Why the Republicans can't win the black vote.

Here's a sad situation if you are a GOP supporter. All the GOP had to do to keep control of the Senate this year - even with Iraq, Mark Foley, Abramoff and other corruption scandals and the "Macaca" comment in Virginia - was to win about 35% of the African American vote in Maryland. Their candidate was Michael Steele, who was a great candidate and an even better campaigner, not to mention the fact that he was an African American from the state's largest majority black jurisdiction. He had a wide range of local government, ministerial and even celebrity endorsements. They needed just 35% of the black vote. They couldn't even get that. And now they are the minority party in the Senate.

The level of estrangement that has developed between the black community and the GOP is almost beyond description. It started in 1960, when many blacks still considered themselves republicans. Two weeks before the election, Martin Luther King was given a bogus sentence of four months in prison for learing a sit-in; his wife Corretta, who was six months pregnant with their third child, feared that her husband would be killed while in prison. Nixon, the sitting Vice President, who was supposedly a friend of King's, refused to get involved (he probably wanted to win the south); John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby used their political contacts to get King out of prison the next day. Although King's Father, Martin Luther King Sr., had publically been supporting Nixon for President, he was so grateful that Kennedy cared enough to get involved and presumably angry enough that the Vice President sat by and did nothing that he switched his support to Kennedy and promised to bring millions of black voters along with him. In his autobiography, King described Nixon as a "moral coward."

From there, the GOP opened its doors wide open to the former Dixiecrats, the disaffected southern racists who used to be Democrats but were turned off by the Democratic party's inclusion of more and more blacks. And for most of the past 45 years, the GOP has attempted to win power by appealing to the "inner Confederate" of some of their supporters. The south has been the key to the GOP strategy since the mid 1960's. And for a long time, it worked beautifully for them. The only Democrats to win the White House since Richard Nixon won it in 1968 were two popular southern governors. The GOP has tolerated racism in some of its popular rainmakers in exchange for the electoral votes that they bring to the table. It worked for a long time.

November 7th, 2006 showed that this era has come to an end. With the Democrats now running conservative candidates, the Southern Strategy no longer guarantees victory. And now the GOP's long standing rejection of the African American community has come back to haunt them and cost them. If they could have gotten a measly 35% of the black vote in Maryland, they would continue to run the Senate, despite having shot themselves in the foot in almost every way imaginable. But they couldn't. The years of Republican rejection of black voters and embracing of bigots was the final wave that swept them out of power.

The resentment in the black community against the GOP is so great that most black voters in Maryland wouldn't even consider voting for a great candidate who happened to be black because he also happened to be a Republican. Steele won in almost every jurisdiction in the state - except for the counties with the largest percentages of African Americans. The dream of having a second black U.S. Senator paled in comparison with the nightmare of having another Republican, in the minds of black voters.

So, why doesn't the GOP get it? They need to appeal to every voter and win every vote across racial lines. What do they do after getting pounded into the sand on Election Day and losing the Senate by one vote? The go ahead and appoint Trent Lott to be the second highest ranking Republican Leader. Earlier this year, they were refusing to renew the Voting Rights Act. Last year, about 20 GOP Senators (almost half of the Republicans in the Senate) refused to participate in a statement of condemnation of America's history of lynching (Who doesn't condemn lynching?) Now they're saying that Trent Lott, with all his baggage of accusations of racial intolerance, should be in the senior leadership again. It's bad enough that they've alienated black voters for most of the past 45 years ... they're continuing to take in water.

Black people in America are at least as much socially conservative as we are liberal, meaning that there are a high number of social conservatives and evangelicals in the community. Blacks and Hispanics are perhaps the only largely conservative groups in the country who consistently vote for the more liberal party. Why? Why do you think that white evangelicals overwhelmingly vote for the Republicans but black evangelicals, who often hold the same views on moral issues, overwhelmingly vote for the Democrats?

Many more blacks would vote for the GOP if we could get the images of Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, Conrad Burns, and Trent Lott out of our minds. But with this party, it's almost like for every old Confederate soldier who fades away, a new one pops up to take his place. First it was Barry Goldwater. Then Strom Thurmond. Then Jesse Helms, Conrad Burns, Trent Lott, etc. If they could clear these types of folks out, they would get a windfall of new support.

The GOP has highly paid strategists who presumably have triple-digit IQs. At some point, shouldn't they be asking themselves why every single ethnic minority group (African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Jewish Americans, Muslim Americans, etc.) prefers the Democrats to them? They're clearly doing something wrong and if they want power in the future, they need to fix it. They can't get by just winning over white conservative voters anymore - the math doesn't support it. They can't afford to alienate entire ethnic groups, as they have done for much of the past 45 years. At least they can stop taking in more water and putting themselves further in the hole.

Bush has tried to some degree. He's appointed two black Secretaries of State and made other gestures toward the black community (although he missed five years worth of NAACP conferences). But the Congress has been out of control.

This is NOT just about Affirmative Action. Good people can disagree about Affirmative Action. But on a broader level, the GOP has been putting out signals of racial intolerance for decades now (remember Jesse Helms, who "whistled Dixie" when in the Senate elevator with black Senator Carole Mosely-Braun?). They booed Colin Powell during his speech during the 1996 Convention. They refuse to reign in the "good ol' boy" faction of the party.

Now it's cost them and the shifting demographics of this country will make it harder and harder to win when an entire ethnic group votes against you. My question is, what will it take for them to finally get it?