this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2024
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It's so funny to think this is the Republican people were convinced was going to win the black vote.
I think Republicans look at a small handful of statistics about black voters, like religious affiliation and views on lgbt issues, and think that means they could be won over. But it's really missing the forest for the trees when they're making blatantly racist attacks.
Republicans want to pander to big business with promises of cheap labor while pandering to labor with promises of future self-enrichment.
Black workers are the fulcrum that argument turns on. They're the workers you can use as scabs when you need to break up a union. And they're the workers you can blame for Woking and DEIing your professional jobs.
That's why Trump sounds so incoherent around them. He's trying to pander to white nationalists and black labor at the same time, and it comes out as gibberish.
Republicans could honestly pick up a lot of black votes if they were capable of dropping the racism. Unfortunately it's so deeply ingrained into the base now that I doubt they could pull it off.
I'd be surprised if many of them cared about winning the black vote.
Guys like SC-R Tim Scott figured out how to run as a Black Republican and tap into a sizable split in the Democratic base, beating his lily white rivals by filling a niche with the state's large base of socially conservative black voters. Allen West, down in Florida, managed a similar stunt to beat out his whiter conservative rivals, before moving to Texas to chair the state's wealthy and nationally influential Republican Party.
I think they do see black voters as winnable constituency, based on how they align on religious beliefs and economic beliefs. During the late 19th / early 20th century, the GOP benefited enormously from an African American voter base that would support New York / California business tycoons simply because they weren't racist Dixiecrats. But then Nixon did the Southern Strategy to win the Dixiecrat segregationist rump in the 70s, and they've been pandering to them ever since. Bush Jr tried to bridge that gap from 2000 to 2008, identifying a host of POC cronies willing to shill for big business without regard to their skin color. But he ultimately failed when the party went into a reactionary anti-Obama backlash.
There are plenty of Republicans who would love to get back to a kind of color-blind corporate hegemony, because its far more profitable to exploit the entire underclass than to be pinned to a chronically disaffected white middle class male base. But you gotta dance with who brung ya. And its the Used Car Dealership voter that's powering the Trump campaign.