Nixon had to prepare for the fact that Goldwater would probably be selected and that he would suffer a landslide defeat. However, Nixon knew had a fighting chance to winning the Republican nomination- and the secret to winning lied throughout the South. Many reporters believed that Nixon’s Southern Strategy was an extension of Goldwater’s efforts to gain support of whites in the old confederacy; but Nixon denied that he had picked up where Goldwater had left off. “The idea that Goldwater started the Southern Strategy is bullshit,” Nixon stated this to a biographer. He wanted people to believe that he was the original strategy