Time now to re-read Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields on the long game the Republican party has played for years now to win voters:
“In its quest to win over white voters in the American South, the GOP played a full house of racial cards, but these were not the only cards they played."
#Republicans #race #gender #SouthernStrategy
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~ Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics (NY: Oxford UP, 2019).p. 125).
"They could not secure the region for their party on white racial resentment alone. Realignment from solidly blue to solidly red requires tectonic shifts. The Civil Rights Movement was, indeed, a cultural earthquake for white southerners, but so too was the Women's Movement that followed."
Ibid.
#Republicans #race #gender #SouthernStrategy
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https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-long-southern-strategy-9780197579039
“It is more than ‘backlash politics.’ It is orchestrated backlash politics. Campaigns made choices, set fires, and even poured on the gasoline if accelerant was needed, which is why the passage of time has not, in fact extinguished, such prejudice. It is kept aflame as long as it is stoked.”
~ Ibid., p. 31
“The combination of bait the GOP used to catch southern whites was tailored to the region, but it is still bait to all who are hungry. So calls for states' rights, law and order, fiscal conservatism, colorblindness, anti-feminism, men's rights, and Christian nationalism can summon a Southern white majority, but other Americans are beckoned too."
~ Ibid., p. 336
"That explains why, over time, at the national level, Republican candidates had no choice but to echo all three of those dog whistles in order to win. Those who did not or could not lost."
~ Ibid.
Maxwell and Shields are describing something that has been building a long time now. Blaming "the Democrats" and Biden and Harris for what has been building a long time now is not only misleading: it's outright dumb.
@wdlindsy
"What this suggests is that pointing to poor socioeconomic performance by democratic governments and citizen anger about that performance as the primary drivers of democratic backsliding is a mistake. The onus for backsliding belongs on those leaders who gain power for a wide range of reasons, including in many cases by promising to renovate democracy, but then once in power relentlessly amass unconstrained power by overriding countervailing institutions and undercutting basic democratic norms and procedures. Backsliding in these cases is thus less about a failure of democracy to deliver than about a failure of democracy to constrain—that is, to curb the predatory political ambitions and methods of certain elected leaders."
Carothers and Hartnett, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jod.2024.a930425.
