 Originally Posted by Heathen Hammer
I'd believe that if they at least did the politically sane thing by acknowledging that their party sucks back in 2016 and tried to work on reasons why electorate doesn't want them, in other works, they had to stop to suck. Instead they assumed it is electorate that is wrong and doubled down on what made Democratic party suck in the first place. In fact, it got to the point that they are now embracing neocon Rhino fifth column of GOP, opposition to which was what made them win 2008 and 2012.
So there is no "longer game", Democrats are just party with leadership with ideology. Whether that comes from general stupidity of its leadership or internal sabotage is another question, but in context of election it doesn't matter.
Well, I mean, if you want a political platform with such a lack of morals and ethics that its sole goal is to win, sure. You have no long game. You're only goal is to gain seats. You have no idea why you're gaining seats. About all the Republicans can do with the Senate is fill Judgeships, because, again, gain seats. Right now the Republican Party is nothing more than a conspiracy to seize power. They don't even have a platform I can fundamentally disagree with. They just want power. And there is something fundamentally wrong with that from the concept of a political party.
Meanwhile, let's look at the history. From the 1930's on. The New Deal has been passed and it's about time for FDR's next election. Sadly, seventyish years after the Civil War you can't just trade on the idea that you're the party that freed the slaves alone. You actually have to do something. Roosevelt has passed the New Deal, albeit in a rather neutral fashion. After Hoover did a crap job of saving the country from the Depression. The Black voters stuck by him for 1932, but after the New Deal and its contingent agencies were put in place, FDR put in place what the press like to unofficially call his Black Cabinet. The informal term for the group of African Americans that served as public policy advisers to FDR and Eleanor during his terms and by mid-1935 they were working in federal executive departments and New Deal Agencies to help provide insight and shape policy for the needs of African Americans.
For all black party identification was roughly evenly matched at slightly below 40 R - slightly above 40 D for 1936, the black vote for 1936 was 71% Democrat, and didn't lower perceptibly until 1956 when Eisenhower ran for his second term and got 40% of the black vote, in part because of voters' disillusionment with Southern Democrats anti-civil rights efforts. Even those inside Eisenhower's aministration knew something was off though. E. Frederick Morrow, the first African American to service in an executive staff position at the White House, spotted the GOP's often indifferent efforts to court black constituencies.
Here's the thing. Even as late as 1960, only about two thirds of black voters were identified with the Democrats. When you count the vote, that's a big number. But compared to today, that's pretty small.
But, Barry Goldwater happened.
This 'revolutionary shift' happened when hundreds of college students, most white, journeyed to Mississippi to help black citizens register to vote. The states response was swift and violent. And less than a month before the GOP's national convention in San Francisco. Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner were kidnapped on a back road in Neshoba County and the only clue they existed was a charred Ford station wagon.
Two weeks later Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law.
Events outside the GOP's convention hall affected what went on inside. Supporters of presumed front-runner Governor Nelson Rockefeller were blindsided, and Senator Barry Goldwater was nominated. "Mr. Conservative" would run. He believed the Civil Rights Act was unconstitutional - although he said that once it had been enacted into law, it would be obeyed. But states should implement the law in their own time. White southerners, segregationists, caught the message, and were reassured.
Black Americans also caught the message, and were not.
In his acceptance speech, Goldwater told the convention "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" while speaking of a very specific notion of liberty. Small government. A government that doesn't have laws that interfere. A government that is not conducting a war on poverty. Goldwater attracted the white Southern votes his advisers thought were essential, opening up the doors for the "Southern Strategy" that Nixon and Reagan would use to great success.
The relatively few, but still not trivial, amount of black voters still in the Republican Party? Message recieved. They moved aggressively, and almost unanimously, into the Democratic Party. They've stayed there through the generations ever since. Not that all of them want to be there. To be shown why later.
The Black Vote for Republican president in 1964 was then less than 10%. The Black percentage of registered Republicans in 1964 were then roughly 10%. Democrat percent appropriately skyrocketed. Barry's loss was massive. 486-52. Johnson with 61% of the popular vote.
In 1967, George Romney fell from great heights, killing the Moderate Republicans Last Stand. While explaining his former support for the war during an interview, he said, "When I came back from Vietnam, I just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get." Claiming the military and diplomatic establishment brainwashed you wasn't a good thing to say then or now. Nixon acted quickly to stab him in the back. Having long understood the amount that he could win with just 5% more of the black vote, but also understanding the racist forces in play in the Republican Party that brought Goldwater to the nomination remained the center of power despite Goldwater's defeat, Nixon acted to play them. He argued the primary civil right in America was to be protected from violence. White voters fears of Black Americans' demands for civil rights made them uncomfortable with politicians who might support them. Politicians like Romney. Nixon, famously running as a "law and order" candidate, wanted these white voters. He got the nomination after a messy convention argued over how tightly to tie to the Southern Base. Reagan tried to make a run. It all ended only after Strom Thurmond stepped in on Nixon's behalf.
More than half a century later, over and over again, Republicans have faced the choice between a big-tent strategy and specific appeals to white voters. And it's not as if people aren't pleading for Republican racial attitudes to change.
This time it worked. Though ironically for implementing the Southern Strategy they got very little of the South. George Wallace ran independant and got the deep south. Nixon wiped the floor with Humphrey.
