Why Is The Republican Party So White?
January 11, 2009
It seems obvious that Ken Blackwell will become the next head of the Republican National Committee.
The former Ohio Secretary of State is clearly the most conservative contender for the position, and appears to have the organizational skills necessary to perform admirably as RNC chair. He’s a lightning rod for Democrats—and thus, a hero to Republicans—because of his role in the 2004 Presidential election. The GOP still reveres Ronald Reagan, and Blackwell is the closest thing the party has to a new Great Communicator.
If Blackwell becomes RNC Chairman at the end of this month, he will be the first black person to occupy that post. That shouldn’t matter—and it won’t. Yes, it will be interesting to see a black person in charge of the “party of Lincoln.” However, I hope that conservatives don’t fall for the foolish notion that Blackwell’s selection will lead to a more racially diverse GOP.
The left has trafficked in half-truths about the GOP and race for decades, but half-truths are not complete untruths. Contrary to what progressives have argued for years, Republicans never endeavored to obtain votes from racist whites. Yet it’s hard to deny that, since Richard Nixon’s 1968 Presidential campaign, the party has explicitly tried to position itself as, for lack of a better term, the white middle-class party.
What the mainstream media often refers to as Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” was really an attempt by Nixon and his advisers to get as much of the white middle-class vote as possible. Nixon’s “silent majority” was, at bottom, a white middle-class majority, one that felt alienated by the counterculture and by what its members saw as the government going to extraordinary lengths to help members of non-majority groups while doing little to help them. Nixon was not a racist, and those who comprised the “silent majority” weren’t necessarily racist either. However, they were, in Nixon’s mind, the political and cultural “standard” of the time—and Nixon geared his campaign and his party to their interests.
Nixon’s effort was not intentionally designed to exclude nonwhites: while running for President in ’68, he often spoke of the need to promote “black capitalism” as a means of moving more blacks into the middle class. However, black voters were not the “target audience” of his overall campaign.
By focusing on the aspirations and anxieties of middle-class whites, Nixon was able to make the GOP a dominant party, one that won a 49-state landslide in 1972. Ronald Reagan also geared his political message to middle-class whites in the 1980s, and for his efforts earned two huge victories. George H. W. Bush repeated the model in 1988: the controversial “Willie Horton ad” wasn’t so much an antiblack ad as it was an effective way to seize upon white middle-class anxieties about crime. While Bush’s son spoke of trying to make the party more palatable to nonwhites, the political strategies he and Karl Rove used in 2000 and especially 2004 were heavily geared to middle-class whites, especially those of deep religious faith.
The left has repeatedly argued that the post-1968 Republican Party is explicitly hostile to nonwhites. That’s not exactly the case. Republican political strategists would have loved to receive the votes of nonwhites who felt alienated from the Democrats. They just never bothered to put much effort into securing those votes. It was easier to focus on turning out as much of the white middle-class vote as possible.
This was a horrific mistake, one that has come back to haunt Republicans. While GOP political strategists ignored nonwhites, Democrat political strategists began marketing to non-Caucasian voters, convincing them that Republicans were closet racists whose economic policies were intentionally designed to hurt them. The Democrats’ intense efforts paid off: recall the hardcore hostility many black voters felt towards Reagan in the 1980s, a hostility reinforced by Democrat rhetorical attacks on Reagan prior to and during the early 1980s—a hostility that remains to this very day. The pathetically low number of nonwhite votes the McCain-Palin ticket received in 2008 is the natural result of years of Republican indifference to, and Democrat propagandizing of, nonwhite voters.
Nixon and his advisers should have never conceded the nonwhite vote to the Democrats. Granted, it would have been difficult to secure those votes in the late-1960s and early-1970s, after the controversy over Barry Goldwater’s thumbs-down reaction to the 1964 Civil Rights Act (even though a larger percentage of Republicans voted for the Act than their Democrat counterparts). Yet the effort should have been made nonetheless.
Why weren’t such efforts made? The Republicans of that era were apparently arrogant, convinced that nonwhites would never become a significant portion of the US population—and also convinced that the white middle-class would vote Republican forever and a day. Their logic was backward on both counts.
While Barack Obama ultimately lost the white vote to McCain, he could not have won the Presidency if he did not secure the support of many anti-Republican middle-class whites. Evidently, it never dawned on Nixon and his advisers that the day might come when many middle-class whites either a) disagreed with the political objectives of the GOP or b) came out of American institutions of higher education convinced that Republicans were responsible for all the problems in the world.
Even if Republicans seize upon President Obama’s mistakes to make gains in the House and Senate in 2010 and recapture the White House in either 2012 or 2016, their victories will not be permanent. Republicans have lost the demographic war, just as they lost the culture war when President Clinton survived impeachment. The party invested too much of its stock in the white middle-class vote, ignoring the future value of a diversified portfolio. Will the party be able to avoid filing for bankruptcy in the future?
