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How the GOP Can Win Black Votes: Sideline the NAACP
A note: I’m using NAACP is a stand-in for itself and every other supposed “civil rights” organization that purports to speak on behalf of the black community, but, in actuality, has cast its own mission and history aside, and is now no more than a fully owned and operated subsidiary of the Democratic National Committee.
Let’s be clear here: any GOP plan involving the NAACP, the Urban League, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the Congressional Black Caucus, etc., or any affiliated individuals (e.g., pastors, community organizers, etc.) in any outreach effort to the black community is not only a waste of time, but a willfully stupid act of self-sabotage. It earns you no goodwill, and it only arms them with extra credibility for when they inevitably turn around to smear you as a racist.
Like clockwork, Republican presidential nominees troop to deliver speeches to supposed “civil rights” groups that they know will definitely not only endorse their Democrat opponent but also condemn them as racists no matter how much they self-flagellate and abase themselves.
Make no mistake; if the Angel of Death were to appear before the leadership of the NAACP and ask them to choose whose life he should take, between David Duke or Tim Scott, they wouldn’t hesitate in choosing Sen. Scott.
Scott, the first elected black US Senator from the Deep South, Strom Thurmond’s successor, no less, is a much much bigger threat to their hold on power than any white supremacist.
Note that your efforts will initially be greeted with mockery and jeering. Every late-night host, Colbert, Myers, Kimmel, Fallon, Noah, etc., would get a lot of applause out of mocking these attempts at outreach. “Saturday Night Live” would get in on the act as well and then will come the supposed serious news anchors and editorial writers, who would sigh and shake their heads at the futility of it, not to mention journalists making snarky entries on Twitter and Facebook.
The laughter will stop the moment they realize you’re serious and that you’re not letting up. Then the panic will set in.
Which is when you will see a flurry of editorials and opinion pieces demanding a role for the NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus, Al Sharpton, etc., and insisting that any outreach effort must be “bipartisan” to demonstrate your good faith. You will see arguments saying it is intrinsically “racist” for a Republican to campaign in the black community, and doubly so for doing it without first engaging with left-wing “leaders of color.”
This is around the time when the media’s stable of tame domesticated “Republicans” (e.g., Steve Schmidt, Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, Michael Steele, etc.) will be trotted out to denounce the first serious attempt by a Republican in decades to woo black voters as “divisive” and “petty,” and call for “bipartisanship.”
The more shameless among them would claim that the NAACP was utterly fair and non-partisan in the manner in which they treated Bush, McCain, and Romney and echo the charge that speaking to the black electorate without the blessing of the NAACP is racist.
At some point, you would have to release a statement acknowledging and praising the NAACP’s past heroic work on civil rights (this is very necessary) but bluntly state that the organization is now far from the honorable non-partisan organization they were back then, and instead are now nothing more than wholly owned and operated subsidiaries of the Democratic National Committee, and the Trump Campaign (and GOP) rejects the position that it needs their permission to speak to African Americans.
This, of course, will also be decried as “racist.”
TO BE CONTINUED
Published in Politics
Another scheme to acquire black voters that won’t work.
But hey, if you can get politicians and their handlers to give it a try (assuming they haven’t already) and it actually works, I’ll applaud.
I am tired of Republican candidates feeling they need to appear at NAACP functions to go after the black vote. The NAACP has already won its battle. Racial equality is the law of the land. Furthermore, the races intermingle so often as to make ludicrous any notion the US is a racist nation. No, the NAACP has outlived its usefulness. It’s not going away until every last bit of racism is stamped out—something that will never happen, and something they blame on Republicans. Republicans ought to go to black churches or cultural events to get their message across. Like Trump, the message should include, “What have the Democrats done to help you in the last fifty years?”
Look at the March of Dimes. It was originally founded to combat polio. Once a cure was found, they shifted their focus to birth defects. I suggest the NAACP could become relevant again if they would shift their focus to the biggest problem facing blacks today—the destruction of the black nuclear family.
They’re not. Usually, they start, often doing stupid stuff like trying to involve Democrat front groups, protests and sabotage begin, echoed by the Press, and they give up.
Like I’ve said before, there is a subset of Republicans that oppose any outreach efforts to African American voters as a matter of principle – i.e. it’s supposedly “unfair” to Democrats to do so.
I have found that those who go the route of sniffing that “it won’t work” aren’t much different.
Either way, the result is the same strategy; do nothing and then lament 90% of the black vote going to Democrats.
Let’s at least try before declaring defeat and trudging home, why don’t we?
At this point in time I warrant that Black Americans trust the NAACP and they don’t trust the Republican Party. You need to deal with that realistically.
Pointing at the Democratic Party’s history won’t cut it.