In 1978 the Republican Party chairman Bill Brock invited Jesse Jackson to talk to party notables in DC as one of the few militant blacks preaching racial reconciliation. According to Jackson, there were seven million unregistered black voters waiting to be wooed by the GOP. "The Republican Party needs black people if it is to ever compete for national office -- or, in fact, to keep it from becoming an extinct party." Jackson got a standing ovation from the crowd, good feelings of the day left them hoping the right 1980 candidate could hope for anywhere from 30-40 percent of the black vote.
Reagan would get only 14 percent.
So Jackson made the argument that Black voters should want the two parties to compete for their votes. He worried the Democrats would take the Black voters for granted. (And, well, 40 years later, Joe Biden tells a radio host: "I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you're for me or Trump, then you ain't Black.") Here's the thing, Jackson's personal conservatism could pretty much be seen as emblematic of that of Black Americans. Something that could be potentially courted by the GOP. He denounces abortion as murder. He insists that when prayers leave schools the guns come in. He suggests that while he supported women's liberation, his wife should at least stay in her place...his home.
But the 1978 vibes didn't last long. Republican bureaucrats coalesced around the idea that minority voters were unwinnable. A few months before Jackson's speech, President Carter introduced electoral reforms. An end to the Electoral College and same-day universal voter registration, that Brock had praised. Thing is, an essay soon appeared in the publication Human Events that expressed the view that Carter's proposal "could blow the Republican Party sky-high" given that most of the new voters in higher-turnout elections would be Democratic. Brock's flip-flop embodies many of the internal struggles of the GOP of the last few decades: should the GOP invest in appeals to new voters or pluck racism's low-hanging fruit? By the time Reagan appeared at a 1980 campaign stop at the National Urban League, it wasn't to win over Black Voters. Just to show he wasn't anti-black.
In 1981, Trenton, New Jersy, around the largely Black and Hispanic districts 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
The Task force was composed of county deputy sheriffs and local police who patrolled polling sites with guns in full view. A court complaint later lodged described them 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.
This was not some rogue enterprise or ill-conceived product of extremists. It was funded by the Republican Party. While the group's goals were, ostensibly to prevent illegal voting, one couldn't take that at face value from behavior. It was more like an intimidation effort. The Republican National Committee was forced into a court-enforced consent agreement that it would not engage into such "efforts", efforts the court deemed racially motivated, until 2018.
In 2005, RNC chair Ken Mehlman appeared at the NAACP convention to formally apologize for the GOP 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."
Maybe befitting a party whose sitting president ran as the "compassionate conservative". No accident. "I felt compelled to phrase it this way," Bush said. "Because people hear 'conservative' and they think heartless." Rove is a bit more blunt. "It helped Bush indicate he was different from previous Republicans."
Bush's platform aimed to be inclusive. We hack on No Child Left Behind in hindsight. Just like many other large laws. But the funding it tried to push to low income students, many of them home to black and Hispanic students, is key. Bush signed it into law with Ted Kennedy's support and two black children standing directly behind him. Today that's a picture for a war crimes trial.
Despite this compassionate conservatism rhetoric and even large policies that seemed to try to go somewhere and maybe run into a wall, the GOP of the Bush era continued to pursue policies hostile to Americans of color. Especially on voting rights.
No figure from the Bush Civil Rights Division emerged more controversial than Hans von Spakovsky. He promoted voter ID laws in Georgia starting in the 1990s, and once in DoJ gained infamy for pseudonymously writing a law review paper under "Publius" which promoted such laws. His identity was revealed later, and he refused to recuse himself from a controversial case involving voter ID in Georgia. The case led career DoJ lawyers to resign and enforcement came to a standstill. Only 48 changes out of 81,000 submitted, ten times fewer than the first four years of Reagan. He also served on Trump's now-disbanded Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, created to investigate whether Trump lost the vote to Hillary Clinton because of voter fraud. No evidence was ever produced.
The loss of the 2012 election prompted a crisis of confidence among the GOP leadership. They would author what is known as, officially, the "Growth and Opportunity Project" that placed the GOP's problems in harsh terms. "Many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country."
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 party has circled the wagons around Trump and his rhetoric and policies. Gone are the days of articulate philosophies like "compassionate conservatism". Now, contrarianism to distinguish itself and stoke the good feels among its core members. Russia was once our number one Geo-political foe. Now the party heaps praise on Vladimir Putin. The North Star: reliance on politics of race and racism. Membership in the party wanes and America grows more diverse all the while.
Republicans know the Faustian bargain they've made. A 2007 interview of John McCain during his presidential run speaks to scary awareness of the short-term strategy of placating the white base and how it can damage the GOP's long-term demographics. McCain is asked the political ramifications of the immigration debate: "In the short term, it probably galvanizes our base. In the long term, if you alienate Hispanics, you'll pay a heavy price. By the way, I think the fence is least effective, but I'll build the goddamned fence if they want it."
So why are generations of Black Voters 90% large voting Democratic in spite of what their beliefs are? In spite of how conservative or liberal they are? How do you provoke an entire race 30% of the population large to outright shift against you? You turn hostile and you stay hostile. These people aren't the hispanics where California is different from Texas is different from Florida. The Republicans just outright turned completely hostile and the Democrats doing mostly nothing and occasionally dropping them a few bits and pieces is better than the Republicans destroying their lives.
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