GOP déjà vu: Minority outreach goes down, again

Keep both hands inside the ride, folks: The Republican party is whiplashing the country once again with respect to its never-evolving efforts at minority outreach. The Daily Beast and The New York Times have both reported that the Republican National Committee has been closing community centers created for the purpose of reaching minority voters, as well as laying off staff.

“The community centers, which were based in several states including California, New York, North Carolina and Texas, were part of a yearslong effort to encourage Black, Latino, Asian and Native American voters to join the party. Republicans closed several minority outreach centers in battleground states more than a year ago and did not retain their minority media outreach directors,” The Times reported on March 13.

This wave of cuts, part of a general downsizing at the RNC in which dozens of party officials were let go, is some of the first muscle-flexing of the committee’s new leadership, which includes Lara Trump, daughter-in-law of former president Donald Trump — and the committee’s new co-chair.

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It’s a big shift from the time of this kumbaya chestnut from Ronna McDaniel, then RNC chairwoman, back in July 2022: “The RNC is growing our Party through purposeful education and engagement. Our commitment to provide opportunities for all to live out the American dream is broadening our base because our ideas transcend all backgrounds. Unlike Democrats, Republicans do not take minority communities for granted and we will continue to work to earn each vote ahead of November.”

Less than two years later, we’re back to Republicans dismissing minority outreach — this time so aggressively that, the Daily Beast reported, the effort’s been distilled by committee insiders as “Make the RNC White Again.” They're not serious people.

“I think they say a lot of things, but I think their actions really are what folks should look at,” said Rep. Suzan DelBene, chair of the House Democrats campaign arm told the Associated Press. “And their actions have been the opposite. They mock diversity and equity, and they put forward policies that go against diverse communities across the country.”

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Avid observers of the national political scene will note: We’ve been down this road to Damascus before. In January 2013, after Barack Obama won re-election as president and Republican soul-searching began, I wrote that “the front office of Republican identity is in utter chaos, its general tableau of spite, snarkiness, mixed messages and philosophical disarray offering a vision of some mad, hair-on-fire amalgam of Hieronymus Bosch and the Keystone Kops.”

Back then, the GOP (fresh from President Obama’s 2012 drubbing of Mitt Romney) gnashed teeth and wandered in its napalmed wilderness, trying to come to grips with why things had gone so … south for the party. It fell to Bobby Jindal, then the governor of Louisiana, to offer a prescription for the Republican party.

“I made this observation at a [Republican Governors Association] conference. The first step in getting the voters to like us is to demonstrate that we like them,” Jindal said in January 2013. “We’ve got to stop being the stupid party. I’m serious. It’s time for a new Republican party that talks like adults. It’s time for us to articulate our plans and our vision for America in real terms … We’ve got to stop insulting the intelligence of voters. We need to trust the smarts of the American people.”

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Thus chastened and presumably inspired, the Republicans started to move off the old talking points and make the trappings of change, going so far as to rebrand the party’s identifying acronym. For a few brief shining moments, we were led to believe that the initials “GOP” stood for “Growth & Opportunity Project,” instead of “Grand Old Party.”

But it didn’t take. Ain’t a damn thing foundationally changed. Fast forward to now and Republicans are setting the stage for defeat in November via two of the Democrats’ stalwart constituencies. The GOP’s pursuit of more female candidates in districts around the country is complicated by historically intractable positions on abortion and reproductive rights — something that matters to younger women, as well as suburban women voters. Their pursuit of more minority voters under the GOP tent is contradicted by conservatives’ attempts to restrict or eliminate library access to black and minority literature, push back on assertions of black culture and history; cripple diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the federal government and at U.S. corporations … and oh yeah, suppress the voter turnout of minority Americans.

It's too bad. In 2022, a Pew Research Center report found that nearly half of the country’s nearly 48 million black Americans were under the age of 30. That’s a fertile field in which to find voters in the future. Everything depends on the message that’s sent to them. A mixed message about their worth, and their value to the Republican party, won’t exactly endear these voters, and others, to the GOP.

The Republican party disconnects explain the essence of its central, existential dilemma — who it is and who it represents. That’s a challenge of identity the GOP will not resolve in the next eight months. Which makes perfect sense: It’s hard to respect voters when you’re doing all you can to keep people from being voters in the first place. It’s hard for the party to “trust the smarts” of the American people when it exerts so much energy and capital trying to shrink the American electorate, the subset of the American people ready and able to vote.

This is why the Republican Party has mostly been unable to achieve sustained, meaningful traction with minorities — African American voters in particular. The GOP message has been muddled at best; now, the shuttering of the community centers that might have given the GOP at least a shred of credibility with minorities points to an outright volte-face. It proves like nothing else could that Republicans are talking out of both sides of their mouth on minority outreach — when they bother to talk to minorities at all.