This interview was conducted in 1981 when Lee Atwater was a 30-year-old operative working in the Reagan White House. Alexander Lamis was a political scientist at the University of Mississippi researching Southern political realignment. A native of Charleston, South Carolina, Lamis had worked as a TV journalist and newspaper reporter across the South before earning his Ph.D. at Vanderbilt — and had a memorable early confrontation with George Wallace while covering Southern politics. The interview was one of many Lamis conducted for his landmark study The Two-Party South, which won the V.O. Key Award when published in 1984 — connecting Lamis directly to the scholar Atwater references in the opening minutes. Lamis later joined the faculty at Case Western Reserve University, where he taught until his death in 2012.
In The Two-Party South, Lamis wrote what may be the most concise scholarly summary of the mechanism Atwater describes in this interview: "Southern Republican candidates gladly took white racist support, careful especially in later years to acknowledge it as philosophical support for the abstract principle of limiting the federal government and nothing more." As Foster Dickson observed in a 2021 review of the book, the main point of Lamis's analysis is that "after the Civil Rights movement dealt a devastating blow to the racist/segregationist raison d'être of the pre-Civil Rights Democratic Party, it allowed a series of developments that led to our current politics — a nearly all-white, conservative Republican Party marked by a reactionary attitude toward social justice movements and a Democratic Party defined by an uneasy coalition of African-Americans, working-class whites, and more affluent liberals." This transcript is the primary source in which that mechanism is described, by one of its architects, in real time.
Before the famous passage, Atwater explicitly asks not to be quoted — which is why Lamis kept him anonymous for 15 years. The passage became public only after Lamis's death, when his widow released the audio to researcher James Carter IV, who gave it to The Nation.
A note on language: This transcript contains the n-word, reproduced in its entirety and not replaced with placeholders. This is a deliberate editorial choice. The word appears because Atwater used it — casually, repeatedly, and without discomfort — in the private company of white interviewers, in an off-the-record conversation between men who understood they were among their own. To sanitize the language would be to participate in exactly the abstraction mechanism the transcript describes: the process by which the raw reality of racial domination is made invisible, deniable, and comfortable. The ease with which Atwater brandishes this word — as political shorthand, as historical marker, as a specimen he can pick up and put down without flinching — is itself evidence. It reveals a man operating within an environment of unchallenged white privilege, where Black Americans exist as objects of strategic analysis rather than as people in the room. That comfort is not incidental to the transcript's meaning. It is the transcript's meaning.
What this interview documents, beneath its surface of political science, is a pattern that runs through the entire arc of American history: the reconstruction of white supremacy after each attempt to dismantle it. After the Civil War and Reconstruction, the formal abolition of slavery was followed by Black Codes, convict leasing, Jim Crow, and a one-party South built on racial terror and disenfranchisement. After Brown v. Board of Education, the legal end of school segregation was met with "massive resistance," white flight, and private academies. After the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, the legal framework of racial equality was countered by the Southern Strategy — the system Atwater describes here — which achieved through economic abstraction and coded language what could no longer be achieved through explicit racial appeals. Each time the architecture of white supremacy was struck down on paper, it was rebuilt in a new form: less visible, more deniable, but no less effective in its material consequences for Black Americans. The sheer force of this reactionary pattern — the energy and ingenuity devoted to preserving racial hierarchy across two centuries and through every legal defeat — cannot be swept under the rug. This transcript is a rare moment in which that process is described, from the inside, by one of the people doing the rebuilding.
The annotations below place each section in its historical and political context. Passages are highlighted in three ways: blue underline marks historically significant claims; red underline marks factual disputes or self-contradictions; gold underline marks passages with contextual annotation. Click any highlighted passage or annotation badge to see the note in the sidebar.
