The New Yorker Radio Hour - What’s Driving Black Candidates to the Republican Party?

Episode Date: August 23, 2022

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.  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. 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. At every level, leaders of the party demonize the Black Lives Matter movement and what they characterize as the teaching of critical race theory in the schools. The GOP opposes affirmative action and almost any effort to redress discriminatory, in the present. In some quarters, simply acknowledging that racism exists is considered unpatriotic. And yet recently, the Republican Party has also attracted increasing numbers of

black candidates to its fold. The website 538 recently published a report that was headlined, a record number of black Republicans could be headed to Congress, and it cited some 80 or more candidates. That's a very stark contrast to the current statistics. two black representatives and one single senator in the GOP. So what exactly is going on? To get some perspective, I spoke with Professor Leah Wright-Rigur, a historian at Johns Hopkins University. She's the author of The Loneliness of the Black Republican,

a book that covers the period from the New Deal through the Reagan administration. Professor, you wrote some time ago a book about black Republicans. I'd love to know what is the trend among the African-American community where the Republican Party is concerned. We would assume, maybe wrongly, that in the wake of the Trump years, that these numbers would have gone down. That assumption rests on a couple of things. One, we are actually, I think, blinded by the partisanship of black voters. So we look at that relationship between African-American, in the Democratic Party, which has been very consistent since 1964, and we say, well, the majority of

African Americans vote for Democrats. 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. And with that comes an increase in the number of black non-voters. So people who say, I opt out of the political process. There comes an increase in the number of black third party voters. People say, well, you know, I'm going for Bernie or I'm going for Andrew Yang or something like that. And then, of course, there comes a very small, but I think pivotal group of black voters who say, you know what, I'm going to the Republican Party.

Again, it feels really shocking that it would happen during the era of Trumpism. I'm not going to say Donald Trump because it's bigger than Donald Trump, right? It feels really surprising. And yet, when you realize that the tension with the two-party system is at the root of it, 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 amongst a small sect of African Americans that the Democratic Party is just as racist as the Republican Party, that actually frees some people up to actually vote Republican. And that's what we're

seeing right now in 2022. So you're describing a number of trends, if I'm getting this right? Right. And what are the numbers? Well, we honestly can't measure anything by the barometer of Barack Obama because he was unique in a lot of ways. The number one way is that he motivates black voters, but in particular, black male voters, to come out in record numbers, numbers that, you know, we haven't seen since the 1965 Voting Rights Act is passed into legislation and all kinds of new black voters come into the party. And so when Barack Obama is no longer on the ticket, it changes everything. Then add to that, you put somebody like Hillary Clinton on the ticket, a certain segment of the black community, says, well, wait a second, this is the same person

who, you know, use the infamous phrase super predators and whose husband as president, you know, presided over the crime bill. And so what we end up seeing, of course, is a drop off in the number of people that come out for the Democratic Party. I believe Hillary Clinton still gets more than 90% of the black vote. We do see a number of African Americans who vote for the Republican candidate, in this case, Donald Trump. In fact, the figures from Pew say that black support for Trump went from 6% in the first election to 8% in 2020. Now, those might be small numbers, but still, it's a little mind-boggling. I won't say mind-boggling because it's still very much within the trend of Republican presidential candidates over the last 55 years.

But it wasn't any Republican candidate. This is Donald Trump of Charlottesville. This is Donald Trump of his immigration policies. It's Donald Trump of a thousand other things that we could name all day long. And yet there was a slight increase in the black voters. The feelings of warmth of African Americans towards the Democratic Party. has been on the decline. And I'll tell you what, Republican strategists understand that that matters. They may not understand why. They may not care about, you know, the meat and potatoes of it. And they may not have anything to offer those disgruntled individuals. But they sure do know how to exploit that division. How would you describe by the ideological diversity of the African-American community and the African-American vote? Partisanship actually forces us to ignore so much of that richness of ideological diversity that exists amongst black voters. Angela K. Lewis, about a decade ago, comes out with a book that talks about African Americans and conservatism. And she says, there's such a thing as everyday conservatism that exists amongst African Americans.

What does that mean everyday conservatism? Well, it's conservatism in terms of values, belief, religion that doesn't translate into partisanship. And in any given time, it fluctuates between about 20 to 33 percent of African Americans self-identifying as conservative. So oftentimes, you'll see Republicans who are like, oh, this is a natural relationship between African Americans and the Republican Party. Clarence Thomas says this all the time in his speeches. But the truth is, African Americans won't support candidates, in particular Republican candidates, if they believe them to be racist or not have the best interest of African Americans and mind. Professor, at the last count of the Republican National Committee, there were around 120 black Republican candidates running at the state, local, and federal level, 80 of them running for Congress.

