Why Can’t the G.O.P. Get Real With Black Voters?
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Version 0 of 1. Cambridge, Mass. — With every news cycle focused on Donald J. Trump’s latest misstep, it’s easy to overlook the fact that his campaign has drawn record low support from African-Americans — and that this achievement, as it were, illuminates something worrisome within the Republican Party itself. As usual, this year’s convention featured African-Americans playing highly specific public roles: as speakers, surrogates, attendees and delegation leaders; they delivered sermons in praise of God and Mr. Trump; spoke of black poverty, unemployment and jobs; and berated the Black Lives Matter movement, offering stringent promises of a swift return to “law and order.” This black hyper-visibility was intentional, a symbolic corrective for the convention’s astonishing lack of diversity: Of the 2,472 delegates, only 18 were black. It is the lowest percentage on record, lower even than 1964, the year the party selected Barry Goldwater as its presidential nominee. Since that disastrous campaign, the Republicans have at least talked about reconnecting with African-Americans. In 2013, the Republican National Committee rolled out its “Growth and Opportunity Project,” a critical self-assessment intended to prevent the party’s share of minority votes from slipping further. The rise of Mr. Trump and his brand of racial populism has undermined nearly all the report’s recommendations on minority outreach. Among black voters, 90 to 94 percent hold unfavorable views of the nominee. By current polling accounts, he is winning between 4 to 9 percent of the black vote. Sally Bradshaw, one of Jeb Bush’s top advisers and a co-author of the 2013 report, recently announced that she was leaving the party, citing Republicans’ decision to nominate “a bigot.” And yet, when you look beyond such glossy items like that 2013 report, the damage done by Mr. Trump feels of a piece with the party’s history, however much people like Ms. Bradshaw protest. Set aside the instances of racial demagogy; even at its best moments, for decades the party has been unable to move beyond broad assessments and platitudes to advocate substantive change. The party has had no shortage of analyses devoted to fixing its “race problem.” In 1939, the future Nobel Prize winner Ralph Bunche created a blueprint for winning over black voters. Dozens of reports followed, usually in the aftermath of a disastrous presidential loss. After the 1964 presidential election, when the Republicans garnered only 6 percent of the black vote, a group of former Goldwater supporters concluded that the party could no longer rely on “racist appeals, overt or covert.” But as with the past four years, whenever the party begins to make incremental gains in its relationship with African-Americans, it finds itself pulled to the right, often at the expense of black needs and interests. In 1960, Richard M. Nixon won 32 percent of the black vote; in 1962, he told Ebony that it would be foolish and a “violation of G.O.P. principles” to give up on black voters. By 1968, as the Republican presidential nominee, he had alienated African-Americans with his racially charged language of “law and order.” When paired with his back-room dealings with South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, Nixon’s “law and order” stance ultimately destabilized the R.N.C.’s initiatives to support black communities. Jackie Robinson, who had campaigned tirelessly for Nixon eight years earlier, quit the G.O.P. in 1968 for exactly this reason. Two years later, black R.N.C. officials would follow Robinson’s lead, pointing the finger at Nixon’s lack of “moral leadership” on race. “We don’t want the black vote,” one former staffer lamented. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and well into the 1990s and 2000s, the story remains the same. Black Republicans regularly sued the G.O.P. for racial discrimination, formed protest organizations and accused party leaders of sabotaging black outreach efforts and pitting the interests of white voters against those of black voters. Frustrated black Republicans, from Clarence Thomas to Colin Powell, have all at some point or another called for the G.O.P. to address its “race problem.” And like clockwork, Republican leaders and officials produced reports designed to broaden the racial demographics of the party tent. There have been moments of success. Jack Kemp comes to mind; in 1986, he seemed to have won a consensus among Republicans with his plan to turn it into the “party of civil rights and of human rights and voting rights and legal rights and economic opportunities.” In 2016, moments such as these have all but disappeared. The occasional glimpse of substantive Republican political and policy considerations of African-Americans is almost immediately undercut by the alienating behavior and rhetoric of Mr. Trump. As we move into the final months of the campaign cycle, the Republican Party will once again find itself at a racial crossroads. If the presidential nominee loses in the general election, leaders will once again engage in a measure of soul searching on matters of race and inclusion. And perhaps this time, instead of saying “farewell” to African-Americans, the G.O.P. will say “welcome” — and actually mean it. |