<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Nick Gillespie, editor in chief of Reason magazine, here discusses how the Republican Party has in recent decades systematically alienated blacks, Hispanics, and immigrants:</div><div><br></div><div><a href="http://reason.com/blog/2016/08/23/is-the-gop-writing-off-40-percent-of-the">http://reason.com/blog/2016/08/23/is-the-gop-writing-off-40-percent-of-the</a></div><div><br></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>There is an obvious lesson here for Libertarians to pursue a different course, and not follow the failed party of the past. Libertarian values of open borders, defending civil liberties against police abuse, ending the "War on Drugs" and mass incarceration policies that disproportionately harm minorities, and speaking out against government policies that oppress and discriminate against the poor, offer a clear alternative – if we have the vision and courage to embrace it.</div><div><br></div><div>Love & Liberty,</div><div> ((( starchild )))</div><div><br></div><div><header class="mainheading">
<h2 class="title"><a href="http://reason.com/blog/2016/08/23/is-the-gop-writing-off-40-percent-of-the">The GOP Is Writing Off 30 Percent of the American Electorate</a><span class="editor" pid="259186"></span></h2>
<h2 class="subtitle">Richard Nixon pulled about one-third of
black voters in 1960. Donald Trump is courting 0 percent. And that may
not even be Republicans' biggest problem.</h2><p class="byline"><a href="http://reason.com/people/nick-gillespie/all" rel="author">Nick Gillespie</a></p><p class="byline"><time datetime="2016-08-23T15:30:00+00:00">Aug. 23, 2016 11:30 am</time></p>
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<div class="entry postcontent"><p><span class="addcaption pic right" style="width:350px"><img alt="Todd Krainin, Reason" src="https://d1jn4vzj53eli5.cloudfront.net/mc/ngillespie/2016_08/donaldtrumpfreedomfest428-2.jpg?h=263&w=350" title="Donald Trump" height="263" width="350"><span class="caption">Todd Krainin, Reason</span></span></p><p></p><p>According
to some polls, Donald Trump has been pulling as little as 0 percent of
the black vote in key battleground states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania.
<em><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/07/13/new-polls-in-pennsylvania-and-ohio-show-donald-trump-with-0-percent-of-the-black-vote/">Zero percent</a>!</em>
That's mind-boggling and sure, it might pick up after his recent
speeches identifying with the plight of African Americans living in
urban areas that have been under Democratic control for decades.</p><p>But if we're being honest, it's not going to change very much. That's
not all Trump's fault, either. It represents a decades-long trend that
has seen Republicans essentially abandon all hopes of cracking the
lowest possible double digits among black voters. In 2012, Mitt Romney <a href="http://ropercenter.cornell.edu/polls/us-elections/how-groups-voted/how-groups-voted-2012/">got just 6 percent</a> of black votes. (One Republican who has done better is Ohio Gov. John Kasich, <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/3-questions-black-voters-should-ask-john-kasich-n396106">who earned 26 percent</a> of the black vote in his 2014 re-election race).</p><p>It wasn't always this way, of course, and looking at how Republicans
went from being the default party of black voters after the Civil War to
being a pariah among them is a way of understanding one highly probable
future for the GOP as a minor party that represents a smaller and
smaller bloc of voters who identify as "white" and "American" in
strictly nativist terms.</p>
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</div> </aside><p>The GOP's declining appeal to black voters—again, approaching <em>zero</em> in the Year of the Donald!—is paralleled by the party's declining appeal to Hispanic voters, too. <a href="https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/00">According to the Census</a>,
blacks currently make up about 13 percent of the population while
Hispanics account for about 18 percent. In an August 11 Fox News Latino
poll, <a href="http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politics/2016/08/11/fox-news-latino-poll-clinton-holds-46-point-lead-over-trump-among-hispanics/">only 20 percent</a>
of Latinos support him, lower even than Mitt Romney's dismal 27 percent
showing among Latinos in 2012, which was itself lower than John
McCain's 31 percent in 2008. Between blacks and Latinos, then, the
Republican Party is effectively writing off almost 31 percent of the
vote before the first ballot is cast in November. And given broad
demographic trends, things can only get worse for the GOP.</p><p>What's going on here and what it does it say about Republicans and
