Q: Should the GOP undertake more outreach to minorities during campaign 2004? YES: A smart appeal to selfdescribed 'conservatives' among blacks and Hispanics is overdue

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 13, 2004

Byline: Richard Nadler, SPECIAL TO INSIGHT

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.