I dislike use of the term "southern strategy" but I do think they made a concerted effort to appeal to whites.
This is not a matter of opinion. This was readily admitted by numerous GOP Party strategists since the time of Nixon. And they were not shy about using the term “Southern strategy” to describe what they were doing either.
“(Nixon) emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognized this while not appearing to"
- Nixon White House Chief of Staff HR Halderman
Ronald Reagan’s chief political adviser, Lee Atwater, in an interview in 1981:
“Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [Reagan] doesn't have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964 [...] and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster...
Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the
Wallacevoter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on
food stamps?
Atwater: Y'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. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] 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 are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."