Why don’t they trust you? Address that directly and I think you’ll be on to something.
Black “leadership” organizations have long been a sock puppet for white liberals and should be seen and treated as such.
During the Carter Administration, his UN ambassador Andrew Young went off the reservation and made ill-advised and unauthorised overtures to the PLO et al and the in subsequent firestorm of criticism, Carter fired him. A colleague of mine told me that he and other politically astute black observers were tallying up which black leaders rallied behind Young and which remained quiet. The difference, he explained, was where they got their money and their degree of dependence on wealthy white liberal Jews.
The anti-Semitic aspects of that discussion clouded the larger reality of black “leadership” being a creature (puppet) of larger white liberal preferences and power, not of a subset of some Jewish liberals. Not merely a funding base but media and academic attention are bestowed on blacks who cater to the auto-erogenous drama that is white guilt. A glib but not terribly analytic stylist like Tahisi Coates is given prominence but vastly more substantive and insightful writers like Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele are walled off. Jess Jackson and Al Sharpton are given MSM attention but more substantive, constructive actors (Robert Woodson comes to mind) are not.
The perversion of American politics, the rot of our inner cities and the needless exacerbations of racial tensions are all a function of the narcissism and need for drama combined with cynical political expediency that animates “white guilt” on the part of people who know damn well they bear no personal responsibility for slavery or Jim Crow.
True. However, try to find a progressive, any progressive – black or white – who is willing to even consider that the breakdown of the nuclear family among blacks might be a problem. They just don’t want to deal with reality. It’s much easier (and politically expedient) to cast blame elsewhere.
@zafar
I’m not one for thinking there’s much of any utility in focusing on the Democrats’ history to win black votes.
I choose to focus on the present. And to my surprise, it’s proven more effective than I expected – I’ll address this in a subsequent post.
As for why the black community doesn’t trust the GOP?
Well, first of all, the GOP decided, being the Stupid Party focused entirely on the short term, to absent itself entirely from the black community.
Being black, I can tell you that in the GOP’s absence the Democrats have not been laggardly in making sure their most loyal voting bloc never even considers the alternative.
Joe Biden telling a black audience that a President Romney would bring back slavery is well within the mainstream of the message the black community is inundated with by the Democrat Party and its allies in the NAACP.
I agree. But of course the current iteration of the NAACP is far from that of the 1960s.
I can’t imagine any serious politician not going after voters because it’s unfair to the other side. I’ve never heard that before, and I’m skeptical that it’s true.
The reason GOP politicians don’t go after black votes is they think it’s a waste of time. If they thought they had a reasonable chance to split the black vote they would.
I oppose hat-in-handedness and ring-kissery (and nastier forms of kissery) on general principles, but being willing to consistently get nothing for something is worse.
A gate that won’t open just a wall with decorative hinges; look for another way in.
Well, why don’t “they” trust “us” then? I think it’s because of decades of Democrat lies and duplicity, both about what conservatives think and about what Democrats stand for, all enabled by a leftist media, academia, and entertainment industry sometimes unwittingly and sometimes all-too-wittingly acting as agents of the Soviets, and ineffectively countered by a right which was mostly timid, incompetent, and duplicitous.
There’s also a more practical reason: politics can be a tribal game as it is and even more so when patronage is on the line. It was through the big city Democrat machines that blacks could wet their beaks in the public trough with patronage jobs (increasingly better quality jobs over the years) and public spending and boondoggles. Same reason the white immigrant ethnicities became beholden to those old machines too; as these earlier groups dispersed so did their influence with the machine. The uncontrolled illegal immigration of the 70’s-90’s sealed the deal which made even more room for minorities, but especially blacks since they were there first and had an existing position to leverage.
Ask them.
And don’t dismiss what they tell you.
There isn’t, but it still seems to be a ‘go to’ response for many. Seems like rank ‘what abouttery’, but that’s just mho.
Is it just really good Democratic Party PR, or is it also lived experience (I’m thinking iterations of the Southern Strategy)?
Additionally – this whole ‘racism no longer exists meaningfully in America, did you Black people not get the memo?’ thing would really irritate me if I was Black. (It irritates me regardless, actually.)
Unless you agree that it really doesn’t? (I’m open to correction.) It seems to me that the US has done more to directly address racism in its society than just about any other country in the West, but declaring victory and going home would still be premature.
That’s hard to do when the response tends to be emotional, and there’s no logic behind it.
How do you argue with someone who says, “I just feel…”
There’s no way to change minds when it comes to that.
Perhaps you need to change their hearts first?
Atm I don’t think either of you can really hear what the other is saying.
And how do you do that? That’s George W Bush talk. And he wasn’t very effective at it, was he?
