Richard Nixon and Strom Thurmond ginned up the Southern Strategy in 1968. For 40 years, Dixie gave the Republicans an almost insurmountable edge in the Electoral College. The GOP won seven of the next 10 presidential elections.

Now Republicans are trapped by their history.

The only counties where Republicans gained in 2008 were in Appalachia and the Deep South. Look at an electoral map, and you see the red states – what Sarah Palin might call “the real America” – shrinking.

Obama swept the Northeast, the Midwest and the West Coast. He made inroads into the South – North Carolina, Virginia and Florida. He won states in the Mountain West.

Republicans are in danger of becoming the party of angry white men. They lost Hispanics 2-1. They lost young voters. They lost women. They lost better-educated voters in a society that is becoming better-educated.

The issues that made the Southern Strategy work now work against Republicans: opposition to civil rights, an anti-government ideology and intolerance for anybody who is different.

The Republicans derided environmentalists, and the country went green.

They defended business, and the economic crisis made business unpopular.

They demonized immigrants, and the immigrants and their children may never forgive them. Wait until Latinos become the majority in Texas.

They dismissed young voters, and a new cohort of Democratic-leaning young voters is now excited about politics. And they’ll be voting for decades.

Jack Betts put it well in his column about how Nixon and Jesse Helms campaigned in 1972:

“Nixon and Helms were whipping up fervor for law and order and traditional values and inciting the crowd against long hairs, liberals, criminals — anyone who could be demonized into an ‘us versus them’ formula that would marginalize Democrats and elect Republicans.”

In politics, so often, success breeds failure. You keep doing the things that used to work, until suddenly they stop working. Then you’re trapped.

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