Phillips died Monday in a hospice near his home in Naples, Florida, according to his wife, Martha Henderson Phillips. The cause of death was Alzheimer’s disease.
“The Emerging Republican Majority” was published in the summer of 1969, just months after Richard Nixon narrowly defeated Democrat Hubert Humphrey for the presidency. Phillips, a Nixon campaign adviser at the time, was a young statistician who studied voting patterns dating back to the country’s founding.
In his book, Phillips predicted Nixon’s victory and identified the appeal of the far-right third-party candidate George Wallace as the beginning of a paradigm shift in American politics. He argued that a powerful Republican coalition was emerging, driven by a backlash against the Civil Rights Movement and Great Society programs, as well as by the growth of Republican-leaning suburbs and the decline of urban areas and other centers of Democratic power.
While the Democratic Party had traditionally benefited from economic resentment, Phillips believed that Republicans could win by tapping into cultural resentment.
Phillips, who briefly served in Nixon’s Justice Department, was not the only analyst predicting an era of Republican control, but his book became influential due to its labels such as “Sun Belt” for the thriving Republican communities in the South and West, and “The Southern strategy” for the exploitation of racist fears to gain support.
“The Emerging Republican Majority” was initially met with skepticism from the Nixon administration, but the realignment in the South was crucial to Republicans winning four out of five presidential elections from 1972 to 1988. However, Phillips was criticized for overlooking the role of evangelical and Hispanic voters, which ultimately helped Democrats prevail in California and elsewhere in the 1990s.
Despite this criticism, Phillips’ book remained highly regarded, to the extent that when liberal analysts John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira anticipated a Democratic comeback in 2002, they called their publication “The Emerging Democratic Majority.”
Over time, Phillips became a disillusioned critic of both parties. In the 1970s, he supported efforts to use antitrust legislation against television networks, which were seen as biased against Republicans. But by the 1980s, he had lost confidence in the future of the Republican Party and criticized their policies.
In his 1990 book, “The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath,” Phillips lamented the state of politics under GOP rule. He criticized the rise in income inequality during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and labeled Democrats as conformist and supportive of the prevailing entrepreneurial free-market mood.
Despite the controversy, Phillips’ contributions to political analysis continue to shape the way commentators view American politics. He leaves behind a legacy of forecasting and critical analysis that will be remembered in the years to come.
