The core of the GOP is maintaining a racially homogenous party. At several points, Republicans have had the choice to make changes needed to have broader appeal.
We know about the report after the 2012 election. Here’s a good interview that discusses the report the GOP commissioned by Black Harvard professor Ralph Bunche to write in 1939 and another report written by a Black Republican consulting group in the 70s.
https://www.vox.com/2020/9/8/214271...publican-trump-black-vote-the-ezra-klein-show
Ezra Klein
And what does Bunche recommend?
Leah Wright Rigueur
Ralph Bunche gives them this comprehensive report [on] where the New Deal has failed. He essentially says the New Deal hasn’t gone far enough — that the New Deal has had discriminatory practices and policies ingrained even in some of its most effective programs. But he also says the Republican Party has not done enough — that the Republican Party should be going further in its policies, and they can no longer rely on the “spirit of Abraham Lincoln” freeing the slaves to move Black voters.
So he argues in favor of all kinds of policy changes. He says you need to be more effective on health care and calls for universal health care. He says you need to be more effective on Social Security relief, finance, agriculture, labor — all of these different areas. He says there is room for the Republican Party to make inroads among Black voters by speaking to the very issues and needs that Black voters want. He’s also very explicit about the need for these programs and policies to be economic.
When the Republican Party gets this report initially, they widely praise it. They said this exactly what we need. But Bunche put in a caveat saying either you publish the report in full or you don’t publish it at all. So when the Republican Party comes back and says they only want to publish the parts where he attacks the New Deal, Bunche says no: You have to publish the entire thing or not at all.
So they end up not publishing it at all, but bits and pieces end up being leaked to the press, particularly the Black press and the Black media. It comes to be known, particularly as Bunche is making the rounds, talking about the fact that the Republican Party has a blueprint for how to move African Americans back into the party but they’re unwilling to do it.
Ezra Klein
I love this story because it seems to me that it’s been the same question for a long time now: The Republican Party wants to win back Black voters, but what they would like is for there to be an easier way to do it than to have to change their policy agenda to meet the actual economic and social needs of Black voters. They keep looking for a message or an orientation or a messenger. But every time somebody comes to them and says, look, African Americans have a very high uninsurance rate, you need a better idea for what to do about that than the Democrats have, they say no, we want some other way of addressing this.
Leah Wright Rigueur
Absolutely. I think there are a couple takeaways from that Ralph Bunche report. The first is that he says you cannot run with both hare and hound, meaning that the Republican Party has to decide whether it wants to court, say, the dissident white vote of the Democratic Party and rely on racial antagonisms on the backs of Black people — or do you really want Black voters? You cannot seduce both. And in the case of Black voters, economic policy in particular is really, really important.
In the 1970s, we see McNeill and Associates, which is a Black Republican consulting group consulting with the RNC, say virtually the same thing that Ralph Bunche has said in 1939 and 1940. They say we have to find a way to make these ideas palatable or attractive to Black people because right now, Black voters are making a pragmatic vote even in cases where they don’t like Democrats — even in cases where they might be more aligned religiously, spiritually, what have you, with the Republican Party.
They will not choose the Republican Party because, one, they believe Republicans are racist and racially antagonistic, and two, there are no [Republican] policies that they see affecting their day-to-day lives for the better.
It’s the two things that go hand in hand. And all too often we see that Republicans recognize this, but they’re unwilling to make either one of those kind of significant structural changes in order to actually get a significant proportion of the Black vote.
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Republicans choose racial antagonism in an increasingly diverse world. So that means I’m order to maintain power, they have to appeal to the fringes of American society like white nationalists and more recently anti-vaxxers.