A note on this document: This editorial introduction, the annotations, and the contextual framing throughout this document were crafted through careful human prompts to AI (Claude, by Anthropic), with iterative fact-checking against primary sources — including the Bandcamp transcripts, Rick Perlstein's Nation article, Bob Herbert's New York Times column, the 1991 Life magazine apology, Lamis's CWRU biography, and Foster Dickson's review of The Two-Party South — and successive rounds of human review and correction. While every attempt at producing factual output has been made, including human review, mistakes may still have occurred. AI-generated text can contain errors or hallucinations. Readers are encouraged to consult the primary sources listed in the bibliography and to verify claims independently. The transcript text itself is reproduced from the Bandcamp transcriptions and has been checked against the full Part 1 and Part 2 source texts.
Well I think uh… To answer that question, Saul, you have to analyze the nature of Southern politics since the 1950s. What you had in the uh 1940s… I think Southern politics begins with V.O. Key's book. What he did was analyze uh the Democratic party, because you didn't have a Republican party. He came up with the idea with the parties were very factionalized. He came up with three different types of factions, of types of state parties, all within the Democratic framework. It was all personality-cult oriented type things.
Race was not really an issue. Race didn't become an issue in the South, again, until 1954. Race *could* become an issue if someone had to be soft on the issue, but no one was. So uh everyone was operating within the framework of a segregated society. So race never became an issue.
Obviously, from 1954 til 1966, that 12 year period, race was *the* issue.
You can analyze… Earl Black wrote a book called Southern Governors and Civil Rights. There hadn't been a comprehensive book written like Key was but Southern Governors and Civil Rights analyzes that period pretty good. What he came up with was "the segregation candidate". The candidate who best handled the segregation issue between '54 and '66 basically was the winner. But importantly, the race question was the top, was the issue in all Southern races. This continued up to '70.
Now once you had the Voting Rights Act in '64 and '65, by '66 Blacks were participating enough in the system where by '70 was the first year… race was still the dominant issue, but the candidate… but moderates were consistently winning primaries by '70 b/c you had a large number of Blacks. And '70 is a good year to use because that is when you got Jimmy Carter, you got Dale Bumpers, you had Reuben Askew, you had Bill Brock, you had John West, you know. Across the board that was a new breed of Southern politician.
To some extent this was because they were image guys and media was being used. But more importantly, that was the first year statistically that the Blacks were participating enough to where a moderate would get to a primary.
That was the also year that Carter ran against Sanders, losing the race.
In 1966 Carter ran against Sanders. Carter, by the way, was an interesting phenomena. Most people don't know this but you can get acetate [pictures]. Carter ran a race against uh Sanders. No wait a minute, let me think of the Carter thing. Carter ran first against Lester Maddox.
Note: Atwater is confused here. Carter's 1966 race was against Lester Maddox (and others); the race against Carl Sanders was 1970. Lamis corrects him below.Sanders was 1970.
Yeah, the Sanders thing, you're right, that was when he did the baseball pictures and all that, but that was a very… I mean, that was not overt racism and so forth, but he was doing that in a Democratic primary, positioning himself to come back in the general election as the moderate against [Pat Suit] the conservative.
But by the way, this is a point of reference, what Carter did was go out in '66 and run as the moderate candidate against Lester and lost, and then he used the Lester Maddox formula, same formula Maddox used.
That was also true of George Corley Wallace, when he first ran.
Oh sure. But his thing was, I ain't 'damn niggers' thing.
But the point I'm making is: is race was the dominant issue in Southern politics, all in through the 50s uh 60s. The 70s began a diminishing… began two things really:
Uh competitive two parties. 60s you had the Goldwater phenomenon and you had Nixon and so forth, but basically the 70s was when you had a crystallized two party thing beginning.
So in 1980 I think the crucial thing of 1980 is, number one, that the two dominant issues of Southern politics which had been race and party — meaning you had to be a Democrat to win — was pretty well resolved. And the main issues became the economy and national defense.
Now that's interesting in that those are the issues basically that Goldwater… in other words, the South in 1964 was considered reactionary, Neanderthalic, and so forth, uh because we weren't mainstream on not only on the race thing but on the economic issues and national defense and all. We were considered y'know ultra-conservative and everything.
What happens is that a guy like Reagan who campaigns in 1980 on a 1964 Goldwater platform, minus the boo-boos and obviously the Voting Rights Act, TBA, and all that bullshit. But when you look at the economics and the national defense, what had happened is that the South went from being behind the times to being the mainstream.