Why do you think there's a record number of black Republicans who are running for office this time around. That is actually pretty easy. It's support from the Republican institutions. And so that's what's different from previous years. You know, in the past, there have been lots and lots of black Republicans who have run for office at every level. I think about a candidate like Kim Classic who raised a lot of money, I think in the millions of dollars, from small donations, grassroots donations, ran to replace Elijah Cummings.

She had a viral campaign. She even ends up getting a shout out from Donald Trump, right? He reshairs her commercial. But in something that really goes unnoticed after her campaign, she complains that she gets no support from the Republican infrastructure. In fact, it is a consistent complaint that black Republicans have really made since the 1960s. We also know looking at internal documents from Republican institutions that by and large, Republicans don't like supporting black candidates, particularly because they believe that black

candidates cannot win. But even in a district like Elijah Cummings? Black voters, right, if they believe that a candidate does not have their community's best interest in mind, will actually punish that black candidate more than if that candidate was white, right? And why do they do that? Because it feels like a betrayal. It feels like treason, right? Racial treason. So when you look at a race like Georgia, the Senate race in Georgia, you have Herschel Walker, who was a very good running back long ago. But I think it's fair to say that if you look at his performance as a candidate, it's been a misery. A misery. He doesn't know the issues. He says disastrous things day in and day out. It seems like a very cynical operation on many levels. Oh, it is a very,

It's a very cynical operation. And if Herschel Walker wins in Georgia, which he might, it won't be because of black voters. And I'll tell you why. Because, you know, we can look at polling. We can look at how African Americans are talking about Herschel Walker. And they don't respect him. They don't believe that he actually has the best interest of the community in mind. They think that, you know, he's a plant, that he's propaganda.

And I think actually the Republican Party knows that Herschel Walker is not winning over anyone in the black community. What they're banking on is that there will be enough white voters and non-Black voters to push Harshal Walker over the finish line. Anything that they pick up in that race in Georgia, any black votes that they pick up in that race won't be expected. And in fact, what we see is that black Republican candidates do well in two kinds of areas. If they are in predominantly black areas or where black votes matter dramatically, they do well. when they avoid controversial racial topics, or at least show that they have organic connections to African-American communities.

The other area where they do well is in predominantly white areas that are conservative. And in that respect, they don't have to do very much except echo whatever the standard bearer of the party needs them to echo. But the Republican Party today is capable, on a daily basis of stone cold racial and racist pronouncements. And only 20% of registered Republicans seem to be pushing back hard against this.

But he is still where he is, Donald Trump. And Trumpism will outlast Trump, as you began our conversation saying. So what place is there for African Americans in the Republican Party? And how will that possibly increase in some? such an atmosphere. So this is the irony, right, which is that in a moment where the party is, is, has not just, you know, is not just going through an identity crisis, but instead has really wholeheartedly embraced white grievance politics, right, and policy explicitly, is also the moment where they are endorsing more black candidates than they have in really the past, you know,

25 years. And so part of that, again, is about maximizing and really exploiting the opportunity that exists because of the breakdown in the relationship between the Democratic Party and black voters. And so the congressional hearings on Russian interference in the 2016 election and again in the 2020 election have revealed that a lot of these institutions that really were, employed by the Republican Party, pumped money into exploiting those tensions because they realized this is an opportunity. And it is an opportunity of the like

that we haven't seen in really years. Many of the candidates who are running in predominantly white districts, black candidates, somebody like Wesley Hunt in Texas or John James in Michigan, what kind of chance do they have and what issues are they campaigning on and how are they talking about race? Sure.

So, you know, James is actually really interesting. So, again, I'll compare it again to somebody like Herschel Walker, right? Who talks about race all the time in ways that are really alienating and off-putting, right? As opposed to James, who really seems to be far more delicate about, this and about avoiding those controversial things while simply hitting the talking points of inflation, right? The economy, right? Those are things that it is easy to rally around

because everyone is feeling it. And I think in particular, like when we look at polling data from across all racial groups, the thing that is consistent across these racial groups is that they care about the economy. They care about inflation. They care about jobs. And so if you're a Republican right now,

you don't want to run on Roe. You don't want to run on, like, critical race theory. Because it is much, it is a much easier and far more effective strategy to simply run on the fact that right now, right? Not 9% inflation. Right. Things cost a lot, right?

What are some of the hurdles, or obstacles that black Republicans face once they actually get an office. It is constantly a struggle to be a racial minority in your political party. And that even if you fundamentally believe that the Republican Party is doing good, it is another thing altogether to sit in those rooms with those people who have access to immense power and be treated like a second-class citizen. And, you know, by and large, they don't use that kind of language. It's far more careful.

