I'm posting options and analysis. I'm not attached to this. I think the trend of black voters moving to the GOP is still not good and Dr. Johnson admits the shift is still happening.
Opinion Black voters joining the GOP is a great exaggeration
Theodore R. Johnson
Sen. Tim Scott speaks at an Iowa event that featured eight of the Republican presidential candidates. (Christopher Smith for The Washington Post)
Perhaps the most consequential partisan failure of the past three decades is the Republican Party’s inability — or unwillingness — to win over Black conservatives.
Maybe you’ve heard otherwise. Supposedly, the party made inroads with Black voters during the Trump presidency. You might have thought that the historic number of Black Republicans in today’s Congress — five, the most since 1877, when it was still the pro-civil rights party — signaled a turning tide. Wrong on both counts. The small rise in Black support for the GOP under Trump only partially recovered the significant ground lost during Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns. And those five lawmakers arrived under cover of the successive movements that have captured the Republican Party: the tea party and Trumpism.
In truth, the Republican Party is in a historic rut with Black voters — its worst 15-year stretch since Black men gained access to the ballot box in 1870. And the party’s inability to make Republicans of the nearly 1 in 5 Black voters who identify as conservative has gone from bad to comical. I can assure you that in predominantly Black places — the shops and social and civic organizations and group chats and churches and so on — there has been a chuckle or two about Republicans consistently fumbling the opportunity. Most often, it’s not ridicule as much as it is genuine amusement — followed, as predictably, by something like, “The racism, though.”
Among White voters, it is mostly true that conservatives are Republicans. When you are talking about Black people, the relationship breaks down. Some of that is because the groups define and practice conservatism differently. But more than that, the GOP’s brand has become toxic to most Black voters; the party’s recent reputation — no longer the party of Abraham Lincoln or Theodore Roosevelt or even Ronald Reagan — precedes it.
Opinions on the 2024 elections
The result is interesting: Being a Black Republican is stigmatized in a way that being a Black conservative is not. The former comes with a well-earned social penalty that the latter does not. And that contributes to the party being especially unappealing to a great many Black voters. We need look no further than recent events in Florida to see why.
Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has gained national attention by peacocking his one-upmanship of Trump, riding culture battles to second place in the nomination battle. But then he clumsily defended a change in Florida’s educational standards about enslaved people benefiting from forced labor. “They’re probably going to show some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life,” he surmised.
Black Republicans took DeSantis to task. Will Hurd, a former congressman and also a presidential candidate, said, “Slavery is not a jobs program. … Anybody that is implying that there was an upside to slavery is insane.” Rep. Byron Donalds (Fla.), a second-place finisher among Republicans to be speaker of the House, wrote in a social media post, “The attempt to feature the personal benefits of slavery is wrong & needs to be adjusted.” Reps. John James (Mich.) and Wesley Hunt (Tex.) each made public statements admonishing DeSantis. And presidential candidate Tim Scott of South Carolina, the Senate’s only Black Republican, channeled his 2016 self in saying, “There is no silver lining” in slavery. … “What slavery was really about [was] separating families, about mutilating humans and even raping their wives.”
Did DeSantis embrace the critique from his fellow Republicans? No. He leaned into the part of American conservatism that Black people have always rejected. He called them “D.C. Republicans” who “accept the lie that Kamala Harris has been perpetrating, even when that has been debunked. That’s not the way you do it.” On a recent call with South Carolina reporters, DeSantis went after Scott by again invoking the vice president: “Do you side with Kamala?” Meanwhile, Republicans attacked online those who tried to correct DeSantis, calling the congressional Black Republicans names such as “Mr. Kamala.”
That mix of attacks on their race, masculinity and character by someone in their own party is wild. The central accusation in each, though, is familiar: Black Republicans will, if pushed, choose melanin over values, race over America. The same was said of Colin Powell when he announced his support for Obama: It was only because “melanin is thicker than water.”
This is the world Black Republicans have chosen to join. And the majority of Black conservatives roundly reject it. Who wants to face routine intraparty tests of where one’s first loyalties lie — with race or party?
I believe that party competition for voters is a good thing. I think a principled conservative party makes the country stronger. I also know there’s a version of conservatism in America that isn’t animated by racial hang-ups — racial and ethnic minorities have modeled conservative values for decades. Nothing frustrates the project of creating competition for Black voters — my political dream — more than a Republican Party that refuses to appeal to conservative members of the group. This back and forth on the slavery question suggests it has not yet found sufficient incentive or courage to evolve into one that offers conservatism without racial resentment — and rewards leaders who embody it. We know it’s possible; Republican governors have figured it out on occasion. But until the party decides to update how it views and discusses race, the losing streak will continue.
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