Uh with… in other words… so what you had was two things happening that totally washed away the Southern Strategy, the Harry Dent-type southern strategy. And that is… That whole strategy was based — although it was more sophisticated than a Bilbo or a George Wallace — it was nevertheless based on coded racism. The whole thing. Busing. We want a supreme court judge that will not bus. Anything you'd look at could be traced back to the race issue and the old Southern strategy.
And it was not done in a blatantly discriminatory way.
But the Reagans did not have to do a Southern strategy for two reasons:
Number one, race was not a dominant issue.
And number two, the mainstream issues in this campaign had been "Southern issues" since way back in the 60s. So Reagan goes out and campaigns on the economics and on national defense, the whole campaign was devoid of any kind of racism, any kind of reference.
And I'll tell you another thing y'all need to think about, that even surprised me. It's the lack of interest, really, a lack of knowledge right now in the South among white voters on this Voting Rights Act. I brought all these Republican state chairmen up here to just kind of soothe them down and say, 'look before we have this meeting, look we may not do exactly what you all like.' And what I found out about it is all of them were very passive, said 'we'll pretty well go along with whatever you want.' And I looked at polls in the last four to five months, and there's just no interest or no intensity on that thing among white voters.
Now, back in 1969, me bringing up how Harry Dent, rather than me bringing up those southerners who are going to do very big important things in the South and come up here with some kind of manifesto. That would have been a big major news story. Ongoing and all that shit.
⚠ Note: Atwater does not mention Reagan's Philadelphia, Mississippi speech — delivered just months before this interview — in which Reagan opened his general election campaign in the town where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964, invoking "states' rights." This is the most glaring omission in his argument that Reagan's campaign was "devoid of any kind of racism."I'm just wondering about not the residual evidence of that. So there's no race, but there is bussing as an issue.
What issue?
Busing. And they were a bit of an issue.
Okay, let's talk about what an issue is, Saul. When I talk about an issue… Say I'm a pollster, I ask an open-ended question, 'what's the biggest issue facing you today?' You poll 600 people and then you put it on a continuum. 45 to 55% will say economics, 12% will say national defense, busing will not even register on the top 10. On an aggregate, busing hadn't been in the top 10 of open-ended issue questions in any poll I've seen since 1972. And now it's gone.
No no no, excuse me Saul, I don't wanna… It's gone. It's been on the top 10, but it hadn't been top 10 by 1978 to 1980, bussing hadn't even a top 10 issue.
So sure, everything's an issue, but what I'm saying...
I'm just wondering how much residual there is, that recall racism and the anti-government, anti-Washington states rights, return to states rights, de-federalize... how much there is in the old day, residual of the old days there is in the antipathy towards welfare programs, poverty programs, which all provide Blacks.
And other political social economic problems which do give power to Black folks, or poor folks or identify the bigger problem. Again, it's not really southern, but the Legal Services Corporation — they give problems to the municipalities of Mississippi who want a gerrymander there, and I'm just wondering...
Sure, OK, but I think this, and don't get me wrong: You go out there in the white country clubs, and they're still going to sit out there and say, 'shit I'm tired of them getting everything', and all that. But the bottom line is, I gotta look here. The bottom line is it's a mainstream thing now, and it's not grounded in racism as much as it kind of the "Network" movie syndrome: "I'm mad as hell and I can't take it anymore."
Now, statistically, the poor people who are receiving all these things are Blacks. Now some of the Southern stuff might still be racism, but there's such a wide spread thing right now I think it's almost evolving into a class struggle-type issue, rather than a racism issue.
When you say widespread, you mean ...
I mean can go to a country club, you know, I live on a country club.
OK.
But what I'm saying is you sit in a cocktail, country anywhere, and they'll still say, 'I'm tired of these fuckers ....'
Anywhere in the country, I understand yeah.
And if were a Black, it wouldn't make any difference. There's always going to be a southern ... I'll say this, my generation, you're my generation, will be the first generation of Southerners that won't be prejudiced. Totally.
