The Repblican Party as the party of whiteness and Jefferson Davis

[lpetrich]

The Republican Choice | FiveThirtyEight - "How a party spent decades making itself white." Also, the party of Jefferson Davis.

Election Day 1981 was ugly in some largely Black and Hispanic districts of Trenton, New Jersey. Ominous signs hung outside several polling places:

WARNING
THIS AREA IS BEING PATROLLED BY THE NATIONAL BALLOT SECURITY TASK FORCE.
IT IS A CRIME TO FALSIFY A BALLOT OR TO VIOLATE ELECTION LAWS.

That National Ballot Security Task Force was made up of county deputy sheriffs and local police who patrolled the polling sites with guns in full view. A court complaint later lodged by the Democratic Party described the members of the task force “harassing poll workers, stopping and questioning prospective voters … and forcibly restraining poll workers from assisting, as permitted by state law, voters to cast their ballots.”

The NBSTF was not some rogue effort, but something supported by the Republican Party. Notice that it did not do similar things in largely white neighborhoods. They were sued for that, and a judge agreed that that was racially motivated. But wanting to suppress voting by people they dislike has continued, under the pretext of opposing voter fraud.

In March of this year, President Donald Trump dismissed out of hand Democratic-backed measures that called for vote-by-mail and same-day registration to help ensure people could vote amid the COVID-19 pandemic: “They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

The Republican Party has not always been like that.

But it wasn’t always the case that the GOP looked to suppress the franchise, and with it minority-voter turnout. In 1977, when President Jimmy Carter introduced a package of electoral reforms, the chair of the RNC supported it and called universal, same-day registration “a Republican concept.” President Dwight D. Eisenhower won nearly 40 percent of the Black vote in 1956, and President George W. Bush secured about the same share of Hispanic votes in 2004.

Yet in 2016, Trump won just 28 percent of the Hispanic vote and 8 percent of the Black vote.

The GOP’s whitewashed political reality is no accident — the party has repeatedly chosen to pursue white voters at the cost of others decade after decade.

Then discussed MI Gov George Romney, father of Mitt Romney, a Republican politician who supported civil-rights efforts.

Romney had pushed for the adoption of a civil rights plank to the 1964 Republican platform, but his efforts failed miserably. Instead, Goldwater’s nomination marked a full embrace of a strategy that sought to win the votes of white Southern Democrats disillusioned by their party’s embrace of reforms aimed at racial equity. Today’s GOP is still informed by this “Southern strategy.”

In her book, “The Loneliness of the Black Republican,” Harvard professor Leah Wright Rigueur describes the treatment of the few Black delegates at the 1964 convention, several of whom were detained by security for talking to the press about their anti-Goldwater sentiments. One man’s suit was set on fire, and another “ran sobbing from the convention floor, crying that he was sick of being abused by Goldwater supporters. ‘They call you “nigger,” push you and step on your feet,’ he muttered to reporters, wiping tears from his eyes. ‘I had to leave to keep my self-respect.’”

 

[lpetrich]

In the early to mid 20th cy., Republicans had gotten a big share of the Black vote. But even in the 1950's, many Republicans had become complacent about their party's Black supporters.

In 1962, Nixon told Ebony magazine that he owed his 1960 loss of the presidency to this kind of complacency: “I needed only five per cent more votes in the Negro areas. I could have gotten them if I had campaigned harder.”

Despite Goldwater going down to defeat in 1964, Nixon thought that it would be good to get Goldwater's support.

Nixon acted quickly to play to them, tying Romney to the violence in Detroit — he was governor after all. Nixon went further, arguing that “the primary civil right” in America was “to be protected from domestic violence.” White voters’ fears of Black Americans’ demands for civil rights made them uncomfortable with politicians who might support those rights — politicians like Romney. As Time had pointed out in 1966, the Democratic Party’s FDR-era coalition was fragmenting: “Negro militancy has siphoned off much support from urban Italians, Irish and Slavs.” Nixon, who would famously run as a “law and order” candidate, wanted those white votes.

At the Republican Party's 1968 convention, Nixon got the nomination with the help of SC Sen. Strom Thurmond, beating Ronald Reagan, and Southern delegates supported Spiro Agnew over George Romney as his Vice President.

Advancing to the late 1970's,

For a fleeting political moment in the wreckage of Watergate, the GOP seemed to be open (once again) to the idea that their future could lie with voters of color. The conventional wisdom of that brief period, Perlstein told me in an email, “was that the Republicans would go the way of the Whigs unless they recouped their appeal to blacks.”

...
In the late 1970s, (Jesse) Jackson made the argument that Black voters should want the two parties to compete for their votes to attain greater political leverage. He worried that the Democratic Party would come to take Black voters for granted.

Although he was right to be concerned about that, the Republican Party did not listen to him very much.

A few months before Jackson’s speech in Washington, President Carter had introduced electoral reforms — an end to the Electoral College and same-day universal voter registration — that were met with praise from Brock, the RNC chair. But an essay that soon appeared in the conservative publication Human Events expressed an opposing view in the party.

... Reagan said the Carter proposal might as well be called “The Universal Voter Fraud Bill,” and pressured Brock into reneging on his support for it, which he did.

