Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham on Sunday pointed to the roots of Southern strategy of the late 1960s — which appealed to racism in the South — as an example of how the Republican Party should reform itself after President Barack Obama won re-election.

“If the reaction to the election is let’s dig into our core principles and try to remake them, I think the GOP will lose even more seats in 2014,” Ingraham told Fox News host Chris Wallace. “If it becomes a bidding war with Republicans in either this group or that group — whether it’s Latinos or women — we’re going to give you more stuff or we’re going to do amnesty plus… it’s not going to work.”

ADVERTISEMENT

“The Republicans have to take a lesson from — and I hate to bring up Reagan again — when Goldwater got shellacked in ’64, Bill Buckley and Brent Bozell Sr. and all these conservatives got together and they said, we’re going to figure out how to sell this idea of economic conservatism and the conservative framework to new voters. And they went into the South and they transformed Mississippi and Alabama, all these places where people had never voted Republican before.”

In his book “From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism,” author Joseph Lowndes points out that William F. Buckley’s used his National Review to argue that southern whites were superior to blacks and Brent Bozell wrote that the federal government had no right to end segregation.

The National Review later moved away from overt racism and supported Barry Goldwater, whose presidential run became the template for the “Southern strategy” to appeal to white voters in the South.

Watch this video from Fox’s Fox News Sunday, broadcast Nov. 11, 2012.