Symposium Q: Should the GOP Undertake More Outreach to Minorities during Campaign 2004?
Richard Nadler, Insight on the News, Apr. 1
YES: A smart appeal to self-described ’conservatives’ among blacks and Hispanics is overdue.
The GOP literature on black and Hispanic outreach is permeated with grand theories and moral imperatives. It is written by bleeding-heart conservatives who want to apologize and by tough-guy conservatives who don’t.
Presidential adviser Karl Rove advocates courting immigrants, lest we be swamped by a demographic tide of hostile Hispanics. VDARE.com’s Steve Sailer says we mustn’t, because a left-leaning Latino tide will inundate our borders if we do. Jack Kemp says we must embrace affirmative action to show that we care about minorities. Pat Buchanan says we must reject affirmative action to show that we care about whites.
I say, answer the threshold question first: Can Republican minority outreach produce a real-vote return on a cost-effective basis?
This technical consideration of outreach must supersede considerations of policy, not because it is more important but because it is, in real life, determinative. Every general-election January we Republicans announce our intention to become more sensitive, more inclusive—as diverse, at least, as our portfolios. And every September such rainbow initiatives dissolve in realpolitik calculations of resource availability and target demographics. The inevitable conclusion: Minority outreach should be minimized in favor of higher-yield campaign strategies.
This is the way of the world. The problem regarding outreach is not that this conclusion is cynical, but that it is wrong. Minority votes are ripe for harvest, but like Anglo job hunters contemplating manual labor in California’s Central Valley we Republicans are reluctant to hire on!
Outreach means broadening the base of a party or a candidate. To achieve this, one attracts adherents who have been either nonaligned in the political wars or aligned with one’s opponents. Outreach is of general interest to any party or candidate. But, as January flows into September, it is of specific interest to those running campaigns that are hotly contested.
Let’s posit a “disinterested” consultant with no strong feelings about race, immigration, affirmative action or reparations. How would such an expert evaluate minority-outreach prospects for a Republican client?
When our consultant from Mars plans outreach, he looks for differences between how groups think and how they vote. For instance, the “Reagan Democrats” of the 1980s had been blue-collar union workers who voted their shop interests. But when Democrat-appointed judges started busing workers’ kids across town, when taxes spiraled upward, out of control, when Democratic mavens expressed open contempt for the Christian faith, large numbers of these blue-collar voters were ripe for Republican outreach.
Such vote-poaching is hardly unique. In an earlier generation, blacks—a loyal constituency of the Republican Party—joined the Democrats over issues of voting rights and access to public accommodations. A consultant cannot cause such fundamental shifts of interest, but he can accelerate them.
Today, roughly 10 percent of blacks vote Republican. But 27 percent are self-described conservatives, 44 percent are pro-life, 55 percent favor across-the-board tax cuts, 58 percent support private Social Security accounts and 70 percent favor school choice.
And among Hispanics, 36 percent are self-described conservatives, 61 percent were in favor of the Bush tax plan of 2001, 65 percent are pro-life and 83 percent support school vouchers. Yet fewer than one Latino in three votes Republican.
In other words, minority affinity for key Republican platform issues exceeds minority affinity for the party that champions them by factors of two, three, five and even more. So let us postulate that were our consultant from Mars, and no one told him otherwise, he might like his chances to shift black and Hispanic votes to the Republicans.
His next question, professionally, would be: Can I target communications to these groups in a cost-effective way? And the answer is yes. In fact, on a mass basis, blacks and Hispanics (unlike whites) are two of the easiest groups in the nation to target. Both have culture-specific media. The great urban-contemporary radio stations that serve heavily black audiences have the highest overall market share in Los Angeles, Dallas, Memphis, New Orleans, Kansas City, Miami and Washington (to name only a few); they rank second in Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia, New York City and Baltimore (again, to name only a few). Black radio reaches roughly 35 percent of its target audience on a daily basis and 50 percent on a weekly basis.
Among Hispanics, 72 percent report listening to Spanish-language TV weekly, and 46 percent daily. The comparable listenership stats for Spanish-language radio are 66 percent weekly and 32 percent daily.