Um… In other words, my parents uh and even people five or ten years older than me were touched with things [they were believing]. But what I'm saying is that has been sublimated by a bunch of other issues. But [more] importantly, just people in the South are just like any people in the history of the world. Once something becomes a reality, people adapt to it. We fought, we kicked, we struggled with all of these problems, first in '54 then the Voting Rights stuff in '64… but by the '70s it was a reality. And you just adapt to reality and move on. So I'm not saying we… you know, that it was done down here because it we thought it was great or we finally understood or anything. It became a part of our life. Uh so in these '80 elections … and… so what I'm saying is, back to our Southern strategy.
So the Southern strategy now, uh basically… [!!!] and here's another thing, Saul you and I have talked about this. Is who controls elections in the South. State-wide elections in the South are controlled by, if you want to use the term George Wallace voters. Because statistically Blacks went for John F. Kennedy en masse, they went for Johnson en masse, they went for uh Humphrey en masse, they went for Carter en masse, and McGovern en masse, all six.
The country club whites went for the uh uh Republican every time en masse.
So, the blue collar voter in 1964 goes for Goldwater, he carries the deep south — remember the other two votes stay the same. 1968 the blue collar voter goes for George Wallace and carries the same voters on. 1972 he goes for Nixon. 1976 he goes for Carter, now here's… we're leading up to my own strategy in the Deep South in 1980. The whole focus group in the South is that blue collar worker. Now that's important when we talk about the racist thing relations thing, because he's also the guy that's most threatened by the Blacks and he's also prone to be "a racist".
Until 1980, and a little bit in 76, the race issue was how you approach that voter. Plus, the most conservative guy on fiscal matters always got his vote, and the toughest son of a bitch in national defense and foreign policy are always going to got his vote.
So what happened is Jimmy Carter in '76 was able... plus these people's regional pride is always biggest with the lower intellects and lower income groups. So on the basis of regional pride, I'm one of you, present issues… Being a born-again Christian, which smacks of conservatism, trying to be conservative, he gets that group en masse in 76, and carries them all the same.
Well, once he got there, and this is an important point, it was his to lose. It wasn't ours to win, it was Carter's to lose. All Carter had to do was run in place. Well he didn't do that. He took that for granted. He went out. He didn't stay on the issue. And we were able to go back in… which I didn't think we were going to be able… I thought we could really wait and hamstring him, wait and back in there…
But what he did uh is default his own home turf. Not on anything to do with racism, or the race question, but on economics and on national defense. It was his to lose. So the fact of the matter is, the South is Reagan's to lose now. And as long as… if Reagan goes and denounces his own economic policy or doesn't balance the budget or, you know, he could lose the South. But if not, he's going to win the South.
But he's not going to lose the South if he goes along with what the Blacks want on voting rights [ ].
That should be a plus of his. Now in 1968, the whole Southern strategy that Harry and those had put together, the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now they don't have to do that. All you gotta do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues his campaigned on since 1964. And that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cutting taxes, you know that whole cluster, and being tough with national defense. And it's going to be very hard for Reagan to lose.
Whether he, I'm not saying that he does this consciously, but the fact is that he does get the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by doing away with uh… by cutting down on food stamps…
[Atwater prefaces: "Now, y'all aren't quoting me on this?"]
Here's how I would approach that issue as a statistician or a political scientist. Or as a psychologist, which I'm not, is how abstract do you handle the race thing. Now once you start out, and now you all don't quote me on this, you start out in 1954 by saying 'nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger,' that hurts you, backfires, so you say stuff like 'forced busing, states rights' and all that stuff, and you're getting so abstract now, you're talking about cutting taxes and all these things, you're talking about totally economic things, and the byproduct often is Blacks get hurt worse than whites.
And subconsciously maybe that *is* part of it. I'm not saying that, but I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract and that coded, that we're doing away with the racial problem one way or the other.
Do you follow me?
Because obviously sitting around saying, 'we want to cut taxes, we want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of lot more abstract than, 'nigger, nigger.'
