Live from TrumpLand: Ian Haney-Lopez: How the GOP became the “White Man’s Party”:
On the Democratic side, in 1970...Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg published The Real Majority, cautioning their party that “Social Issues” now divided the base. “The machinist’s wife in Dayton may decide to leave the Democratic reservation in 1972 and vote for Nixon or Wallace or their ideological descendants,” Scammon and Wattenberg warned:
If she thinks the Democrats feel that she isn’t scared of crime but that she’s really a bigot, if she thinks that Democrats feel the police are Fascist pigs and the Black Panthers and the Weathermen are just poor, misunderstood, picked-upon kids, if she thinks that Democrats are for the hip drug culture and that she, the machinist’s wife, is not only a bigot, but a square, then good-bye lady—and good-bye Democrats....
Scammon and Wattenberg were frank.... The solution was clear: the Democratic Party had to temper its “pro-black stance.”
On the Republican side... in 1969, Kevin Phillips published The Emerging Republican Majority.... Phillips had a simple, even deterministic thesis:
Historically, our party system has reflected layer upon layer of group oppositions.... The prevailing cleavages in American voting behavior have been ethnic and cultural. Politically, at least, the United States has not been a very effective melting pot.... The Negro problem, having become a national rather than a local one, is the principal cause of the breakup of the New Deal coalition....
Phillips saw his emerging Republican majority... [as] "largely white and middle class... concentrated in the South, the West, and suburbia.”... The old Democratic alliance of Northeastern liberals, the white working class, Northern blacks, and Southern Democrats, could be riven by racial appeals. Beginning in 1970, Richard Nixon embraced the politics of racial division wholeheartedly.... In 1963, Robert Novak had written that many Republican leaders were intent on converting the Party of Lincoln into the White Man’s Party. The following year, Goldwater went down in crushing defeat.... Even so, less than a decade later, the racial transmogrification of the Republicans was well underway...
