Did Reagan run on racism?

[Rockefeller GOP]

No.  He ran on the bad record of his predecessor.  In 1980, the South was his worst region.

[Rockefeller GOP]

Uh, there's a reason "Reagan Democrats" were a thing.

Race played a PART in Democrats voting for Reagan but certainly not all of it.  Many were socially conservative (and apparently finally willing to give the pro-business GOP a try) and were attracted to Reagan's foreign policy ... not to mention disillusioned by Carter.

Also, as I said earlier, Reagan's worst region in 1980 was the Deep South, and though he did very well there in 1984, he ALSO did very well everywhere else, too.  Not seeing the clear correlation between racists leaving the Democrats and getting Reagan his victories.

[Rockefeller GOP]

Yes, every Republican since Nixon has run on the New Jim Crow platform of gutting welfare and locking up minorities.

H-Y-P-E-R-B-O-L-E.

[Rockefeller GOP]

Yes, every Republican since Nixon has run on the New Jim Crow platform of gutting welfare and locking up minorities.

H-Y-P-E-R-B-O-L-E.

Not really.

New Jim Crow?!  I'd like to hear how.

I'm also starting to believe our token three communists are all the same poster, LOL...

[Rockefeller GOP]

And, Shua, I am excruciatingly embarrassed to see a poster whom I usually respect defending Atwater's remarks as evidence that the 1980 campaign was not largely about race.

I'm saying Atwater said it was not about race.  I don't know how someone can fairly come to any other conclusion that he was arguing anything else, unless there's some sort of deconstructionist hermeneutic involved. Maybe he's just justifying himself retroactively, I don't know, but if you quote Atwater as an authority on the subject, then don't take his remarks out of context and twist them around to try to make it sound like he supported the very argument he was criticizing. 

I don't know what a "deconstructionist hermeneutic" is, but how exactly are you connecting that ominous Atwater line about "doing away with the racial problem one way or the other" to the claim that racism wasn't relevant to the 1980 presidential campaign?

He is taking the premise of this question:

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and accepting it for the sake of argument.
He is arguing that a campaign that might appeal to racists by pointing to other issues that might be subconsciously related to racism is going to leave racial politics behind anyway by focusing on those other, substantively nonracial, issues.  There's some weakness to that argument, but this is one of many things he is saying in defending against the charge that the campaign was racist.

Good post.