The Long Southern Strategy:
How Chasing Votes in the White South Changed American Politics

"The Southern Strategy has long been defined narrowly, as the Republican appeal to southern whites who recoiled from the civil rights revolution and its allies in the national Democratic Party as a result. But as Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields make clear in this provocative and powerful study, white backlash was only part of the approach. A must-read for anyone seeking to make sense of Southern politics, The Long Southern Strategy shows how tensions over race, religion and gender relations worked to remake the region, and to remake the Republican Party as well."
-- Kevin M. Kruse, co-author of Fault Lines: A History of the United States since 1974

“With The Long Southern Strategy, Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields widen the aperture to reveal the ways in which what we think of as a time-limited, race-focused effort to court southern voters in the 1970s and 80s, was in fact a strategy carried in on two vitally important and unexplored wings-gender anxiety and religious fervor-and carefully packaged in uniquely southern flavors. This deeply-researched, broadly drawn argument about the ways in which the Republican Party rebranded itself to appeal to and inflame those anxieties will surely become crucial to our understanding of both the long history of voting and organizing in the American south, and to reckoning with our current politicalÂclimate-that remains trapped under the unfinished fallout from the Civil War."
-- Dahlia Lithwick, Senior Legal Correspondent, Slate

"You can't understand American politics unless you understand the politics of the South. And, as Maxwell and Shields prove, you can't understand Southern politics until you understand the racist, evangelical, and gender elements of the GOP's Long Southern Strategy-which spread far beyond the South and helped make Donald Trump our first Confederate president."
-- Bill Press, Radio Talk Show Host