electoral politics in the 21st century? And what does it say about the
possibility for a third party such as the Libertarians to drive up their
own national numbers? The short answers: Absent a different agenda and
outreach to groups they alternately demonize and ignore, the GOP will
harden into an awful party of racial and ethnic resentment. For the LP,
which embraces tolerance, diversity, and economic mixing and progress,
the sky's the limit, especially if the Democrats continue to take
minorities for granted.</p><p><span class="addcaption pic right" style="width:350px"><img alt="Factcheck.org" src="https://d1ai9qtk9p41kl.cloudfront.net/assets/mc/_external/2016_08/courtesy-factcheckorg.jpg?h=242&w=350" title="" height="242" width="350"><span class="caption"><a href="http://Factcheck.org">Factcheck.org</a></span></span>As
recently as 1960, the Republican Richard Nixon managed to get about 30
percent of the black vote. From the Civil War on, blacks had favored the
"party of Lincoln" for self-evident reasons. Southern Democrats were
segregationists and they worked hard not just at disenfranchising blacks
at election time but in every way possible. Blacks weren't even allowed
to attend Democratic national conventions until 1924. While he was no
great friend to African Americans, Franklin Roosevelt began <a href="http://www.factcheck.org/2008/04/blacks-and-the-democratic-party/">to win a majority</a>
of their votes in the 1930s, mostly for the same reasons he won a
majority of nearly every group's votes during his four presidential
campaigns. Blacks were more likely to be poor than average and they
warmed to various FDR programs aimed at ameliorating poverty. Harry
Truman, writes Brooks Jackson, won 77 percent of the black vote in 1948,
the first year that a majority of blacks identified as Democrats (among
other things, Truman integrated the armed forces and took civil rights
more seriously than most of his predecessors).</p><p>While Eisenhower in '56 and Nixon in '60 did relatively well with
black voters, Barry Goldwater's refusal to vote for the Civil Rights Act
of 1964—and his willingness to run a campaign that <a href="http://reason.com/archives/2002/03/01/he-was-right">tolerated</a>
(if it didn't actively court) segregationists—effectively ended the
Republican Party's relationship with blacks. As former segregationists
such as Strom Thurmond crossed the aisle to join the Republicans, the
transition was complete and for the past 40-plus years, Republican
presidential candidates have struggled to crack double digits with black
voters. Running as the "law and order" candidate in 1968 and <a href="http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1968/the-first-civil-right">targeting urban violence</a>
(by war demonstrators and race rioters alike), Nixon no longer had much
appeal for black voters. The last GOP candidate to crack double digits
was George W. Bush in 2004, when he pulled 11 percent.</p><p>Something similar is happening with Latino voters, although the trend line is less uni-directional. In 2004, George W. Bush won <a href="http://latinousa.org/2015/10/29/the-latino-vote-in-presidential-races/">40 percent</a>
of the Latino vote (some reports put it a few points higher), but since
then it has declined precipitously, down to Trump's pre-election share
of 20 percent. The typical conservative Republican response to this is
to invoke a master plan by Democrats and/or moral and ideological
failings of Latinos. A few years back, I debated Ann Coulter at an event
hosted by the great Independence Institute of Colorado. Among the
topics was immigration. Coulter, <a href="http://reason.com/blog/2016/04/27/revealed-donald-trump-got-his-immigratio">who has taken credit for Donald Trump's pro-deportation stance in this election</a>,
claimed that Ted Kennedy was behind the push to bring in millions of
Mexicans and other unmeltable ethnics from Africa, Asia, and especially
Latin America, all of whom would inevitably vote for Democrats. "I don't
think any time in the history of the world has a country changed its
ethnic composition overnight like that," said Coulter, following a line
of thought that is popular among many conservatives, right-wingers, and
Republicans. "It was done by design. It was done to help the Democrats,
and it did help the Democrats."</p><p><span class="addcaption pic right" style="width:350px"><img alt="Pew Research" src="https://d1ai9qtk9p41kl.cloudfront.net/assets/mc/_external/2016_08/pew-research.png?h=509&w=350" title="" height="509" width="350"><span class="caption">Pew Research</span></span>In
fact, the immigration reform enacted in the mid-1960s, much in the
spirit of Civil Rights legislation. Its chief authors were New York Rep.
