History of the United States II / Unit 15 USH2 2125 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
The Southern Strategy
The idea
Nixon won in nineteen sixty-eight with a southern strategy learned from Goldwater's campaign and an appeal to northern blue-collar workers he later called the silent majority. His running mate, Spiro Agnew, former governor of Maryland, called the Democrats fiscally irresponsible and soft on communism. The appeal reached northern middle-class and blue-collar White voters and southern White voters who had moved to the suburbs after the Court's integration rulings, the anchor says.
In practice
Wallace's thirteen and a half percent, the southern votes the strategy set out to win.
Where people slip
Unit five's realignment of eighteen ninety-six and unit eleven's of nineteen thirty-two each rebuilt the parties; this is the third. Once elected, the anchor adds, Nixon neglected, deliberately, the civil rights movement and minorities' needs. The Democratic coalition of unit eleven was breaking apart.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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