So anyway you look at it, race is coming on the back burner.
Reminds me of a great story that is told in uh… One of the biographies of Huey Long. He went to a Catholic hospital which had been a target of the racists down there because uh uh… White folks working on Blacks. White nurses working on Black patients. It was also, he had promised lots of Blacks more jobs, and upgrading jobs, when he was running for elections. So he went to the hospital one day and just raised hell, about all that white people working on Blacks. And why didn't they get some more Blacks in the place to works on blacks rather than having these clean-looking white person working on Blacks. So he satisfied both constituencies. Black lives more jobs and didn't… [ ]
Yeah. And you know, Huey Long, interesting, he was the only single one of those guys who, and you can always find some traces of that stuff, but he consistently didn't use the race relations, and…
Well he used it, but then uh he turned it around for himself…
Yeah, but I mean I'm talking about when you look at [Cliff Barterman] and of these guys…
What about this thing with… [ ]
I don't… now the thing… I don't share that shit, because I'm not satisfied with it.
Does that answer your questions?
Yeah that answers my questions. OK good then.
Is that all you need?
That's all I need.
You doing aright?
I'm doing fine, how bout you? Never did get to the barbecue. I made some by at the house t'other day. Texas style.
Lemme give you -
End of Part One recording
Well that was a good introduction. I was… I'm gonna take you back to 1970 and you can sort of jump from '70 to '80 and ask you what happened to the…
Well, wait a minute, let me make Saul knew that wasn't… that I didn't wanna be quoted. (calling out) Hey Saul?
Part 2 opens with Atwater explicitly reconfirming to a third person (Saul) that he does not want to be quoted — reinforcing that the famous passage was off the record. This is why Lamis kept him anonymous for 15 years.Recording resumes
So I.. so I'm gonna take you back to 1970, we jump from 70 to 80 and the impact of the race issue on the South. And I'm particularly interested in the statewide races and how you see race as what... what importance race was in the races for governor, and senate…
In the '70s.
Yeah, yeah. In the '70s. With the election of these moderate democrats you were talking about, it didn't just fade away, it didn't just stay there, and I was wondering what…
I think what happened is, all these different factors are independent factors, but they can work together also. So you had two things happen in the 70s. You had a situation where, starting in '66 and all through to the '80s in the moderate, or the most liberal, as long… there's an invisible line of where you can have, of where you become a liberal in the south. When you become a liberal, you're in trouble, even in the Democratic primary, but if you are a good moderate um you stake out a victory within the Democratic primaries.
Now you take the situation in '72, '74 and then right on through the '70s where racism is not only a non-issue but it is a dangerous and self-destructive issue in a Democratic primary.
The uh… Blatant liberalism, in most cases, was just as destructive. So what you had was kind of a moderation for in the Democratic primary.
Then you had a development that started in the 60s with the hardening up and the firming development of a 25 to 35% Republican party, um Republican base move. You had the advent of Republican primaries in the South, mostly… there might have been two or three primaries in the 60s, but in the 70s you had a new creature called Republican primaries. I know we had our first one in South Carolina in 1974.
Basically… conservative primaries were extremely conservative, extremely right wing. Now race never became an issue as such. It was basically who was the most conservative. And when I say conservative, I mean conservative.
Um… but race was never discussed within the framework of a Republican primary that I'm…
Then you go to a general election, and what you had was a Republican conservative against a moderate Democrat. The Republican conservative got, generally, that's where he... you know…
First of all, the issues were devoid of any talk about about race and so forth for the most part… But what you had winning these, I mean in the general election, the candidate that could best... The way the Republicans won was getting the Wallace vote. Getting the Blue collar vote. Getting the white vote. So, you know, any way that you, in a coded sense… any racism that was used... busing…
Like Brock's race in 70 when he won the senate seat, and even the one in Virginia...
That's right, any racism was used ... busing ...
They continued that. Bernie in Florida.
Well, now, I didn't follow that race at all.
But just to tie in with this, you talked about the white blue collar voter being a sort of pivotal vote you were talking about presidential elections in particular. What I'm more interested in is the gubernatorial and US senator race.
