KEVIN PHILLIPS AND REPUBLICAN POLITICS
Kevin Phillips first became known for his 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority, written in 1967 and 1968, and used by Richard Nixon in his successful 1968 presidential campaign. The Emerging Republican Majority predicted a new era of GOP control of the presidency based on the realignment of the South. Newsweek described it as “the political bible of the Nixon Administration.”
Educated at Colgate, the University of Edinburgh and Harvard Law School, Phillips, at age 27, had served as the chief elections and voting patterns analyst for the 1968 Nixon campaign. In 1969, he began twelve months tenure as Special Assistant to the U.S. Attorney General, but left in 1970 to become a syndicated newspaper columnist. In 1971, he became president of the American Political Research Corporation and editor-publisher of the American Political Report (through 1998). Discussions of the 1972 presidential election widely acknowledged how it had followed Phillips’s outlines, but then in1973-74, the Watergate scandals confused the future.
After Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 restored the 1968-72 dynamics, Phillips was generally acknowledged as the Republican party’s principal electoral theoretician. In 1982, the Wall Street Journal described him as “the leading conservative electoral analyst -- the man who invented the Sun Belt, named the New Right, and prophesied ‘The Emerging Republican Majority’ in 1969.”
In 1978, Phillips became a radio commentator for CBS News, and in 1984, for National Public Radio as well. He served as a commentator for CBS Television News during the 1984, 1988, 1992 and 1996 election seasons and conventions....
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