Emanuel Celler and Michigan Sen. Philip Hart, and its explicit goal was
partly to route around the patently racist quotas from the 1920s that
had been based on "national origins." Disturbed by the rise in
immigrants from central and southern Europe, unapologetically racist
lawmakers in the '20s laws moved to limit the number of Jews, Italians,
Poles, Slavs, Irish, and other undesirable Europeans. New limits were
pegged to percentages of the 1890 Census, when there were fewer
foreigners from "bad" countries in the United States. The '60s reforms,
on the other hand, were specifically designed to let Americans of
European descent bring over parents and grandparents who had been
stranded in the old country first by the Depression and then by World
War II. Even as it put family reunification front and center in deciding
who could come here, it also allowed for high-skilled folks to
emigrate. It was passed against a backdrop of lower and lower levels of
foreign-born people in the United States. By 1970, <a href="chrome-extension://oemmndcbldboiebfnladdacbdfmadadm/https://www.census.gov/newsroom/pdf/cspan_fb_slides.pdf">just 4.7 percent</a> of the country was foreign-born, down from a peak of almost 15 percent in 1910.</p><p>By the mid-'60s, though, relatively few Europeans were interested in
coming to America. Some of them were trapped behind the Iron Curtain and
had no easy way West. Throughout free European nations, things were
relatively good for most people after a truly grim period that started
with World War I. The immigrants that have come to America post-1965 are
mostly from Mexico, Latin America, and Asia. In the late 1980s, Ronald
Reagan pushed hard to create a pathway to legalization and citizenship
for undocumented immigrants who were overwhelmingly of Latino heritage.
So you might want blame (or thank) Reagan far more than Ted Kennedy for
changing our "ethnic composition overnight."</p><p>But you can and should blame <em>Republicans</em> for failing to
appeal to ethnically diverse Americans in the 21st century. Demograhics
are not destiny in politics but ever since the mid-'60s, the GOP has
done a masterful, if not always conscious, job of making sure that
blacks and Latinos feel unwelcome.</p><p>In <a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/immigration-1965-law-donald-trump-gop-214179">a great piece at <em>Politico</em></a>,
Josh Zeitz writes that "unlike earlier waves, 90 percent of new
Americans since 1965 hail from outside Europe—from countries like
Mexico, Brazil, the Philippines, Korea, Cuba, Taiwan, India and the
Dominican Republic." Where conservatives tend to see an undifferentiated
blob of threats to American identity, Zeitz underscores that post-1965
immigrants "include evangelical Christians, traditional Catholics,
anti-statist refugees and the kind of upwardly mobile, economic strivers
whom the GOP courted assiduously in past decades."</p><p>Had the GOP worked to engage newer, non-European immigrants, the
party wouldn't be in the position it's found itself in, where only rare
presidential candidates such as Reagan and Bush II can appeal to
one-third or more of a rapidly growing part of the citizenry. About the
only time contemporary Republicans view immigrants as individuals is
when they are signaling out the precise threat each different sub-group
represents to the nation:</p>
<blockquote><p><span class="addcaption pic right" style="width:300px"><a href="http://imgur.com/gallery/t3nvF7S"><img alt="GXSplinter, Imgur.com" src="https://d1ai9qtk9p41kl.cloudfront.net/assets/mc/_external/2016_08/schrodingers-immigrantgxsplint.jpg?h=405&w=300" title="Schrodinger's Immigrant" height="405" width="300"><span class="caption">GXSplinter, Imgur.com</span></a></span></p><p><br></p><p>It's
a party whose presidential nominee uniformly disparaged Mexicans as
"rapists" and "killers" and called into question the impartiality of an
American-born federal judge of Mexican ancestry. It's a party that casts
a big enough tent to include congressional luminaries like Steve King
(for every immigrant child "who's a valedictorian, there's another 100
out there who weigh 130 pounds and they've got calves the size of
cantaloupes because they're hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the
desert"); Michelle Bachman (who claimed that a top aide to Hillary
Clinton had family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood); Peter King (who
contends that "80 percent, 85 percent of the mosques in this country are
controlled by Islamic fundamentalists"); Louie Gohmert (the GOP's
in-House intellectual, who raised concerns that Muslim immigrants might
give birth to "terror babies" who "could be raised and coddled as future
terrorists"); and <a href="http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/gop-congressman-uses-anti-latino-racial" target="_blank">Don Young</a> (who apparently didn't receive the memo explaining that "wetback" is no longer a term used in polite company.)</p>
</blockquote><p>"By 2050, non-Hispanic white Americans will comprise less than half
of the U.S. population," writes Zeitz. "Had the GOP focused more on
ideology and less on skin color, the party could have thrived from the
immigrant influx."</p><p>But it didn't do that, any more than it has reached out to African
Americans on a regular basis. There have been well-intentioned and
sincere efforts by some Republicans (Jack Kemp comes to mind, and more
recently <a href="http://reason.com/archives/2013/04/10/the-republican-party-and-the-african-ame">Rand Paul</a>),
but the instinct among most conservatives and Republicans is to ignore
issues in the African-American community or to reflexively side with the
police, drug warriors, and others who are viewed negatively by blacks.
