Voices
time the Republican Party nominated a ticket that couldn’t win
either members’ home state.
The year in question is 1968,
when Richard Nixon (a California
native living in New York when he
declared for the presidency) and
Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew
beat Hubert Humphrey and Edmund Muskie while losing both
New York and Maryland. Nixon
and Agnew won by broadening
their party base (albeit in a disgraceful way) and the Romney-Ryan ticket should consider a better
and more forward-looking basebroadening strategy.
The Romney-Ryan ticket has a
lot of similarities to the NixonAgnew ticket:
Both members of both tickets
are very smart policy wonks.
Both tickets paired an ideologically flexible top man (Nixon had
a conservative record but ran and
governed to the center-left; Romney governed to the center- left
but is running to the right) with
a number two who had a more
ideological reputation.
Both Romney and Nixon selected running mates who were more
popular with conservatives than
they were.
And the way that Nixon and
ELI
LEHRER
HUFFINGTON
09.30.12
Agnew won is particularly relevant to Romney and Ryan: they
broadened the party’s base. The
strategy their campaign adopted
to do it is a disgraceful blot on
the Republican Party’s history.
Although neither man was
personally a bigot, they allowed
and encouraged their campaign
organization to play on racial
fears and prejudices in an effort
to encourage southern whites
(almost all of them
previously loyal
Democrats) to vote
The
Republican.
way that
The strategy wasn’t Nixon and
a smashing success
Agnew won is
in that George Walparticularly
lace’s more openly
relevant to
racist and segregaRomney and
tionist campaign won
Ryan: they
five southern states
broadened the
outright. But it did
party’s base.”
almost certainly provide a margin of victory that allowed Nixon to take
Tennessee, Missouri and Virginia—and with those states the
Electoral College.
Although its motivations
and subtext were simply wrong,
some specifics of the “Southern
Strategy”—promising a tougher
line on crime most prominently—