Kevin Phillips, strategist who forecast rising Republican power, dies at 82

By HILLEL ITALIE
AP National Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Kevin Phillips, the author, commentator and political strategist whose landmark 1969 book, “The Emerging Republican Majority,” became a blueprint for GOP thinking in the 1970s and beyond, has died. He was 82. Phillips foresaw Richard Nixon’s 1968 victory as the beginning of a paradigm shift in American politics, driven by a backlash against the Civil Rights Movement and Great Society programs. His wife, Martha Henderson Phillips, said he died Monday in a hospice near his home in Naples, Florida. The cause of death was Alzheimer’s disease. Phillips married Henderson in 1968 and had three children.