Donald Trump and the GOP is Struggling to Attract More Black Voters than Mitt Romney Received – Zero Percent
Because of the browning of America, Donald Trump is trying to do what many other Republican presidential candidates have struggled to do in the past but must do to win future elections: make himself more appealing to black and Latino voters.
Trump has been arguing that the Democratic party has been taking the black vote for granted and he is a better candidate for “the blacks”. In a Huffington Post article author and political analyst, Earl Ofari Hutchinson, said Trump was expected to draw a larger percentage of the black vote than Mitt Romney did in 2012– zero percent. However, there are debates over whether or not Trump has really been trying to draw black voters as a vast majority of his support base features white voters, particularly ones that are of low-income and are in rural areas.
Even more than Romney, Trump’s violent, race-baiting crusade that nakedly appeals to largely white lower income, less educated, rural and mostly male crowds drive the point home that blacks are not even an after-thought in his drive to snare the White House.
Hutchinson’s column cites the fact that Trump has had photo opportunities and meetings with many black celebrities and leaders but these appear heavily orchestrated.
Besides the handful of comic endorsements he’s gotten from blacks, he’s front-loaded his traveling campaign circus act from time to time with two black women — the “Stump for Trump Girls,” a black minister or two, and panned to audience shots of black faces sprinkled through his rally crowds.
Trump and his black surrogates will pound on the tired theme that the Democratic Party has betrayed blacks ,and that it practices a modern version of plantationism; that is, perennially taking the black vote for granted, while offering no tangible programs for the black poor. …
Trump’s aim is not to get any substantial support from blacks, since that’s an impossibility, but to sow seeds of doubt, confusion and even a little hostility toward Clinton among just enough blacks to keep them from the polls in the must-win, battleground states. Judging from the punches thrown by a black at the Trump protester, it may have worked in at least once case.
Read Earl Ofari Hutchinson’s article at HuffingtonPost.com.
To make things worse for the GOP’s diversity program, black staffers have been jumping off of the Republican bandwagon. And although the RNC had a small increase in the number of black people who voted for the party in the last major election, many black members of the RNC have been getting out of the party.
According to an NBC News report, Kristal Quarker-Hartsfield, the Director of African American Outreach for the RNC, left to take another position outside the party. Although there are reports that she is still on good terms with the RNC, there are concerns that the division within the party resulting from Trump’s recent dominance could cause the black segment of the party to struggle to stay together.
That there has been a mass exodus of Black staff from the RNC is undeniable. Quarker-Hartsfield and Watson are two of four top African American staffers to leave the RNC over the past year. Raffi Williams, the former RNC Deputy Press Secretary and the son of FOX News political analyst Juan Williams left the RNC last year for a job in media. Another African American RNC staffer Tara Wall, who was a strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign and worked for the RNC as a senior strategist for media and engagement, left in late 2015. The sole remaining top level African American staffer would appear to be Lucas Boyce.
Many in the RNC remain well aware of the Republican Party’s problem regarding minority voters. The math this year is likely to be even more difficult than it was for Gov. Mitt Romney in 2012 given that the Trump has been openly antagonistic to Hispanics and the facts of the RNC’s autopsy report during the 2016 campaign.