Allright, allright, gubernatorial.
And in those, wouldn't you say that in most states the Democratic candidate's been able in that period from about '72 to '78 to pull those voters, keep those voters, and that's why the Republican Party...
That is right. Now let me give you an example of someone who I'm very close to, that happened here. Mr. Strom Thurmond. Basically Republicans, and I think Aiden could be horseshit here but I mean that's irrelevant. Republicans still don't get elected state-wide in the South. And the reason is, cuz the Republican party has not been able to put together a coalition of enough blue collar people, George Wallace-type voters and Republi… you know, country club people.
Would you… did you say '80 was the ...
'80 was the first year that Republicans did that, in… on another level other than just presidential. In other words, Richard Nixon in '72 with the fifth congressional district in South Carolina gets 72% of the vote, Republican congressional candidate gets 31. And you had that across the whole south. In other words, you had to totally separate presidential politics from the rest of politics, but '80 he wins across the South, the candidate that best dealt with the economic issues got 71% of George Wallace-type voter - blue collar. The whole key is getting 70% of that vote, which is very tough to do. Those people are — 'my pappy was a Democrat, and his pappy was a Democrat' kind of people. So in order to get them you have to have some very sexy appealing type of verbiage in the campaign and the right kind of issues to get them. Strom Thurmond's been able to do that better than anybody. He is always ... Strom Thurmond got 82% of the white voters in 1978. He literally got all of the Republicans and all of the blue collar type voters. The average Republican candidate has not been able to penetrate the blue collar voter out there.
Strom is an exception, of course, cuz [ ].
Yeah, that's right. And he has been a Democrat. I'll put it to you this way, I've managed 27 Republican campaigns in the South and I have never used the word Republican, and never put a Republican sentiment on any campaign [that we want to win]. ⚠ The Bandcamp transcript includes a bracketed editorial note from the transcriber: "That '27 campaigns' figure is, apparently, a wild exaggeration, a lie that Atwater injected into the media, got repeated, and then cited the reporting on as evidence of. Similar to how Dick Cheney would leak something to the NYT, and then cite the story he'd planted as evidence of the lie he was trying to circulate. WMD in Iraq, for example." This appears to be the transcriber's own commentary, not from the original recording.
You don't win elections in the South, and I think this is still the case, by advertising that you are Republican. What you have to do is put your candidate up there, have the best candidate, and have the best issues to put together a coalition of basically 30% Republican and basically the breakdown is you've gotta base of 30% Republican, 40% Democrat, 45% Democrat, and the rest Independent. So you literally have to get out there and put all the Independents together and all the Republicans together. And and… There has not really been a meaningful Republican party in the south in the '70s, to the extent of… other than Virginia. Which the way I analyze the parties [ ] you know Virginia is a statistical artifact. And it's not a Southern state as such demographically, when you look at the Deep South. The Deep South is one thing and the peripheral South is another.
Well, how do you see the race in the '80s at this level, sub-Presidential level? Of course I can see your argument about Reagan's use of the issue or non-use of it, but could he have national constituency levels. But how does the Republican party going to come to grips with it?
I mean I think Carol Campbell's an interesting …
Well, I assume you know that he got clouded last routine.
Oh is that right? I interviewed him a couple of years ago.
Yeah, well Campbell and I are back to back in this.
Oh, I'll have to take a look at this. He's a very interesting politician and in this interview he was very candid about the black vote. He talked about that race in South Carolina in '78 for the Governorship and the use of the appeal of the Republican candidate to… I guess the black vote and how it backfired on him because it was a delicate thing, he said. He went out and ran radio ads saying, 'black people why vote for the Democrats? What have they given you, the one party system, segregation and so forth?' Well, he said he over-did it, and I just thought that was interesting.
Campbell was the guy who, I mean I [ ] managed everything he did. So we're kind of two guys who grew up together on this stuff. Well, I think uh… in my judgment Karl Marx [used to write on entitlement]. Race and religion will always be there. The real issue is ultimately the economic issue. I'm not sophisticated enough to be an economic determinist or anything like that, but race will be within the framework of culture, and I feel like there's almost going to be a class struggle [like the atmosphere] and blacks are going to be statistically be on one side of it.
