The Republican Southern Strategy, winning by using the racism of southern White voters, was successfully implemented just after a vast demographic deluge. In the first five decades of the last century, African Americans migrated from the South to the North and the West in search of better jobs and livelihood as well as to avoid the toxic racial climate of the South.
As this great democratic change was happening, a new political realignment was developing in the South. Herbert Hoover successfully used an anti-black and anti-catholic message to win half of the South. That was the beginning of the Republican Party’s change of relationship with African Americans in the south. In the Democratic Party, however, the reverse was happening. The new alignments and re-alignments took three decades. By the end of the 1960s, and after the passage of Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, the shift in patronage and alliance was complete.
With the declining number of African American voters, the Southern Strategy was a political winning formula even though it was morally repugnant. But when the Republicans were using this strategy to win, two other demographic changes were happening. Blacks started to return to the South. Sociologists call this "Return Migration." The transformation of the economy in most parts of the South also attracted plenty of migrants from other parts of the United States.
In the controversial book, The End of Southern Exceptionalism, Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston argued that the Republican Party’s control of the South coincided with the emergence of a new Sub-Urban economic class, and hence, White resentment played only a marginal role in the political dominance of the GOP. This thesis was well discredited by several political scientists. But they had a point. Southern Exceptionalism was ending. Why? The North to South migration was increasing. A huge number of Latinos, African Americans and Northern, more liberal Whites are now living in the South.
The Obama Campaign is using this demographic change to its advantage in Virginia and North Carolina. A North Carolina and Virginia win for Obama will signal the end of the Republican Southern Strategy. For the Democrats, it is a Reverse Southern Strategy. Using race backlash to win elections will be over soon.