They’ll have to change their own hearts. We can’t do it for them.
Let’s try it in reverse: why do you say that racism exists in a meaningful way?
I, on the other hand, have heard/read it numerous times. Particularly starting from the aftermath of the 2004 Elections when Ken Mehlman was making noises about the GOP devoting resources to winning urban and black voters.
Up popped numerous articles and op-ed pieces, including one, quite memorably for me, by a sitting member of the Washington Republican Party State Committee expressing their worry that Republicans aggressively going for the black vote (and succeeding) could render the Democrat Party “uncompetitive.”
Another memorable reason I’ve seen given is that this will really anger Democrats and undermine any chances of “bipartisanship”.
That is a conclusion I somewhat agree with – and I’ll address it later on. But it doesn’t mean that they’re right in all, or even most, cases. And even if individual politicians have to focus on gettable voters, a Party, as a whole, cannot afford this type of short run thinking.
To repeat myself; the GOP’s decision in the ’70s to abandon the black community as being hopelessly lost to the Democrats has become a self-fulfilling prophecy and continuing in the same vein doesn’t make it any better.
@MartinKnight: the GOP should absolutely “go direct” (as they say in my workplace) and campaign energetically in majority-black neighborhoods. The basic message should be “we believe in you.“
There would be two goals for this effort. The first would be, obviously, to persuade more black voters to vote for the GOP. This isn’t because their votes will make the difference between victory and defeat, but because Republicans believe (or ought to) that our ideas are better, and black Americans deserve to learn about them.
The other goal would be to force the Democrats to defend their ideas and programs against a serious challenge, and actually fight for black votes rather than take them for granted.
Actively campaigning, in good faith, for black votes could wind up garnering the GOP white/Asian/Hispanic votes. Remember that when DJT posed his “what do you have to lose?” challenge, he was speaking to a white audience. And the white people reacted positively.
Americans of all hues recognize that very bad things have happened to black people in the past, and that the situation for welfare-dependent blacks in inner-city Chicago, Baltimore etc. is dreadful. I find there is considerable sympathy among whites, and an earnest desire to fix the problem. The irritation of the white Trump voter is (IMHO) that his/her sympathy is met with accusations of racism, aggressive claims of victimhood by obviously successful people (Colin Kaepernick, etc.) and demands that he and his family tolerate a rigged game when it comes to college admissions, government contracts and, of course, what can and cannot be said.
Everything that can and should be said by the GOP to black voters can and should be said to white voters. So every speech and appearance in majority black communities will and must be broadcast widely. After all, family is breaking down all over the place; father-absence is a problem in lots of communities; drugs, mental illness, shootings, abortion, stupid regulations that hobble small businesses… and yes, welfare programs as they are currently configured are rewarding (and thus encouraging) dysfunction and dishonesty and punishing self-improvement in Maine trailer-parks just as in Baltimore slums.
So the GOP message should be relentless: “You [black voter] are an American. Freedom is your birthright, and you have the same right and capability to exercise that freedom in the pursuit of your happiness and the happiness and well-being of your family and communities.
The Democrats evidently believe in black inferiority, whether this is conceived of as a genetic inferiority [old school Democrats!] or more sympathetically explained by the intractable, generational damage done by slavery[the modern Democrats].
They push for reparations because they think you’re broken and need to be “repaired” by whites. Well, you’re not broken. And while racism still exists, it is not and has never been an insurmountable obstacle to black achievement. We don’t think you need to wait until the last white supremacist is reformed; we believe that you are more than capable of living a good and meaningful American life in spite of him.
How can we be so confident? Because racism has always existed and black Americans have always achieved—the evidence is abundant in American history, and it is all around us in America today.
We refuse to allow the efforts, sacrifices and triumphs of countless courageous, talented and patriotic black Americans to be retroactively declared a failure. The black soldiers who fought side by side with whites in the American Revolution, those who fought to end slavery in the Civil War, those who fought against tyranny abroad World War 2 and came home to mount the Civil Rights movement…all these did not struggle, sacrifice and die in vain. They weren’t wrong to believe in an America that was more and better than her worst moments; and they helped to move America forward in the direction of her unique promise.
The GOP should be saying that the left’s reflexive focus on racism contains the not-so-subtle message that black people’s well-being depends entirely on white people—the presence or absence of racism within even well-meaning white souls or the “white” wealth whites must be persuaded to redistribute as reparations, “white” universities taking “white” places and giving them, gratis, to “people of color”, “white” accommodation of “cultural differences” not to mention the “white” government’s generous welfare programs without which black people couldn’t possibly survive —-all of this is both insulting and unnecessary. More importantly, it’s not true.
