What’s Driving Black Candidates to the Republican Party?

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 23 August 2022

⏱️ 30 minutes

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Summary

The Republican Party has recently attracted an almost unprecedented number of Black candidates to its fold—more than at any time since the Reconstruction era. “In a moment where the Party . . . has really wholeheartedly embraced white-grievance politics,” Leah Wright Rigueur tells David Remnick, “they are endorsing more Black candidates than they have in the past twenty-five years.” Rigueur is a historian at Johns Hopkins University and the author of “The Loneliness of the Black Republican.” The G.O.P., she argues, is exploiting a moment when the long-standing relationship between Black Americans and the Democratic Party is weakening, and it aims to capitalize on an “everyday conservatism” among voters. “It actually makes sense that in the aftermath of Barack Obama—with Black people’s levels of support and warmth for the Democratic Party in decline and the belief among a small sect of African Americans that [it] is just as racist as the Republican Party—that actually frees some people up to actually vote Republican.” Plus, the staff writer Emma Green, who covers the pro-life movement, discusses how individuals’ positions seldom reflect the furious partisan divide, and she shares some nuanced sources that have informed her reporting.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.9	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The Republican Party has made it very clear that it has no place for black activism.
0:18.8	At every level, leaders of the party demonize the Black Lives Matter movement
0:23.4	and what they characterize as the teaching of critical race theory in the schools.
0:28.7	The GOP opposes affirmative action and almost any effort to redress discrimination in the present.
0:35.5	In some quarters, simply acknowledging that racism exists is
0:40.3	considered unpatriotic. And yet recently, the Republican Party has also attracted increasing
0:46.3	numbers of black candidates to its fold. The website 538 recently published a report that was
0:53.3	headlined, a record number of black
0:55.6	Republicans could be headed to Congress, and it cited some 80 or more candidates. That's a very
1:01.8	stark contrast to the current statistics, two black representatives, and one single senator
1:07.5	in the GOP. So what exactly is going on? To get some perspective, I spoke with
1:14.1	Professor Leah Wright-Rigur, a historian at Johns Hopkins University. She's the author of the
1:20.7	loneliness of the Black Republican, a book that covers the period from the New Deal through the Reagan
1:26.7	administration. Professor, you wrote some time ago a book about covers the period from the New Deal through the Reagan administration.
1:32.0	Professor, you wrote some time ago a book about black Republicans.
1:39.4	I'd love to know what is the trend among the African-American community where the Republican Party is concerned.
1:47.2	We would assume, maybe wrongly, that in the wake of the Trump years, that these numbers would have gone down.
1:58.3	That assumption rests on a couple of things. One, we are actually, I think, blinded by the partisanship of black voters.
2:03.5	So we look at that relationship between African Americans and the Democratic Party,
2:11.4	which has been very consistent since 1964, and we say, well, the majority of African Americans vote for Democrats.
2:18.4	So that's just the way it is. And so one of the things that we have noticed, particularly since Barack Obama is no longer in office, right? So there's no longer a black male president in office, that the tensions and the relationship between the Democratic Party and black voters has grown a little more tense.
	...

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