obama

In October [2012], Newsweek announced that it will be moving to an all-digital format in 2013. That means that this post-election issue aside, there is only one print issue left.

With its history of iconic and controversial covers, Newsweek unsurprisingly went for a less-than-conventional cover.

The cover depicts President Obama as Napoleon Bonaparte victorious after a battle with the headline “The Obama Conquest.”

Their message to the GOP? “You’re old, you’re white, you’re history!”

Not very becoming of a prominent publication…

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/newsweek-has-a-very-pointed-post-election-message-to-the-gop-2012-11?r=US&IR=T

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FROM NEWSWEEK:

GOP Bets on Black Conservatives As Key to Victory: 'We Change or We Die'

BY STEVE FRIESS ON 02/09/22 AT 5:00 AM EST

Ten years after its "autopsy" of Mitt Romney's 2012 loss to Barack Obama concluded that the Republican Party's biggest problem was its failure to appeal to voters of color, 2022 is shaping up as a breakthrough year for the GOP on at least one diversity front: Black candidates. From Georgia, where high-profile Black Republicans seek nominations for both governor and senator, to Michigan, where former Detroit Police Chief James Craig is the odds-on favorite to go up against Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, to a lineup of well-funded House and Senate candidates poised to break the record for the number of Black Republicans elected to Congress, a decade-long effort to broaden the appeal of the GOP is finally bearing fruit—and could play a pivotal role in determining the outcome of the upcoming midterm elections.

It remains to be seen whether the coming wave of Black conservative candidates can spur legions of Black voters, the Democratic Party's most loyal constituency, to vote Republican. But judging by recent races featuring a Black GOP candidate—lieutenant governor races in Virginia and North Carolina, a Kentucky attorney general campaign and the last two U.S. Senate races in Michigan—the party has reason to be hopeful. Exit polls showed these Black Republican candidates drew slightly larger, potentially decisive shares of Black votes compared to the white Republicans running alongside them for other offices in their states. Indeed, North Carolina Lt. Governor Mark Robinson, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron and unsuccessful U.S. Senate hopeful John James in Michigan were the top vote-getting Republicans in their states in their most recent races, indicating they both excited the GOP base and drew crossover votes.

"Some Republicans are savvy enough to understand that if they win 10 to 15 percent of Black voters in state and local elections, they can win—and there are ways to actually do this," says Johns Hopkins University political science professor Leah Wright Rigueur, author of the 2016 book, The Loneliness of the Black Republican.

One of the most important test cases this year may come in the Michigan governor's race. Craig's campaign to unseat Whitmer, Rigueur says, is "not about winning 100 percent of the Black folks, it's not even about winning 50 percent. It is about winning just enough to push them over the edge and make the difference." Craig echoes that, telling Newsweek his status as a native Detroiter and well-regarded tenure as the city's top cop grants him an authenticity with Black audiences that will "open some minds to what I have to say."

Another indication that the GOP is chipping away at Black loyalty to the Democratic Party, according to Republican National Committee spokesman Paris Dennard: last year's elections in Virginia, where there were examples of Black Democrats losing to white Republicans in regions with sizable Black constituencies.

"The GOP is an inclusive party making significant inroads and, with recent wins already, we are optimistic about our chances in having even more Black conservatives elected to serve in 2022," says Dennard, the first Black person to hold his RNC position. (Listen to a Twitter Spaces discussion of this story with Dennard, conservative commentator Candace Owens, California House candidate Tamika Hamilton and radio talk-show host Larry Elder here.)

"Significant" is relative; it won't take much to sharply raise the numbers. The three Black Republicans now in Congress—South Carolina Senator Tim Scott and Representatives Burgess Owens of Ohio and Byron Donalds of Florida—are the largest number to serve simultaneously since Reconstruction. Virginia Lt. Governor Winsome Sears, sworn in last month, brings the number of Black Republicans in statewide elected offices to five. By contrast, 14 Black Democrats hold statewide elected office and 55 Black Democrats serve in Congress (excluding Washington, D.C. and the U.S. Virgin Islands).

Still, Election Night 2022, already looking favorable to Republicans, could go down as the moment elected Black Republicans go from a rarity to a real contingent. A number of high-profile candidates are serious contenders if not outright favorites, including Craig in Michigan; former college football star Herschel Walker seeking to unseat Democratic incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock in Georgia; and ex-State Senator Vernon Jones of Georgia attempting to replace retiring GOP Representative Jody Hice in a sprawling district east of Atlanta.

