Demographics ditch "Nixon's Southern strategy" of courting whites, leave GOP scrambling.
As Republicans were promoting themselves as a multiracial party from the platform in Tampa two weeks ago, an ugly incident on the convention floor suggested not everyone had got the memo. From the podium a range of speakers of Haitian, Mexican, Cuban and Indian descent spoke of how their parents had overcome huge barriers so they could succeed in the US.
In the audience, a successful black woman who works for CNN was being pelted with peanuts by a convention-goer, who said: "This is how we feed the animals."
The tension between the projection of a modern, inclusive, tolerant party and the reality of a sizeable racially intolerant element within its base pining for the restoration of white privilege is neither new nor accidental. Indeed, it in no small part explains the trajectory of the Republican party for almost the last half century.
In his diary, Richard Nixon's chief-of-staff, Bob Haldeman, described how his boss spelled out the racial contours of a new electoral game-plan to win southern and suburban whites over to the Republican party in the wake of the civil rights era. "You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks," Nixon told him. "The key is to devise a system that recognises that while not appearing to."
This could be the final hurrah for what became known as Nixon's southern strategy in what is shaping up to be the most racially polarised election ever…
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This is shaping up to be the most racially polarised US election ever
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