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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

July 9: GOP To African-Americans: You Need To Change, Not Us

Embedded in the furor over the MS GOP SEN runoff is an argument by conservatives about the legitimacy of pursuing African-American votes that could prove toxic the more it is articulated. I discussed it at some length today at TPMCafe:

[F]or the immediate future, we’re going to hear ever-more-shrill arguments from the right in Mississippi and elsewhere that by appealing to African-Americans on the positive grounds of potency in securing federal dollars, and the negative grounds that the challenger is a bit of a neo-Confederate, Cochran’s campaign replicated the Democratic “race card” appeals that conservatives so violently resent.
Since state Sen. McDaniel’s campaign cannot repudiate the very idea of outreach to African-Americans (particularly in a state where black folks make up well over a third of the population), it’s forced into an argument that outreach can only be pursued via the right kind of message to the right kind of African-Americans. McDaniel’s campaign manager, state Sen. Melanie Sojourner, exposed the perils of that argument in a Facebook post wherein she pledged never to endorse Cochran no matter what the party decides:

Throughout my campaign and since I’ve repeatedly made comments about how I felt the Republican Party was doing itself a disservice by not reaching out to conservative African-Americans. Where I’m from, in rural Mississippi, I grew up knowing lots a [sic] God-fearing, hard-working, independent conservative minded African-American family’s [sic]. On the McDaniel campaign we had two young men from just such family’s on our staff.

So it seems anything other than appealing to self-consciously conservative African-Americans is forbidden.
Aside from the implied suggestion that the vast majority of African-Americans are not God-fearing or hard-working, and may actually be selling their votes for government benefits (a charge at the rotten heart of the many extant GOP versions of Mitt Romney’s “47 percent video”), how likely is it that the kind of minority outreach deemed kosher by this and other conservative activists could actually succeed? Not very.
Despite the many rationalizations and revisionist takes we hear about the GOP and race during the 1960s, the truth is Republican support among African-Americans collapsed dramatically at the moment of the first conservative movement conquest of the GOP, in 1964, and has never recovered.
From the New Deal through 1960, the GOP share of the African-American vote in presidential elections averaged about 30 percent; it was 32 percent in 1960, in part because a lot of African-American clergy shared their white Protestants’ antipathy to the Catholic John F. Kennedy (who also, of course, was supported by many southern segregationists). But in 1964, even as Barry Goldwater was sweeping the white vote in much of the deep south after he voted against the Civil Rights Act, the GOP share of the black vote plunged to 6 percent. (That didn’t much matter in Mississippi, as it happens, since African-Americans outside a few cities were largely barred from voting; Goldwater took 87 percent of the vote in the Magnolia State).
African-American support for GOP presidential candidates has since peaked at 15 percent twice in years the party promoted a “centrist” image (1968 and 1976). The Great Communicator of the conservative message, Ronald Reagan, pulled 12 percent and 9 percent of the black vote in his two general elections. There was great excitement in 2004 when George W. Bush, deploying both “compassionate conservatism” and hostility to same-sex marriage, won 11 percent of the African-American vote. And now, as of 2012, the vote share is back down to 6 percent, right where it was in 1964.
The idea that becoming more conservative is going to lift the prospects of Republicans among African-Americans is a complete hallucination. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say, reflecting Sojourner’s comments, that conservatives want African-Americans to change before they are worthy of outreach.

So do Republicans really want to be a Big Tent party that’s not mainly limited to older white folks? Not, it seems, if that means they have to change.

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