As for what is in the mind of the GOP presenter—assuming it’s a white person—I’d say “Look, we can all sit here and talk about me. My sins. my biases, me me me. It would probably be good for my immortal soul to have my consciousness raised, but is that really the best use of your time? Would you like your president to spend the next four-to-eight years forcing all white Americans to attend Implicit Bias Training or would you prefer that he or she concentrate on resolving the issues that are actually preventing people (all people) from thriving?”
Very nice. You should be writing for somebody besides yourself.
Indeed. People may be disgusted with politicians for giving them nothing but lip service, but you can’t expect people to vote for you if you can’t even be bothered to make empty promises.
This points up another difference between Republicans and Democrats; Dems know how to woo voters. All of their voters get to hear how special they are. They get food for their children, gifts, money….
@zafar
I’m pretty much over the whole tiresome “whataboutism” (or “whatabouttery”) shtick. People who squeal about “whataboutism” are usually just disingenuously defending a double standard while trying to claim a moral high ground they certainly have not earned.
So while I see no utility in the whole “Democrats were the party of the Confederacy!” line of argument, I can certainly understand Republicans being aggrieved at having Strom Thurmond’s membership in the GOP being held against the Party while Republicans pointing to Robert Byrd staying in the Democrat Party and even serving as Majority Leader is dismissed as “whatabouttery”.
Or, as is happening now, the media trying to pressure Governor Kay Ivey of Alabama to resign over a blackface skit in the 1960s after starving the story of Ralph Northam’s KKK/Blackface yearbook photo from the 1970s of oxygen.
It actually is very well executed Democrat PR aided greatly by Republican stupidity. Again see the Ivey vs Northam, Fairfax vs Kavanaugh dichotomy or the “very fine people” lie they’ve peddled against Trump.
The reality is that there is virtually no element of the “Southern Strategy” narrative (at least in the context you’re obviously referring to) which survives contact with reviewable media, and recorded facts and figures. It relies entirely on a combination of bad faith and disingenuous suppositions (e.g. “code words”) and smug coastal elitists’ caricature of the South as always and forever a hotbed of lynchings, burning crosses and white sheets.
Because people (black and others) are still often judged (instinctively classified) based on the colour of their skin (or their name, or their religion) rather than on the content of their character.
And that has consequences in terms of access to employment and housing – essential components of living a decent life.
I’m not a fan of race based quotas or affirmative action either.
Based on what evidence?
For example:
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-publhealth-040218-043750
That seems to presuppose racism. What is the evidence that racism is still significant, common, widespread, etc?
Digging around in the references is interesting. For example
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev.soc.33.040406.131740#abstractSection
from which:
Experimental approaches to measuring discrimination excel in exactly those areas in which statistical analyses flounder. Experiments allow researchers to measure causal effects more directly by presenting carefully constructed and controlled comparisons. In a laboratory experiment by Dovidio & Gaertner (2000), for example, subjects (undergraduate psychology students) took part in a simulated hiring experiment in which they were asked to evaluate the application materials for black and white job applicants of varying qualification levels. When applicants were either highly qualified or poorly qualified for the position, there was no evidence of discrimination. When applicants had acceptable but ambiguous qualifications, however, participants were nearly 70% more likely to recommend the white applicant than the black applicant (see also Biernat & Kobrynowicz’s 1997discussion of shifting standards).1
Although laboratory experiments offer some of the strongest evidence of causal relationships, we do not know the extent to which their findings relate to the kinds of decisions made in their social contexts—to hire, to rent, to move, for example—that are most relevant to understanding the forms of discrimination that produce meaningful social disparities. Seeking to bring more realism to the investigation, some researchers have moved experiments out of the laboratory and into the field. Field experiments offer a direct measure of discrimination in real-world contexts. In these experiments, typically referred to as audit studies, researchers carefully select, match, and train individuals (called testers) to play the part of a job/apartment-seeker or consumer. By presenting equally qualified individuals who differ only by race or ethnicity, researchers can assess the degree to which racial considerations affect access to opportunities. Audit studies have documented strong evidence of discrimination in the context of employment (for a review, see Pager 2007a), housing searches (Yinger 1995), car sales (Ayres & Siegelman 1995), applications for insurance (Wissoker et al. 1998), home mortgages (Turner & Skidmore 1999), the provision of medical care (Schulman et al. 1999), and even in hailing taxis (Ridley et al. 1989).
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Afaict this doesn’t assume intent – so it isn’t about whether the subjects being assessed for bias are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (which is what discussions of racism/ discrimination often collapse into – unfortunately, because it moves the focus imho to something that’s not constructive and which can prompt defensiveness which discourages proper analysis).
I don’t think one can infer racism from disparities in outcomes. Do you? That’s assuming that this experiment is representative anyway.