In South Carolina, Scott, only the second Black Republican in the Senate since Reconstruction, has nominal opposition for his reelection and has amassed a huge campaign war chest, sparking chatter about a possible White House run in 2024 or 2028. He's raised more than $30 million since 2017, second only to Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York among senators seeking reelection in 2022, according to Federal Election Commission records.

What's more, the RNC expects a record-setting number of Black nominees for the House. They may include John James, who joined the race for a new seat in the Detroit suburbs this month after his losing his last Senate bid by just 1.7 percentage points; if elected, he would be Michigan's first Black Republican member of Congress. Also running in GOP primaries: former Army helicopter pilot Wesley Hunt, the first Black Republican nominee for Congress in Texas in 2020, when he lost by 3 points in a Houston-area district; former Scott legislative aide Shay Hawkins of Akron, Ohio; businessman Quincy McKnight of Nashville; and ex-Trump aide Rod Dorilás, a 31-year-old Navy veteran in Palm Beach County, Florida.

"It's not just about Black conservatives rising and seeing their success," says Donalds, a first-term House member who doesn't mince words when it comes to the opposition. "There's a lot of Black people witnessing how diabolical the Democrats are when it comes to trying to maintain their monopoly on Black folks. They're sick of it, they're deciding to make a change, and they're deciding to run for office."

For the Republican Party, the wave of Black candidates represents a giant step forward into a more multicolored future as part of a grand strategic plan for the Grand Old Party. As one high-ranking GOP official, who is white and asked for anonymity to speak frankly, puts it: "We can't be the party of white men anymore. There aren't enough of us. There won't be enough of us in a decade. We change or we die."

The RNC's Mission

Illustrating the shift: a little-noticed event in Indiana last summer, when 15 people of color and LGBTQ people graduated from a political organizing and training program organized by the state GOP. The program's online description is laden with the kind of progressive buzzwords that regularly receive mockery in the right-wing media—monthly classes cover "inclusive language, authentic communications, diversity and civic engagement, multicultural messaging...and more!" And none other than RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel showed up to fete the graduates. She told the group: "Expanding coalitions and growing our party has been a passion of mine since I became chair of the RNC—not just to win votes but to build authentic relationships and share our message with all communities."

Installed atop the RNC after Donald Trump became president, McDaniel has, in fact, made expanding outreach to Black voters a hallmark of her tenure—an extension of the Black Voices For Trump effort during the 2016 campaign. Many progressives took umbrage with Trump's August 2016 blunt appeal to Black voters—"You're living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed. What the hell do you have to lose?" And the effort seemed to fail when he garnered a paltry 8 percent of the Black vote. But supporters say that was a prelude to a presidency in which Trump led an outreach and policy initiative that, by 2020, brought his share of the Black vote up to 12 percent, the highest percentage for a GOP presidential nominee since Ronald Reagan took 14 percent on his way to the White House in 1980.

"It started with President Trump and how vocal he was about the Black Voices for Trump movement being fully funded and staffed at the campaign, and then you have the chairwoman funding it and the donors embracing it after that," Dennard says.

By 2020, when Trump ran for reelection, the RNC rented office space in 15 major cities with a large Black population in battleground states for regularly staffed "Voices For Trump" field offices. They closed after the campaign ended, but McDaniel last February committed $2 million to reopen them and expand to more cities. At least three—now called Black American Community Centers—have already opened, in Milwaukee, Cleveland and College Station, Georgia. The effort also includes Dennard writing a weekly column in the Black newspaper The Carolinian, the RNC taking out advertisements in Black media to celebrate Black History Month and placing Black GOP surrogates as pundits on conservative and Black political talk shows.

The strategy fits neatly into the playbook recommended in the 2013 RNC report analyzing Romney's presidential-election loss—the one dubbed "the autopsy"—which urged the GOP to seek votes beyond its base of older white Americans. "We need to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian, and gay Americans and demonstrate we care about them, too," the report said. "We must recruit more candidates who come from minority communities.”

In the early days of the 2016 Trump campaign, amid the candidate's harsh remarks about immigrants and some communities of color, a Politico headline blared, "Trump kills GOP autopsy" and New York Magazine called it "dead and buried." Yet radio talk host Larry Elder, a Black conservative and the top vote-getting Republican in September's failed recall of Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom, says Trump followed the autopsy's advice all the way to the White House and beyond.