And I think, uh… for instance, the Republican party and I tell these Republican candidates, they're going to have a hard time getting masses of black voters just by appointing a black to be secretary of the the air force or something like that. They're going to either have to change that entire issue or keep the same issues, forget races, let the chips fall where they may, and you're still going to have a black-white split just because of the economics involved.
Let me tell you something I did, I did a study for graduate of Thurmon's work which I [backed him] in '78. We got about 80% of the black vote in the traditional black precincts. Then I went back and selected 300 blacks, and I've gotta [take their information and put it in a statement]. So I went and selected 300 blacks that were 98, 96% white.
$30,000 a year above [ ] which in '78 and '79 was like making $60,000, Thurmond got 38% of them, black vote.
So now what affirmative action and all this is going to do in the long run is create a legitimate black middle class and upper middle class. That voter, in my judgment will be more likely to vote with his economic interest than he will anything else. And that is the voter that I think of just through a fairly slow, but very steady process will go Republican.
Because I'm finding that now. You know… the blacks that have helped me in a few things have been doctors, lawyers and people like that, and they're very interested in getting [wealth]. And they're getting nothing out of the Democratic Party. They get nothing. So I think that is basically what's going to happen. And I think that race as such is going to dissolve as an issue. But you are going to have the race question in the sense of on one side, you're going to have a guy who's a millionaire and he's got something in common with the guy who's making $10,000 bucks a year. You know, he's busting his ass and putting into the system. He's paying taxes, and somebody else is not doing anything and taking out of the system. Those two guys, the George Wallace voter and the millionaire have something in common.
And I'll tell you something else, statistically as the number of non-producers in the system move toward 50%, that makes the system more and more polarity… to where that drives uh… the Wallace guy and the traditional Republican closer and closer together as they become threatened. As their taxes go up and inflation goes up because [the amount they're saddled with society].
But this, moving away from the race issue, just in general, from what you've said I don't get the feeling that you have tremendous optimism for the Republican party in the near future below the presidential level so, is that right? From what you're saying?
No no, let me tell you. I think that there is tremendous opportunity on the Senate level, gubernatorial, and number one statewide. In other words, I believe in kind of a [formal anesthet…] presidential where, the senate, then the governors, then congressional, then the state houses. I think that you have a situation now because this fractured party that you have, like I said it's fractured, that the best candidate that best approaches and best identifies what the economic issues and national defense will win.
Every campaign I was involved in, and I'll just name a few of them. I had Jean Johnston against Richard Maguire, I had Tommy Harpin against Bob Ratnnell, I had John Aperri against John Jennerret. Had Florence Pence against Tom Turnipseed, and all those campaigns were popular…
This is a consulting organization that you…
Yes, that I was president of, as well as doing southern, Deep South and away. And in all of those campaigns, plus I was peripherally involved because one of my partners would follow all these things, and in every one of those races the reason we won was that we best identified the economic issue, best identified the national defense. But our stuff would put the Democrat on their heel.
Now in a situation where the Democrat best identified the most credibility with the economic issues and all he wanted was no trouble in South Carolina. Which Strom walked over this other guy, he was able to petition himself as being conservative on the budget committee, this that and the other thing, which made for no problem.
We were able to paint Richardson Prior as a big spender, part of the problem-type guy, inflationary type guy. Same with Bud Ravenell. Placed our guy as the conservative and this that and the other.
I think we're now down to blood… I mean real issues. I mean economics and national defense. And I think in any given situation that if the Republican can best stake out those issues he wins. State-wide or on congressional basis. And that never has been the case. '80 is, I think the watermark year in that sense.
You mention that a fractured party identification situation. These white, blue collar Southerners. If they, when asked by survey what party they vote for, they invariably say Democratic party.
Or Independent.
Rarely Republican. But then if they consistently vote Republican, or be lured to vote, at some point you almost want to call them out.
Well sure. They will call themselves Independents an awful long time.