Minority media are incredibly targeted and relatively inexpensive. So our Martian maven again answers “Yes, messages can be delivered to minority audiences en masse, in a cost-effective way.” He will observe that one political unit (but only one) already does this. They are called DE-MO-KRATS.
Next, our consultant must choose his message. And here’s the sticking point: Republican policies are popular among minorities, but Republicans are not. The mere addition of the Republican label to any policy can drop its popularity 20 points or more. A unique 2002 postelection survey by the firm the polling company dramatized the total disconnect between black voters and the Republican Party on its core issues:
By 62 percent to 21 percent, African-Americans preferred Democrats to Republicans “to reduce terrorism by strengthening the national defense.”
Blacks thought Democrats were likelier to reduce taxes than Republicans by a margin of 75 percent to 11 percent.
Democrats were more trusted than Republicans to “protect the rights of unborn children” by a margin of 69 percent to 13 percent.
The point is not that minorities reject our core issues. It is that they do not associate the Republican Party with those issues.
It is at this point that Republicans typically pack it in. Minorities are just too ignorant for outreach or too enculturated or too propagandized or too … something. But our outsourced consultant from Mars wields more curiosity than the average Republican operative. He asks, “If minorities, and especially blacks, dissociate the GOP from its platform positions, with what issues do they associate us?”
A day of urban-contemporary radio, an evening of Univision, and the veil is lifted. In these venues Republicans rarely are presented in our own voices—but we are there. Democratic consultants, advertising as often as four times per hour in close races, define Republicans as bigots who drag minorities to their death from pickup trucks, who put guns into their children’s hands, incarcerate them without evidence and deny them an education. We are the demons who prevent blacks from voting and who burn crosses on lawns. Republicans are not recognized as the party of national defense, right to life, low taxes, entrepreneurship or school choice for a simple reason: We are not portrayed as such in the venues minorities watch and audit. And the response of minority voters to what they see and hear is, in fact, rational.
In uncovering the “secret” of Democrat supermajorities and turnout spikes in minority communities, our Martian consultant also has exposed the root of Republican underperformance. Democrats enjoy the practical monopolization of minority mass communications. They define us. They are less than kind. And we are absent.
So stated, the response becomes clear: Break the monopoly! Re-establish the GOP brand. Reattach the Republican Party label to its signature issues, and attack the Democratic Party on theirs. And do so in the same venues, with the same frequency and the same passion, that Democrats use. It is they, after all, who are the experts.
So in theory we can answer our threshold question—the cost-effectiveness of minority outreach—with a yes. On the basis of the vast dissonance between how they think versus how they vote, blacks and Hispanics constitute potential growth demographics. We can target both efficiently, on a mass basis, through commercial media. And we have a relatively popular message capable of closing the gap between political opinion and political behavior—the Republican platform, explicitly stated, chapter and verse.
But our answer needn’t depend on theory or on Martians or even on the Democrats. In 2002 a Republican group, the Council for Better Government (CBG), placed more than 20,000 broadcast ads on black and Spanish media. Their campaigns overlapped 29 major contests in 12 states, including Missouri, Colorado, North Carolina and Georgia. Under the leadership of longtime conservative activist John Altevogt, CBG scripts highlighted hard-core GOP standards, including right to life, tax cuts, Social Security privatization, military preparedness and school vouchers. The CBG campaigns attacked the Democratic Party freely and excoriated leading Democrats, such as Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, by name.
Using precinct-level, real-vote data, Access Communications Group (of which I was then president) assessed this counteronslaught in an extended meta-study of all 29 contests. On average, CBG campaigns drilled holes in Democratic majorities of 14 percent in African-American precincts, and 30 percent in Democratic majorities in Hispanic precincts.
We can cut Democratic majorities in the Democratic core sooner rather than later if we will show up in the right venues and assert our platform with the same passion and conviction our opponents demonstrate.
Nadler is a consultant with Access Communications Group of Kansas City and an adviser to the Republican Leadership Coalition. He has written policy analysis for the Cato Institute, National Review, Policy Review and the Heartland Institute, and is a regular panelist on Ruckus, a public-affairs show on KCPT-TV, Kansas City, Mo. Contact Richard Nadler at nadler_richard@hotmail.com.