Opinion: Courting the black vote ... not!
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As part of their dream to create a permanent Republican majority in national politics, Karl Rove and his acolyte, Ken Mehlman, stressed the need for the party to more aggressively woo black voters. But as the current presidential race unfolds, most of the GOP candidates aren’t even going through the basics.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported late last week that as final details are hammered out for the National Urban League’s annual conference in St. Louis later this month, not a single Republican seeking the White House had accepted an invitation to speak at the gathering. The major announced candidates --- Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and John McCain --- have said they are definitely tied up elsewhere. Same with several of the race’s lesser lights. And a check today with the group, which bills itself as the ‘largest community-based movement devoted to empowering African Americans to enter the economic and social mainstream,’ found that it’s still unclear whether any Republican will be there (by contrast, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards are among the Democrats who will be).
Similarly, all the Democratic candidates made a point of participating in a forum at the NAACP convention last week in Detroit; among the Republicans, only Tom Tancredo showed up (he had the stage to himself before the Democrats came on, won a warm welcome from the crowd and quipped, ‘This is my kind of debate’).
Perhaps the Republicans are simply giving in to political reality. Despite the efforts of Rove and others during George Bush’s first presidential term, his percentage of the black vote improved only marginally between 2000 and 2004 --- from 8% in the first election to 11% in the second, according to New York Times’ exit polling.
Looking farther back in the exit polling, since 1980, no GOP presidential nominee has gotten more than 12% of the black vote. The 16% that President Ford got in 1976 today would be hailed as a major inroad.
There’s no sign on the horizon that whoever the Republicans pick as their standard-bearer next year could approach or surpass Ford’s figure. And that certainly won’t change if the preliminaries of ’07 are an indication of the GOP’s interest in the black vote in ’08.
-- Don Frederick