Austin Bay Blog

Placing a justice on the US Supreme Court is a domestic strategic political operation– and the judicial vacancies are getting air time, ink, and electrons. One reason the Dems so depise Karl Rove is that he thinks in decades, at least in terms of US politics. I think you can make a case that the GOP began aggressively pursuing black and Hispanic minority voters in the 1980s, but that’s one of those discussions fit for a seminar panel that includes, well, strategic political planners like Rove and Ham Jordan. (They wouldn’t get hung up on a debate over the adverb “aggressively” but would look at candidates, campaigns, media and policy trends.) In today’s Wall St Journal OnLine Journal, Brendan Minitier asks the quesiton, “Can today’s GOP now appeal to black voters?” Forget Nixon’s s’outhern strategy.” The GOP’s pursuing a “northern strategy.”

Mininiter’s lede and thesis:

Call it the Northern Strategy. Last week Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Melhman stepped out in front of a crowd gathered for the NAACP National Convention in Wisconsin and coolly announced the death of the hotly debated and controversial electoral strategy successfully used by Richard Nixon in 1968. The “Southern Strategy,” as it has become known, helped Republicans win in many states of the former Confederacy in that election by appealing to defecting conservative Democrats.

The GOP’s success in what was once the solidly Democratic South came, unfortunately, as some Republicans were “looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization,” Mr. Melhman told the group. “I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.”

These aren’t the first steps Republicans have taken to reach out to black voters. But Mr. Melhman’s speech is an important turning point in reaching out to a reliably Democratic voting bloc. It’s also a necessary step if Republicans are going to remain competitive on the presidential level by improving their performance in northern states with large, inner-city black populations. On the same day that Mr. Melhman spoke to the NAACP, President Bush traveled to Indiana to meet with black leaders and spotlight their volunteer activities. The president also has appointed two secretaries of state–Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice–who are both accomplished individuals who happen to be black.

It’s true that only two Democrats–Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton–have been able to pry the presidency out of Republican hands since 1968. But with two relatively close elections under their belts, Republicans can hardly be sanguine about their electoral prospects. After all, Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania were once Republican states. Yet today these states represent a treasure trove of voters all but out of reach to the Party of Lincoln unless it can find a way to appeal to minority voters in the in the industrial heartland.

Minitier says it isn’t just about the GOP’s power. And it shouldn’t be. Unfortunately a lot of media political coverage out of DC focuses on the DNC and RNC, not on the American people.

But important policy questions also hang in the balance and depend on a realignment of black voting to support the black community’s changing political interest.

Minitier argues:

Unfortunately, their loyalty to the Democrats has come at a steep price for black voters. They’re taken for granted by one party and written off by the other–hence the lack of progress on schools, drugs, and urban tax policies that drive employers to the suburbs.

Read the whole thing– and in particular note the “listening” program Maryland’s Gov. Robert Ehrlich and Lt. Gov. Michael Steele used to shape and inform their 2002 campaign.

At his [Steele’s]urging, Republicans fanned out across the state and dropped in on every public meeting they could find–even those held by the NAACP. They then came back and formulated policies to take to the voters. In 2002 ,the strategy paid off as Robert Ehrlich became the first Republican to win the governor’s mansion in decades. His running-mate, Mr. Steele, became the first African-American to win statewide office in Maryland’s history, and the GOP has begun making gains in the state legislature too.