals are filling up all the hospitals! What’s the best way to improve public safety? Get rid of criminal aliens, who cause all the crime! How do we grow the economy? Deportations and  across-the-board tariffs, which will enable us to “take other countries’ jobs.” What about the federal budget? “Kamala Harris wants to give illegal immigrants Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.”

The party of intersectionality

Of course, race and immigration are not distinct — the hatred promoted by the Republican ticket and its allies is quite intersectional. As Donald Trump, Jr. recently said, “You look at Haiti, you look at the demographic makeup, you look at the average I.Q. — if you import the third world into your country, you’re going to become the third world.” There is an important shift contained there: While Republicans used to say “I’m in favor of immigration, just not illegal immigration,” that claim has become more and more rare. Trump and Vance’s blood-and-soil nationalism leaves little room for even legal immigrants. We might let in a few of them (like Vance’s in-laws), but we won’t let them forget that they can never be real Americans. 

As the campaign progresses, Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants grows simultaneously darker and more sweeping. He still talks about individual cases — the “beautiful” white woman murdered by an immigrant will never disappear from his act — but now he is focused more than ever on community contamination, the widely shared misery and suffering that results from the very presence of outsiders. Here’s part of a speech he made earlier this week in Pennsylvania:

Think of the cruelty Kamala Harris is inflicting on the people of Pennsylvania. You live in a small town your whole life. You pay your taxes. You really are exemplary. You pay everything. You do everything. You love your town. You love your country. You know the town so well by name. You’re just so proud of it. And suddenly, she flies in thousands and thousands of migrants from the most dangerous places on earth, and they deposit them right smack in the middle of your community.…

So now, your schools can teach because the majority— they can’t teach because the majority of students don’t speak the language. The housing market is destroyed. Crime is rampant. The jobs are taken by migrants illegally imported to our countries. Your school classes, you can’t get in. You can’t get into your hospitals. Nobody can get into the hospitals. They’re driving to hospitals 3, 400 miles away.

Of course these are all lies, but the message is what matters: The pure pre-immigration community — prosperous, clean, loving, happy, proud — has been contaminated, both figuratively and literally (among the lies Vance tells about Haitian immigrants is that they bring disease) by the arrival of immigrants whose presence turns every place they live into a post-apocalyptic nightmare. 

Immigration may wax and wane as a concern for the bulk of the electorate, but after the last three campaigns it cannot be dislodged from Republican identity. As the country grows more diverse, resentment of immigrants will continue to burn hot among the party’s base, and candidates will compete to see who can most effectively channel that anger. Trumpism will live on, not only as a political style but in the substance of the only issue Trump really cares about: hatred of foreigners, especially those who aren’t White. 

This will tie the Republican Party even more closely to far-right parties in other western countries, which will likely gain strength as they become the vehicle for growing anti-immigrant sentiment. The coming decades will see tens of millions of people cross borders in search of better economic prospects and to escape the cascading effects of climate change, and everywhere they go they will be greeted by a right-wing backlash. 

Most Republicans, including Trump, sincerely want their party to include people of all races. But only if they agree with its nativist agenda, in both policy and spirit. Like the Southern Strategy, this one can be applied anywhere in America, whether there are immigrants there or not. They believe this will be a winning strategy for years to come. But even if it isn’t, it’s the road they’re on, and they aren’t turning back.