The GOP’s sad efforts at African American outreach
by digby
I wrote about the GOP’s pathetic attempt to pretend they are conducting outreach in the African American community today for Salon:
It has often been my observation that every African American Republican must be on cable TV. There aren’t very many but that’s only because there are almost no African American Republicans at all. This is not to say that black conservatives aren’t sincere in their political beliefs. It’s just that they represent a vanishingly small minority of the African American constituency: According to Gallup, only 2 percent identify as Republican. That is a major hill to climb for the GOP and it makes you wonder why they would even try to present themselves as an integrated party.
Historically, African Americans were Republican, of course. Abraham Lincoln was a Republican and you can imagine that that was as strong a validator for them as you can get. GOP hacks love to dredge this up as some sort of proof that black Americans are more naturally Republican but that’s just as ludicrous as saying that Martin Luther King was a conservative. The fact is that African Americans were Republicans from the post-Civil War period until the turn of the century. After all, the Democratic Party’s stronghold was in the South, where most blacks lived. It was white supremacist and didn’t allow black people to vote at all.
Franklin Roosevelt attracted a lot of black votes, although his deals with the the Southern Democrat devils often excluded them from his programs. But they liked his philosophy, as most of America did, and by 1936 he was getting 70 percent of the black vote. It wasn’t until the late 40s that a majority called themselves Democrats, though, and that was tied to a particular set of policies: in 1948, Harry Truman integrated the military and the federal civil service. But Republicans still got 30% of the African American vote until the mid-60s when Lyndon Johnson got civil rights legislation passed.
Now, Republicans could have greeted that migration to the Democratic Party a number of different ways, perhaps most logically by trying to beat the Democrats at their own game. But they let their African American constituency go slowly at first and then all at once by making a fateful decision. In 1964 Barry Goldwater’s campaign decided to oppose civil rights legislation. And by 1968, the party fully committed to a Southern Strategy to appeal to white southerners and their brethren in the north who were hostile to civil rights and African Americans in general. And that strategy led to decades of race baiting and dog-whistling and “law and order” campaigns designed to divide white America from black America.
This recent history is all disputed by conservatives, of course, who think they’re being clever by pointing out that it was Southern Democrats who instituted and fought for Jim Crow so African Americans should by all rights be Republicans even today. Let’s just say they aren’t as clever as they think they are and African Americans certainly aren’t that dumb.
But the Republican party isn’t really trying to get black votes (or at least they’re not willing to make any concessions in their basic policies to make that happen.) However, they have a problem with a constituency they do need to vote for them: decent white people. And decent white people don’t want to be complicit in racism. (Granted, most decent white people are complicit in racism in a thousand different ways even if they don’t fully realize it, but voting for a party that is overtly racist is so obviously wrong that many of them will balk at such an association.) And since the Republicans have alienated virtually all Americans of color, they must get a large percentage of whites in order to win political power.
It goes on to show some of their other attempts at outreach most recently a very sad affair in which they tried to honor black music and Rence Priebus, chairman of the RNC, ditched the event at the last minute. Sad.
They’ve got a serious problem nationally and it’s going to get worse. The question is whether their ongoing attempts to suppress the votes and the influence of racial minorities will outweigh the votes of racial minorities and decent white folk. In the short run they may be able to eke out some advantage. Long term they’re in trouble.
.