'Hard, hard work': Georgia Republicans seek African American votes

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/13/georgia-republicans-african-american-votes

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“It is a David and Goliath challenge,” Leo Smith says of his job. “It is hard, hard, hard, work.”

There can be few things in politics quite as difficult as persuading African Americans in Georgia to vote Republican.

“Traditionally there has been a divide,” Smith concedes. “You can look at Atlanta. Northern Atlanta: white, wealthy Republican. South Atlanta: mostly black, minority, Democrat, poor.”

Smith, 50, used to work in college admissions, recruiting minorities to almost exclusively white universities. Now he fulfils a similar role for the Peach State’s mostly white Republican Party. He recently sat down for an interview with the Guardian, giving an unvarnished insight into the challenges faced by the Georgia Republicans in their quest to attract minority voters.

The thrust of his job, he said, was to bring together Georgia’s Republican and African American worlds, which he acknowledges rarely overlap.

“I will take a candidate who needs to bridge that relationship and take him to a black church with me. I will say: ‘Hey, the first time we go, you’re just going to sit there. You’re not going to say anything and you’re not going to do anything.'”

At the next visit, Smith might encourage the Republican candidate to “share some chicken nuggets or something with the pastor”. But it won’t be until the third or fourth meeting, Smith said, that they will broach the possibility of an audience with the congregation.

“We need to have touch points with these people,” he said. “It's almost like soft selling.”

Smith also likes to compare his role to that of a schoolboy trying to fix-up a friend with a long-shot date. “I'm the wing man,” he chuckled. “I am the coordinator of physical encounters.”

The Republican National Committee in Washington has hired eight other wing men and women – their official titles are “minority engagement directors” – in Virginia, Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama and Florida.

In the 2012 presidential election, Mitt Romney won only 17% of the national non-white vote, an appalling result that underscored the Republicans' urgent need to lure minority voters. Ahead of this year’s midterms, the RNC said it was spending $60m on minority outreach efforts and hired more than 50 paid staff to help attract black, Asian and Latino voters across 19 states.

Georgia, however, is a particular problem. The GOP fares particularly badly among African Americans there and, to a lesser extent, Latinos and Asians as well. Smith's job is to start fixing that – and fast.

With minorities forming a growing slice of Georgia’s electorate the state, which has gone Republican in every presidential election for the past 30 years – with the exception of Bill Clinton’s first campaign in 1992 – could be a swing state in the 2016 vote.

Signs of that shift could be seen even sooner. Democrats believe their candidate for Georgia’s open Senate seat, Michelle Nunn, could win in November’s midterm election.

Smith is focusing his efforts on a handful of regions in the state, including Savannah, Albany and Augusta, where there are precincts in which 25% of the minority population voted for Romney – the high-water mark.

In each area, Smith has recruited African American “surrogates”, training them to host events – “women and wine” nights, college gatherings, movie screenings – where they can softly market the GOP.

He believes African Americans are naturally inclined to a conservative belief system, in tune with the Republican focus on the family and free-market economics. Republicans, he says, are already capitalising on this, pointing to the recent $25m grant by the billionaire Koch brothers to the United Negro College Fund, which gives students financial aid.

“We need to make Charles Koch not sound like something you snort, but something you can aspire to be like,” Smith said. “What is wrong with wealth? Nothing.”

Leaning forward, Smith adopted a stage whisper, re-enacting one of the quiet conversations he says he often has with African Americans.

“Do you really hate rich fat cats? But what if you had an opportunity to be rich fat cat tomorrow. Would you take it?” Switching to a different voice, he added: “Yeah! I would!”

Smith concluded: “I never went to a black person who said that they don’t want to be a rich fat cat.”

In a state as racially scarred as Georgia, however, it is unclear whether appeals to the inner capitalist will do the trick. African American loyalty to the Democratic Party has roots that stretch back decades.

Smith, who was once a three-county president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), insists – rightly – that both parties have ugly histories of discrimination. He stresses, as many in the GOP do when talking about issues of race and the two parties, that Abraham Lincoln, the president who abolished slavery, was a Republican.

“Democrats were the Dixiecrats,” Smith said, referring to the party’s white, segregationist wing in the south. “They were the people who wouldn’t let black Americans attend their schools, they were the people who populated the KKK.”

That changed, and it was the Democrats, under presidents John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson, who ushered through civil rights legislation in the 1960s. As a result, many southern whites began turning to the GOP. The relationship between black voters and the Democratic Party was cemented.

Smith’s point, though, is that the pendulum could swing back again. “Things change,” he said. “Society has shifts.”

The problem for Republicans is that the pendulum is continuing on the same trajectory. Voting patterns reveal that the deep south is becoming more racially divided, not less. Barack Obama’s presidential wins have had a particularly polarising effect in the south, pulling blacks closer to the Democrats and making whites more inclined to vote Republican.

In Georgia, the colour divide remains stark. It is even on display in the reception area of the GOP's state headquarters, in Atlanta, where Smith works. Portraits on the wall show the two dozen Republican politicians holding statewide office. All of them are white men.

Smith insists the party is making great strides to change that and points out that during last month's primaries, the GOP fielded a record number of minority candidates.

Asked how many actually won the Republican nomination, Smith sighed and began to count aloud.

“State superintendent – Ashley Bell. No. Vivian Childs. Did not make it through primary. Fitz Johnson. Did not make it through the primary. Gil Williams. Did not make it through the primary. Derrick Grayson ran in a Senate race, but he didn’t make it through.”

Arguably, Grayson is the kind of candidate the party does not want to attract. He sparked controversy by posting a YouTube video of himself supporting Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher who, in the midst of a standoff with the federal government, ranted about “the Negro” who, he ventured, may have been “better off as slaves, picking cotton”.

Grayson ended up sixth out of seven candidates in the Senate primary, winning 1% of the vote. Smith declined to comment on the candidate's support for Bundy.

After Grayson, Smith stopped counting African Americans who have tried and failed to win the GOP’s nomination in Georgia.

“But look at all these names I’m mentioning,” he said. “That’s a start. They ‘also ran’.”

Days later, over the phone, Smith said there were actually two African Americans (both state legislature candidates) who secured the Republican nomination.

Both, he added, had been unopposed. Getting minorities on the Republican ballot is a crucial first step if the party is going to rebuild its standing among non-white voters, in Georgia as elsewhere.

“Difficulty is no stranger to civil rights movements,” Smith said. “This is a civil rights movement. And we’ve got to start somewhere.”