Nixon Wins Presidency on Southern Strategy of Coded Racial Appeals

Richard Nixon wins the 1968 presidential election on November 5, 1968, having explicitly built his campaign around coded racial messaging aimed at white Southern voters alienated by the Civil Rights Act. Campaign strategist Kevin Phillips writes an internal memo advising that capturing the Democratic South would turn on the "law and order/Negro socio-economic revolution syndrome" and urging Nixon to emphasize "crime, decentralization of federal social programming, and law and order." Nixon avoids the Deep South — which goes to segregationist third-party candidate George Wallace — and instead sweeps the Peripheral South: Tennessee, Virginia, Florida, and the Carolinas. Historians and a 1981 admission by Republican National Committee chairman Lee Atwater confirm that "law and order" rhetoric functioned as a coded appeal to white backlash against civil rights, establishing the template that subsequent Republican presidents would refine for decades.