When it comes to Latinos and non-European immigrants, the same
distancing act dominates, along with calls to establish English as an
official language and appeals to protect bankrupt entitlement programs
from pilfering by illegal immigrants who are simultaneously
supernaturally lazy and so hard-working they take all of our jobs.</p><p>There is very little reason to believe that the Republican Party will
pursue any meaningful interaction with racial and ethnic minorites or
economic refugees, even when, as Zeitz underscores, they might have
strong ties built on common religious and entrepreneurial interests. The
attitudes of so many of the GOP's presidential nominees and boosters in
the press have been resolutely hostile to seeing Mexican and Latino
immigration as anything other than a scourge upon the land. A few years
back, Tea Party favorite Marco Rubio worked on comprehensive immigration
refrom legislation until he was shouted down by his own party. By the
time he announced for president, he was only interested in talking about
cutting off the flow of newcomers. Toward the end of primary season,
the Cuban-American Ted Cruz took to attacking Donald Trump as soft on
immigration because the billionaire had a "door" in his much-discussed
wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. National Review, arguably the flagship
publication of the conservative right, has been calling for reductions
in immigration from Latin America for decades now and attacked Trump for
being insufficiently tough on the issue.</p><p>The Republicans' unwillingness to interact with a more ethnically and
religiously diverse America can be the Libertarian Party's gain. Former
New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson and former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld
are the only candidates that are effusively pro-immigration, pro-trade,
and socially tolerant. Coming from a border state with a large Latino
population, Johnson in particular is in a position to talk about the
benefits of immigration and the issues faced by newcomers and their
families as well as by longtime residents. His focus on the sharing
economy, school choice, and rolling back federal regulations that hamper
entrepreneurship also should play well with both blacks and Latinos.</p><p>But none of this is easily achieved. Gaining support among any
constituency is the result of hard work and years of toiling side by
side and shoulder to shoulder. The Republican Party—including Donald
Trump in his recent outreach to African Americans—isn't wrong to say
that racial and ethnic minorities aren't benefitting from Democratic
Party policies at the local, state, and federal levels. Social Security
retirement benefits ultimately screw over blacks, who have shorter
lifespans; protecting union teachers from competition by charters and
other forms of school choice hurts low-income minorities most of all;
far from welcoming illegals from Latin America, the Obama administration
has <a href="http://reason.com/blog/2016/05/13/always-worse-than-trump-on-immigration-o">deported record numbers</a> and split up <a href="http://reason.com/blog/2011/11/03/obamas-immigration-legacy-4600">tens of thousands of families</a>; and on and on.</p><p>But simply rattling off such talking points isn't going to win new
votes. That only comes from concerted actions that start at the
neighborhood level and work out and up through levels of power and
government policy. The political opportunity is there, but it remains to
be seen who, if anyone, will take it.</p></div></div><footer class="bio"><p><a href="mailto:gillespie@reason.com">Nick Gillespie</a> is the editor in chief of <a href="http://Reason.com">Reason.com</a> and Reason TV and the co-author, with Matt Welch, of <em>The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America</em><em> (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0080K3TRI/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1">2011/2012</a>). He is also a columnist for <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/contributors/nick-gillespie.html">The Daily Beast</a>.</em></p></footer></div></body></html>