Why?
Well because, it always ... They're still voting for the Democrat that lives down the street and some county council. I mean, they are Independents because they're voting for a Republican for the president, Republican US senate, Republican congressman, but there's 15 other [opposites on the battle] and every one of those guys looking forward to Democrat.
When is that going to change.
Now, on the local level ... Okay first of all, I've did a paper on the Congress, and I'm sure you've seen the same numbers. A US Senator has a 61% of getting re-elected, a congressman has a 96.4% chance of getting reelected. Is that because of the homogeneity of the district, the whole bit.
So therefore those simple statistics, I can look back at 1980 and say, I didn't think it, but sure it was possible for pick up all those statistically for us, a 40% chance. That's pretty good numbers, it's not great. But it's very tough to fight the statistics that have nothing to do with the Party identification, nothing to do with anything else.
Basically the power of incumbency, and the congressional district.
Now when you get down even on a smaller level, these single… these little state houses and state senates and you've got all these incumbents mobbing the House of Representatives. South Carolina, we've got some revolutionary country. We now control the congressional delegation. Four Republican congressmen, a Republican US Senator. 20 Republicans in the house, 125 Democrats. Those 125 Democrats are going to run for re-election. There's no way to entice them to switch parties because you can't go out and tell a guy, 'if you switch we'll give you all this good stuff,' because they're still a majority party and as long as those guys are running for re-election. So the only way you basically win is in new seats. You see what I mean?
Yeah.
So you slowly creep up on new seats. There's actually three parties in the south. There's a Presiden… there's a state-wide party system, there's a congressional district party system and there's a local party system. And they're three separate entities. There's some similarities, some changes [ ]. But there are actually three party systems, which generates a whole set of circumstances [unique to here].
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Are the Southerners looking to the Reagan Administration for assistance in boosting re-alignment at the local level, and can it?
Well, very candidly this is going to be very tough. I think the whole nature of politics because of the [ ] party system, because of the media system and so forth, creates a situation in which one individual or one individual presidency, and the individual being President Reagan, is going to have a hard time affecting behavior in situations unrelated to his own situation… In other words, Reagan has a good chance of affecting behavior with the institute he needs to talk about. Please support my tax program, please support [Graham-Lively].
But for any politician in America has a tough time anymore of affecting behavior in other races. Now I have not done a paper, but I've read studies and I firmly as a practitioner can tell you that from the 70s, starting in the '70s there's a very big definite trend line on enforcements and decreasing effect.
And now in South Carolina, I've given you as an example, I support Reagan, I was his key campaign director. Jim Edwards and Strom Thurmund everybody came out for [kind]. Now in 1955 or something like that there's no question, there wouldn't even have be a race in South Carolina.
But as much as… Thurmond's the most… got more credibility than any other political figure probably in the country within his own state. He was not able to keep us from just walking all over [Johnny Common]. If it had been Strom Thurmond versus Ronald Reagan, Thurmond would have killed him. But what I'm saying, in general, the president can't go at it even like he could in the '60s, but he couldn't do it in the '60s. In other words, it never happened. What they wanted to happen in the '60 never happened. Fellas, we can do a lot of things to help, we can go out and bring candy and sit here and help the community. Hopefully the bloc grant, you know a whole bunch of things to help, but I do not see one person of one institution drastically being able to re-alter at some point.
But if any one person is doing it, you've got the job.
That's right. What I'm doing is I'm saying, I've got the job but I'm trying to be reasonable about it. Let me see this thing, this might be something that you could use….
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But it basically addresses this same thing of pre-synchronization.
But what about that race in Mississippi yesterday?
Well it's a good example of what I'm talking about. If we had... There ain't no question that Reagan is popular as shit down there, because I saw three polls on the thing, he's up in the 70s. And if endorsements were all they were cracked up to be, I mean the guy would've walked all over this board. That's just one of many many issues, and the more important issues are right down in there.
The heavy Black vote of course, wanted [more], so the Republican had a majority of white supporters.
Oh sure, I mean…
Transcript ends. Original recording runs approximately 42 minutes total.