The GOP Southern Strategy-concentrated in suburbs and cities?

[All Along The Watchtower]

I have a Political Almanac from 1983 with all the members of that session of Congress in it. What struck me was that the Republicans in the South were representing cities and suburban areas; the rural areas were still dominated by Democrats at that time.

Furthermore, it seems that many of the counties carried by George Wallace in the South were carried by Jimmy Carter, and Nixon's strongest areas in the South were in the suburbs. Which brings up another point: Texas had two Republican congressman in the late 1960s, and one of them, George H. W. Bush, was representing a suburban district of Houston.

So, is it fair to say that the Southern strategy was mainly concentrated in the suburbs and cities of the South, and not as much as in rural areas?

[Scam of God]

It's probably more apt to say that the GOP particularly targeted the urban enclaves of northern-and-midwestern emigrants to the South, who, while adopting its cultural trappings to assimilate themselves, were far too materially comfortable to also take command of its populism. They gradually displaced the native barbarians, until the both of them are alike in their barbarity.

[Hash]

The Southern suburbia is the one which is sociologically closest to the Republican Party, since it's mostly quite affluent.

And those areas are still some of the strongest Republican areas, just look at Birmingham suburbia.

[jokerman]

"The Southern Strategy" is a GOP strategy that was adopted in the late 60s and 70s after and on top of a previously existing movement toward the GOP in the south that began post WWII.  This early movement towards the GOP was part of the "new south."  It was not really related to race, although its members identified with the national GOP's conservative stance on national defense and anti-communism.  It took root on the periphery of southern society, in the literal geographic sense and where people had been uprooted from southern life in the burgeoning industrial centers and suburbs, and was very strong in states with high populations of migrants from the north.  Compare Nixon vs. Wallace in 1968.  The electorate of the former was the original base of the Southern GOP.  "The Southern Strategy" is formulated as a method of combining most voters from both the Wallace and Nixon electorate to dominate the south.  None the less, Wallace voters (who constitute the base of the Southern GOP now) swing back and forth from Democrat to Republican well into the 1980s.

[The Age Wave]

Arguably, this strategy ruined the Democratic Party. Not by diminishing electoral chances, but by forcing an altering of the composition that left the electorate a bunch of suburbanite latte liberals who don't know anything about the plight of the working man.

[Alexander Hamilton]

Arguably, this strategy ruined the Democratic Party. Not by diminishing electoral chances, but by forcing an altering of the composition that left the electorate a bunch of suburbanite latte liberals who don't know anything about the plight of the working man.

It hurt my party much, much more.