Although during the Trump years, I think they had to be far more outspoken. And many of them ended up, I think, paying the price for that. Like me a love. Right, like me a love. Or Will Hurd who declines to run. And once he declines to run, that's when he starts, you know, speaking out about, his experience in the party. We also know that, again, there's absolutely no reward for, I think, critiquing or offering constructive

criticism for the party in a moment, the moment that is now. And I'm not even talking about, you know, along racial lines, right? I'm saying, look at what's happening to Liz Cheney, right? She's a pariah. And so we can look at that and see that the experience is the same for black Republicans. Tim Scott is an interesting figure because he really has tried to walk a tightrope of holding fast to an investment in poor and black communities. So he's done a number of initiatives around this issue. He's come out on issues of criminal justice.

form, right, a number of these issues, while also recognizing that the second that he speaks out or distances himself explicitly from his party and from the standard of Trumpism, that he will be punished for that, as he is right now. Let's look in our crystal wall, or you look at yours. how are all those black Republican candidates going to do in 2022 in the midterms? What's your prognostication? So I'm going to go based on what has been historically true, at least over the last 55 years, which is that Republicans, including black Republicans, tend to do better during midterm elections amongst black voters.

Anything between 10 to actually 35 percent, is completely normal during midterm elections. It is entirely possible that whoever the Republican candidate is gets 10%, 12%, you know, even 15% of the black vote. Anything within that framework is completely normal and to be expected. Leah Wright-Rigur is a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. is more to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick. Emma, you seem to be broadcasting from the ballroom. Ha! Yes. We have a New York City closet that is, I guess, almost the size of habitability. Like, this could count as a studio

in some parts of New York City. Exactly. Maybe you could put a stove and a shower in there, too. I talked the other day with Emma Green, who took her microphone into the closet. Emma joined the New Yorker as a staff writer last fall. And I asked her what's been on her mind lately.

Emma, you've covered academia and cultural conflict and politics and religion. And lately you've been writing, no surprise, about the pro-life or anti-abortion movement. How did you come to start reporting on this? So it's been one of my sub-beats for a long time. And just from a writerly perspective, I've always found this question, the abortion question, to be one that really has so much space for exploration. the political conversation is locked into these binaries, but when you take it out of that frame and start talking about abortion and asking questions about abortion in a way that's personal

that gets at the really hard situations that people can get in, I think it really shows us something about the human condition. It shows us something about life, some of the hardest situations in life, and sometimes the most, you know, wonderful situations in life. In order to help you understand and help our listeners understand the pro-life movement, I think you've chosen the three things to share with us that you think will give us some deeper perspective. Which one of those would you like to talk about first? So we'll start with this book. And just for fair warning, this is a book that was written by one of my neighbors.

But even if she wasn't one of my neighbors, I would have loved this book. It really changed the way that I thought about abortion. It's called High Risk, and the woman's name is Javi Eve Karkowski. She is a maternal fetal medicine specialist in New York. And she was writing about all of the ways that as an MFF, someone who regularly is dealing with not only abortion, but also really, really tough situations with high risk pregnancies, how her frame around pregnancy questions has changed over her life as a doctor. So here's a little excerpt from her book, a scene that really stuck. with me. Some of us are calling it a baby. Some of us are calling it a fetus. Some of us are calling it it, although we catch ourselves when we do. None of us feel good about any of this. We're all talking

to Annie Riley, but really to her whole family. She's pregnant, 23 weeks and zero days by our best estimates. Until yesterday, she was having a normal, uncomplicated pregnancy. And then yesterday, when she was running errands, her water broke. She came to see us, and and while being evaluated, she became uncomfortable. Now she's in labor. We're trying to stop the labor, this complicated process by which our body works to eject the contents of the uterus.

Our treatments for this situation are old, not terribly effective. Right now, it looks very much like she'll be delivering within the next few hours or days. So we're in her room, talking and talking about the pregnancy, about the fetus, about the baby.

Is it a baby or fetus? That's the thing, really, the crux of the matter. We need her to tell us. Across America, there's somewhat different standards around when a fetus is viable outside of the mother's womb. The earliest that hospitals will do it really is 22 weeks. Most hospitals will definitely try to offer life-saving care at 24 weeks. But this woman is in the gray zone.