"Donald Trump, to a greater degree than any Republican presidential candidate that I've seen, went to the inner city and tried to get Black votes," Elder says. "The message is this: Don't act as if Black people cannot be convinced. They can be. Don't condescend. Tell the truth. Talk about the issues, talk about how these issues benefit you."

'Republicans Who Just Don't Know It Yet"

Indeed, some GOP positions, on subjects such as abortion, LGBTQ rights, education and immigration reform, have strong support within the Black community, and are seen by conservatives as issues that can win over Black voters who "are Republicans who just don't know it yet," as Sears, Virginia's new lieutenant governor, likes to say.

Cases in point: A 2019 Pew poll found that 49 percent of Black Americans oppose same-sex marriage versus 32 percent of whites; a 2020 Gallup survey reported that 54 percent of Black respondents do not believe abortion is morally acceptable; a 2018 Harvard-Harris survey found 85 percent of Black Americans favor restricting legal immigration, more than any other demographic group; and 73 percent of Black voters support school choice, according to a 2021 RealClear survey.

Still, Craig, Detroit's former top cop, knows voting Republican is a tough sell, even in his own family. He's honing his pitch to Black voters in Michigan by talking to his father, a lifelong Democrat. "My dad wants to understand why I'm a Republican, and I say, 'Dad, you are conservative, you've always been a conservative. You believe in law and order. You believe in small government. You believe we shouldn't be excessively taxed. You believe in an entrepreneurial spirit, in the merit principle,'" Craig says. "These are some of the tenets [of the Republican party] and when you put all that together, my dad's a conservative."

Recent poll numbers in Michigan show just how high the stakes are for Craig, who has a double-digit lead among Republican hopefuls for the party nod, in improving his standing among Black voters. A Detroit News poll in early January had him 9.5 points behind Whitmer with 11.7 percent undecided in the general election; a Detroit Free Press poll weeks later had him trailing by just 5 points with 13 percent undecided. The Detroit News poll also showed Craig tied with Whitmer among white voters but backed by just 7.6 percent of the Black vote to Whitmer's 82.3 percent, with 10.1 percent undecided. In other words, winning over most of those undecideds and peeling off just a small share of Whitmer's Black support could allow the Republican to pull ahead.

Michigan State University political science professor Matt Grossmann believes Craig has a good shot at pulling it off: "The Black vote in southeast Michigan is a huge, important section of the electorate, and he has some name recognition and potential goodwill there. That gets him at least a hearing that white candidates from elsewhere might not get."

Trump, in some cases, can be a surprisingly helpful factor, too. Black Republicans point out that, despite his coarse rhetoric on racial issues, Trump's presidency brought policy changes and other developments that benefited people of color, including an economy that yielded record-low Black unemployment; the First Step Act, which eased stringent federal criminal sentencing guidelines and created mechanisms for earlier prison release; and a budget that included $255 million per year for 10 years for Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

More recently, Trump's endorsements of a number of little-known Black politicians, despite their slim chances of wining, is encouraging some Black Republican candidates to ignore traditional GOP gatekeepers—local party bosses—who in the past have put the kibosh on their ambitions, says Rigueur, the Johns Hopkins political scientist.

"The old Republican Party would say, 'This candidate has no shot, we won't touch them,'" Rigueur says. "That's not how Trump operates. He operates by saying, 'Does this candidate agree with me? Yeah, I like them.'"

Not everyone in the party is on board with courting candidates and voters of color. Every time the RNC posts to Facebook about an outreach effort—say, the opening of the Black GOP community centers—laments from rank-and-file white Republicans follow. "Why can't it just be a community center? The parties are ridiculously divisive," said a typical comment. Another poster followed with snark: "I demand you pander to my race as well."

Elder and others shrug off the backlash. "Do I think that the Republican Party has done a poor job of marketing itself to Black voters? I do," he says. "They have written off Black people or they've assumed they're going to vote for the Democratic Party."

Meanwhile another Black candidate, Kim Klacik of Baltimore, doesn't think the party is going far enough. Klacik, the 2020 GOP nominee for a House seat in a firmly Democratic district, raised more than $8 million after posting a three-minute viral campaign ad scalding Democrats for failing to improve conditions in the city. Trump praised the ad, endorsed her and gave her a prime-time speaking slot at the 2020 Republican Convention.

READ MORE:

https://www.newsweek.com/2022/02/18/gop-bets-black-conservatives-key-victory-we-change-we-die-1677030.html

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