Did Reagan run on racism?

[All Along The Watchtower]

Yes and he was better at it than Nixon.

[All Along The Watchtower]

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.

While I agree with you that Reagan's natural base of support wasn't really in the South (more like the Southwest, if you consider suburban Southern California to be Southwestern ), he did expand and update Nixon's Southern Strategy with appeals to racist sentiments-though these tended to be coded in the language of "states rights" and "reducing welfare/government spending." Racism need not be explicit or obvious a la George Wallace in the 1960s.

And keep in mind that the Deep South still had a lot of black and poor white voters who remained loyal to Favorite Son Carter (though the latter-I suspect-went heavily for  Reagan in 1984). The broad middle and upper classes of Southern whites that were emerging in the growing suburbs of the South were-and are-extremely conservative.

By the end of the 1980s, the Democratic Party was hemorrhaging voters in the South, particularly in presidential elections but also (increasingly) in congressional elections. Even in the 1990s when Arkansas Favorite Son Bill Clinton appealed to a lot of poorer and working class white voters ( in the Upper South and parts of Appalachia), the South continued on its march to the GOP. It would take adopted Texan George W. Bush to seal the deal.

tl; dr the South's shift to the GOP has been a long, complex process. Opposition to the Civil Rights movement certainly played a significant part, as did the rise of the Religious Right (white evangelicals-in the South and elsewhere-becoming more politically involved in Republican politics). Reagan had a key role to play as well at a crucial point in this process-which did involve (mostly coded) appeals to racism.

[All Along The Watchtower]

That's stretching pretty pathetically thin to say "reducing spending" is racial code. Might as well just say being a Republican automatically makes you a racist.

I agree, if you take what I said completely out of context. We're talking about white Southerners who voted for Reagan, who talked a lot about fictional welfare queens from Chicago (gee, I wonder why?) and who launched his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, with a pro-"States Rights" speech. Coming off the heels of the 1960s and 1970s, when poor black people were implicated (rightly or wrongly) in urban crime and rioting and when many white Americans were angry at "welfare cheats" (and welfare is highly racialized in our political discourse), I think it's being naive and obtuse to say that there wasn't at least some exploitation of white racial resentment by the Republican Party in that time.

[All Along The Watchtower]

In addition to what posters in this thread (including myself ) have already said, I would add that the race-based appeals were part of a broader Republican political strategy of conservative populism- a populism that was (and is) targeted to middle-class and working-class white voters, many of whom had previously supported the Democratic Party. Along with anxieties over race and crime were concerns about changing gender roles and sexual norms, resentment of liberal intellectual elites, and a growth in nationalistic sentiments regarding foreign policy and immigration. These factors are all interrelated and tended to reinforce each other.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Even if Reagan did not run on racism (just for the sake of argument), or use race-based stereotypes about "welfare queens" (which he indisputably did) or whatever, there were still plenty of good reasons for why black Americans were among the most likely groups to have negative views of him and his administration.

Putting aside the question of whether his campaigns didn't appeal to black people...his policies certainly weren't sensitive to the concerns of black Americans and other minority groups. If anything, the Reagan administration was often remarkably callous and antagonistic toward such groups.

And yet, the way Republicans talk you'd think that we can't ever call their heroes racist, because they weren't as bad as George Wallace or something. And being called a racist is the worst thing that's ever happened to anybody, obviously. Including racism.