She's at 23. And so what Javi is describing is this experience as a doctor relying on the patient to say, is this a stillbirth? Is this a situation where tragically, with a one in pregnancy, I went into labor before I was ready, and we know that the baby's going to die and we're going to do comfort measures, we're going to let this be a loss? Or is this a situation of a really, really, really, really premature baby? And that line, not really being clear, even to Chavi, who has the highest level of medical training that you can have in the field of obstetrics and gynecology, that was really powerful for me because it showed that often when it comes down to it, the way that we experience pregnancy,

pregnancy loss, the decision to terminate a pregnancy to not move forward, there's a level of ambiguity there. It's not so defined and scientifically determined. So, Emma, so the first is high risk, because that book sounds fascinating. What's your second? So I want to point the listeners towards an expert who I rely on all the time in my reporting. Her name is Mary Ziegler, and she is just fabulous. She writes about the pro-life movement. She's written about it from a money perspective, from a legal perspective, from a history perspective. She's a legal historian.

So there was a tweet that she wrote on the day that Dobbs came out. This was June 24th. She said, I have 12 minutes free for the first time today, and it's beginning to sink in. And to me, that was like, oh, you know, this is really hitting her in the historical sense. And she started offering perspective over that day in the next few days, trying to help people understand the long tale of this. She wrote, will there be a backlash to today's decision? Don't expect to know in 2022. In 1973, Roe was only the third story on ABC.

Isn't that amazing? It is incredible. It's incredible. Stevens answered zero questions on Roe in 1975 in his confirmation hearings. Backlashes unpredictable takes time and is shaped by many other actors. Sort of framing the way that that history comes to bear. I think she's one of the best experts out there when it comes to understanding the pro-life movement. And finally, Emma, you've got another book to share.

Could you tell us what it is? So this book is Defenders of the Unborn, the Pro-Life Movement before Roe versus Wade. The author's name is Daniel K. Williams. And I picked this out because more than many, many other books, this book helped me to understand that the politics of the pro-life movement haven't always been Republican, and they haven't always been Republican in the way that we think of the Republican Party in 2022. It sort of mixed up my assumptions about the ideological motivations of the pro-life movement and how it got its start in the 20th century. All right. The solution to the woman's problems is neither to offer her abortion nor merely to prohibit it, but rather to demonstrate that there are humane alternatives. This is from a brochure from the Minnesota citizens concerned for life, and that's from 1971. And it goes on, this means that we must provide counseling, medical care, financial assistance, homes for unwed mothers, adoption agencies, and effective welfare programs. Today we think about the pro-life movement as being tied 100% to the Republican Party. And it's a Republican Party that is in large parts anti-government, believing that the government should be small enough to fit in your pocket. And so it's hard for us to imagine a broad-scale pro-life movement that on the one hand argued against abortion, but on the other hand really,

really vigorously wanted social safety net programs, wanted housing programs, financial assistance, medical care, all sorts of programs provided by the government that would help mothers and babies. And moreover, I think it's even harder beyond that to imagine a pro-life movement that also paired with anti-war protest. So Daniel K. Williams, the author, is explaining the evolving politics of the pro-life movement. That was very much rooted in the kind of progressive. anti-war, pro-social justice, pro-racial justice movements of the 1960s and 70s. I think we see remnants of that in some neighborhoods of the pro-life movement today. I don't think it's disappeared. But from a political level, I think it's really interesting to understand that the way that the pro-life movement

started and especially where it was prior to row, directly prior to row, is not the same as the place politically where it is today in 2020. If I can ask you one last question, after all of your reading, all of your reporting, what do you think is missing from the anti-abortion pro-choice debate? So I think that there are a lot of assumptions on both sides about the motivations and desires of either team. The framing by people who are most involved in this issue from a sort of organizational activist perspective often goes like this. On the pro-life side, they accuse people who are pro-choice of being baby killers, of being hostile to the sacredness of life, to, you know, having lots of sex and not wanting to embrace

the consequences, just lowest common denominator. And on the other side, on the pro-choice side, there's often the narrative that the pro-life movement is 100% about misogyny, about control, it's about hating women. And I would say that while there can be grains of truth perhaps that you can extract from those narratives, when I have met up with activists and most importantly, when I've met up with real people who are grappling with these decisions, those forms. frames do not at all seem to match what I find. And so I try to stay in that gray zone as a reporter, trying to hold uncertainty, to hold openness to what different people's experiences lead them to

believe about some of these really fundamental questions and just try to be as good of a listener as I can so that I'm not bringing some preconceived frame and putting that on someone. Emma Green, thank you so much. Thanks, David. Emma Green is a staff writer for the New Yorker, and she recommended Jave E. K. K. K. Wierke's book, High Risk, Daniel K. Williams' Defenders of the Unborn, and Mary Ziegler's Twitter feed. You can find it all at New Yorker Radio.org.

I'm David Remnick, and that's our program. I want to thank you for joining us. See you soon. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus. of tune yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrato and Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Breda Green, Calilea, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, and Gophane and Putabwelle.

Along with Jeffrey Masters, Will Coley, and Michael May. And we had assistance from Harrison Keithline and James Napoli. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.