...
Brock’s flip-flop embodies a contradiction inherent in many of the internal GOP struggles of the past few decades, and ones that continue today: Should the party invest in appeals to new voters or pluck racism’s low-hanging electoral fruit? ... Often, the party has attempted to play both strategies, though the racial one usually seems to blot out the more ecumenical approach.

 

[lpetrich]

George Bush II tried to be racially and ethnically inclusive.

In 2005, RNC chair Ken Mehlman appeared at the NAACP national convention to formally apologize for the GOP’s Southern strategy. “Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.”

It seemed an act befitting a party whose sitting president, George W. Bush, had run for office as a “compassionate conservative.”

...
It was an extension of Bush’s past success with people outside the party’s usual base. When he was governor of Texas, he won more than 50 percent of the Mexican American vote.

But much of the Republican Party didn't get the message, it seems.

Despite the compassionate conservatism rhetoric, the GOP of the Bush era continued to pursue policies hostile to Americans of color. The party deployed a warm and fuzzy message that belied the actions it took on voting rights. It tried to turn out Hispanic voters while tapping into efficient ways to shut down minority voting under the “voter fraud” umbrella. The abscess that George Romney had warned about not only had re-formed, it had grown.

Then voter ID and voter purges and closing of polling places.

After Barack Obama became President again in 2012, Republican strategists did a lot of examination of where the party went wrong. “Many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.”

Yet three years after the report’s publication, the GOP nominated Donald Trump, an anti-immigrant, race-baiting candidate. “How did people abandon deeply held beliefs in four years? I think the only conclusion is they don’t. They didn’t deeply hold them. They were just marketing slogans,” Stuart Stevens said. “I feel like the guy working for Bernie Madoff who thought we were beating the market.”

...
The one thing that the party has stayed true to is its reliance on the politics of race and racism. While membership in the party wanes and America grows more diverse, the GOP has become practiced at speaking to its core members’ desire to maintain a white-centric American society. Trump’s appeal relies heavily on attacks against the media and “PC culture,” the medium and mode of expression, respectively, of a diversifying country.

...
Republicans with more immigrant-friendly views remain on the outs in an era when the party has focused on things like a family separation policy at the U.S.-Mexico border. There are reports that Bush won’t vote for Trump in the fall.

 

[lpetrich]

This coming main election?

The potential for disenfranchisement is very real in the upcoming presidential vote. The pandemic has given experts real concern that a poorly administered election could see thousands who want to vote essentially denied the right to do so. With that, seeds of distrust will be sown in the outcome. Just this week, Trump tweeted: “RIGGED ELECTION 2020: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!”

...
Democrats and Republicans are currently locked in legal battles in various states over the rules that will govern November’s election, which could largely take place by mail.

But what's been happening with mail-in votes could be happening all over the nation. Though some states have been doing vote by mail for some time, like Oregon, others are much more new to that, like New York. In NYC, counting of absentee ballots has started nearly two weeks after the primary election there, and it may take some weeks before it is done.

 

[lpetrich]

About Rev. Jesse Jackson:

Jackson’s own personal conservatism could be seen as emblematic of that of Black Americans, ones who could be potentially courted by the GOP. A 1979 profile of Jackson by the journalist Paul Cowan described him at an anti-abortion rally: “[He] denounced abortion as ‘murder,’ he insisted that ‘when prayers leave the schools the guns come in’ … he suggested that, while he supported women’s liberation, his wife at least should stay in her place — his home.”

It shows how much the Republican Party has failed to attract blacks -- it has failed to attract many black social conservatives, its most likely sort of recruits.

The party has had more success with Hispanic ones, however.

 

[ideologyhunter]

The GOP is overwhelmingly non-Hispanic white (89% is often cited, although I swear I've seen 93 or 94% in some polls.) There are no positive demographic trends for the party as it is presently oriented. Their numbers also skew toward middle- and old-age much more than the Dems. They are facing, as of the start of the 2040s, a minority-majority America, much more diverse than their idealized decade of the 1950s was. I expect them to stick to their ideological guns until that's killing them, and to intensify their think-tank strategies toward the long-range scheming they're presently up to: vote suppression, gerrymandering, packing the courts with right wing law school recent-grads, running a non-stop propaganda machine, etc.
LBJ famously told an aide, after he signed the '64 Civil Rights Act, that "We (the Dems) have lost the South for a generation." He was probably off by at least 2 generations, but when Texas itself is wobbling toward 50/50 blue/red, the times are a-changin'.
In regards to the ultra-Caucasian GOP, it's always fun to hear folks like Rush Limbaugh talking sarcastically about how the African American vote is overwhelmingly Democrat. Keep whining, righties. We're on the shore edge of a big wave, and it will change a lot of things.

 

[lpetrich]

Frank DiStefano has written a book, "The Next Realignment", and he has made several YouTube videos about its contents. One thing that he argues is that there are no permanent majorities, and that the two parties are almost always nearly equal in size.

This is because if a party becomes very big, then it becomes complacent, and it starts neglecting some of its constituencies. Those constituencies then go over to the other party, making the parties' sizes closer to equal.

But for the Republican Party to pick off any constituencies, it will have to become more racially and ethnically inclusive, and it may be hard to do while being the party of white victimhood.