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In American politics, the Southern strategy refers to a strategy by Republican Party candidates of gaining political support in the Southern United States by appealing to racism against African Americans.〔Carter, Dan T. ''From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994.'' p 35〕 During the 1950s and 1960s, the African-American Civil Rights Movement achieved significant progress in its push for desegregation in the Southern United States. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, in particular, largely dismantled the system of Jim Crow laws that had enforced legal (or ''de jure'') segregation in the South since the end of Reconstruction Era. During this period, Republican politicians such as Presidential candidate Richard Nixon worked to attract southern white conservative voters (most of whom had traditionally supported the Democratic Party) to the Republican Party, and Senator Barry Goldwater won the five formerly Confederate states of the Deep South (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina) in the 1964 presidential election. In the 1968 presidential campaign, Nixon won Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee, all former Confederate states, contributing to the electoral realignment that saw many white, southern voters shift allegiance from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party during this period. In academia, the term "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." This narrative recognizes the centrality of racial backlash to the political realignment of the South, but suggests that this backlash took the form of a defense of ''de facto'' segregation in the suburbs, rather of overt resistance to racial integration, and that the story of this backlash is a national, rather than a strictly southern one.〔 The perception that the Republican Party had served as the "vehicle of white supremacy in the South," particularly during the Goldwater campaign and the presidential elections of 1968 and 1972, has made it difficult for the Republican Party to win the support of black voters in the south in later years.〔 In 2005, Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman formally apologized to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a national civil rights organization, for exploiting racial polarization to win elections and ignoring the black vote. ==Introduction== Although the phrase "Southern strategy" is often attributed to Nixon's political strategist Kevin Phillips, he did not originate it but popularized it.〔 passim〕 In an interview included in a 1970 ''New York Times'' article, Phillips stated his analysis based on studies of ethnic voting: :From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that...but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.〔 While Phillips sought to increase Republican power by polarizing ethnic voting in general, and not just to win the white South, the South was by far the biggest prize yielded by his approach. Its success began at the presidential level. Gradually southern voters began to elect Republicans to Congress, and finally to statewide and local offices, particularly as some legacy segregationist Democrats retired or switched to the GOP. In addition, the Republican Party worked for years to develop grassroots political organizations across the South, supporting candidates for local school boards and city and county offices, as examples. But, following the Watergate scandal, in the 1976 election, southern voters came out in support for the "favorite son" candidate, Southern Democrat Jimmy Carter. From 1948 to 1984 the Southern states, for decades a stronghold for the Democrats, became key swing states, providing the popular vote margins in the 1960, 1968 and 1976 elections. During this era, several Republican candidates expressed support for states' rights, an issue over which southern states had argued against the federal government prior to the Civil War. Some political analysts said this term was used in the 20th century as a "codeword" to represent opposition to federal enforcement of civil rights for blacks and to federal intervention on their behalf; many individual southerners had opposed passage of the Voting Rights Act. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Southern strategy」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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