Listening to a historian the other day I learned that the GOP’s bleeding of Black votes has been going on for much longer than I had expected. My thoughts were that the GOP had once been the home of the Black vote because of the warm feeling for Lincoln, the End of Slavery, and an aversion to the Democratic Party due to its explicit support of Jim Crow segregationist laws. And that this rough alignment began unraveling with the 1960s and the Civil rights legislation pushed by President Johnson, but this view is only partially correct.

The GOP was the home to the Black vote but the bleeding of that support began with the 1936 election as the Black vote started departing for Roosevelt despite that fact that at that time the Democratic party was strongly associated with southern segregationists. In 1939 the GOP commissioned a report investigation why they were losing the Black vote and what measure were required to regain it. The author, Ralph Bunche, reported that while the Black vote had no illusions about the stronger support with the Democratic party for racist policies the economic benefits of the New Deal were tangible gains for the community and to win the vote back the GOP would need to enact policies that produced tangible benefits and not simply rely on good will and historical associations.  The GOP rejected the findings and continued to lose the Black vote.

The process repeated in the 1960s where one party produced real world change that could be seen and felt and again there was a report and again the action required were rejected. Instead Nixon and GOP sought the vote of the disaffected Democratic whites that opposed the new round of civil right legislation in the ‘Southern Strategy,’ over any meaningful actions and the Black Votes continued to bleed.

2012 the GOP lost to Obama and commissioned a new report, a report that advised actual actions and again the results were rejected and the party embraced an openly racist candidate with Trump. Trump gathered a vote total that was actually less than the 2012’s losing total for the GOP but due to third party defections and strategic fluctuations in voter turnout managed his Electoral College victory.

Three times the GOP has been told by people it has hired what it needs to do to reach out and win more support from Black and other ethnic communities. Three times is had rejected the answers preferring platitudes to actions, messages to meanings, and now it has abandoned all sense of honor, morality, and ethics is it quest for electoral victory.