A new study of blacks and their voting patterns finds that nothing the Republican Party does, even nominating African-American GOP candidates, works to win them over.
“Historical legacies provide deeply rooted ties between blacks and the Democratic Party,” said the study in the authoritative journal Political Research Quarterly. “These ties may simply render it impossible for Republicans — black or otherwise — to move public opinion or mobilize among blacks,” it added.
The study, provided to Secrets, searched through the demographic details of 3,300 African-American voters in the 2010 election, when the GOP had nearly three dozen black House candidates running, part of the Republican Party’s push to attract minority voters.
But the authors, political scientists from Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Chicago, found it didn’t help. “Republican efforts in recruiting black candidates were ultimately unsuccessful at mobilizing black voters,” said the study titled, “Candidate Race, Partisanship, and Political Participation: When Do Black Candidates Increase Black Turnout?”
Since 1981, the GOP has focused on expanding the black vote beyond single digits — and mostly failed. But not always.
The GOP has had some luck electing black Republicans like Mia Love of Utah as part of a push to woo African Americans. AP Photo
Party boss Reince Priebus has made a priority of electing black Republicans and wooing African-American voters. He recently highlighted three black Republican winners, Reps. Mia Love of Utah, Will Hurd of Texas and Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina.
“America is strongest when both parties fight to earn every vote,” Priebus said. “No voter should be taken for granted, no vote should be overlooked.”
The study did find that having a black Republican in the race pushed more African-Americans to the polls, but mostly for Democrats. The highest turnout, 75 percent, occurred when both party candidates were black, followed by when only the Democrat was black, at 73 percent, and 62 percent when only the Republican was black.
“While black citizens do distinguish black Republican candidates from non-black Republican candidates, they also distinguish black Republicans from black Democrats,” the study said. “Black citizens appear to conclude that they do not share common political values with Republicans, whether black or not. As a consequence, black Republican candidates simply do not evoke the same response from black citizens as black Democratic candidates.”
The conclusion should be sobering to the Republican Party and black GOP candidates:
“We find that black citizens — Democrats, Independents, and Republicans alike — are more likely to turn out to vote when a black Democratic candidate appears on the ballot. However, the same does not apply for black Republican candidates; black voters are not mobilized by the presence of a black candidate when that candidate is Republican.
In the contemporary United States, the minority empowerment thesis is not wrong so much as it is in need of refinement. Partisanship exerts an enormous influence over how citizens experience the political world. In spite of the importance of racial group identity for black political behavior, partisanship remains the key factor which citizens orient themselves to political candidates. In this way, while black citizens’ evaluations of partisan candidates are influenced by candidate race, black citizens’ application of partisan lenses enables them to use partisanship as a simplifying heuristic for political decision making.”
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
