Is Black America Becoming More Willing To Take A Look At The GOP?

by John Hawkins | January 13, 2005 11:59 pm

As someone who has said that the GOP needs to make more of a pitch to black Americans[1], I can tell you that these statistics from the latest Larry Elder column[2] are music to my ears and should scare the hell out of the Democrats…

“Polls find young blacks less likely to call racism America’s No. 1 issue. A Time/CNN poll found 89 percent of black teens consider racism in their own lives to be “a small problem” or “not a problem at all.” Twice as many black teens as white believe that “failure to take advantage of available opportunities” is a bigger problem for blacks than discrimination. Polls and focus groups show younger blacks less likely to identify themselves as Democrats, and more likely to support partial privatization of Social Security, school vouchers and the abolition of race-based preferences. This spells trouble for the Democratic Party and its monolithic black vote.”

In other words, blacks who have grown up in modern America aren’t as willing as their parents to go along with Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, the NAACP, and the rest of the race grievance industry who are essentially trying to deliver the black vote to the Democratic Party in mass.

That makes a lot of sense considering the times we live in. Condi Rice and Colin Powell have been power players in the Bush administration, the most popular conservative radio host in America, Rush Limbaugh, has a black fill-in host, and there are extremely influential black pundits on the right including Larry Elder, Thomas Sowell, & Walter Williams. In fact, most of the race based attacks that you see these days aimed at conservative blacks by Democrats, whose tolerance level for minorities who disagree with them has gotten quite low indeed.

Judging by the polling numbers, there’s still a lot of work the GOP needs to do in order to convince black Americans that they’re welcome in the Party, but I would not be surprised if the GOP is pulling 20-40% of the black vote in a decade or two. Maybe it’s not a majority of the black vote, but it would likely be enough to cripple the Democratic Party…