It didn’t take long, however, for Nixon to change his mind. Running for president in 1968, Nixon decided to capitalize on racial resentment himself, leveraging white fear with calls for “law and order” and a pledge to fight the “war on drugs.” This so-called Southern Strategy helped the GOP win the presidency and later retake the Senate after being out of power for almost thirty years. Future Republican candidates would rely on similar appeals to win the presidency, though always with coded language, whether it was Ronald Reagan shaming “welfare queens” or George H. W. Bush disparaging Willie
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