accepted race campaign.

'What we get wrong about the Southern strategy' - the Washington Post

. . . 'Goldwater’s campaign did launch the Southern strategy, originally called “Operation Dixie,” by directly and aggressively championing his vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. As a result, the senator won five Deep South states, including 87 percent of the vote in Mississippi. But this blunt appeal may have done more harm than good, because, other than his native Arizona, these were the only states Goldwater won.

Four years later, understanding the risks of such an overt campaign against civil rights, Nixon’s team instead coded their racial appeals. The “silent majority” of white Southerners that the candidate needed to attract understood that Nixon’s call for the restoration of “law and order,” for example, was a dog whistle, signaling his support for an end to protests, marches and boycotts, while his “war on drugs” played on racialized fears about crime. Nixon also adopted a stance of “benign neglect” on civil rights enforcement, a message that his advocates, such as Democrat-turned-Republican Sen. Strom Thurmond, bluntly conveyed to Southern whites on his behalf. As Thurmond put it, “If Nixon becomes president, he has promised that he won’t enforce either the Civil Rights or the Voting Rights Acts. Stick with him.”