{"id":994,"date":"2022-09-02T15:05:35","date_gmt":"2022-09-02T19:05:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/haystaqdna.com\/staging\/8843\/?p=994"},"modified":"2024-12-16T09:29:15","modified_gmt":"2024-12-16T14:29:15","slug":"who-are-black-republicans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/haystaqdna.com\/staging\/8843\/who-are-black-republicans\/","title":{"rendered":"Who are Black Republicans?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Who are Black Republicans?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Download a PDF of the Case Study<\/a><\/span><\/h4>\n
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Since 1940 African American voters across the nation have shifted en masse from the GOP to the democratic.<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> This shift was driven by African Americans’ (AA) support for Democratic party programs including the New Deal, The Great Society, and Lyndon Johnson\u2019s critical support for the civil rights movement of the 1960s.<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Once home to relatively liberal African Americans during the reconstruction era the GOP lost Black membership due to the disenfranchisement of Black voters in the south after the end of reconstruction in 1877 and because of the segregationist \u201clily-white\u201d movement within the party. More recently, the \u201csouthern strategy\u201d of appealing to Wallace and Thurmond voters that the GOP has pursued since the Goldwater era has left many feeling that the Republican Party does not care about Black America.<\/span><\/p>

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\u00a0African American political behavior is shaped by a concept that political scientists refer to as \u201cshared fate\u201d which means black americans feel they gain when representatives of the African American community succeed and this leads to favoritism towards African American candidates in many races and leads to most African Americans voting for left wing candidates regardless of their other demographic characteristics. This does not mean that African Americans are uniformly liberal, indeed roughly a third of them identify as conservative when surveyed as of the 2020 primary, a massive increase since 1972 when ten percent did even as the 2010s have seen a slight increase in the number of African Americans identifying as liberal or moderate.<\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Nonetheless most African Americans (90-95%) vote Democratic because of a belief that Democrats support the AA community and because of intense pressure within this community to vote the Democratic ticket.<\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Further under certain circumstances African American can be convinced to vote for conservative candidates and Gen Z AAs express much skepticism about the Democratic party.<\/span>5<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Black Republicans share a sense of shared fate with other African Americans, have strong connections to the African American community, have a strong sense of Black identity, and take a variety of perspectives on whether public policies should be examined using a race-conscious lens.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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Across the years a number of Black conservative pundits including Larry Elder, Carol Swain, Jason Riley, and Candence Owens Herman Cain and Ben Caronson have argued that African Americans should vote for the GOP and that the Democratic party would collapse if the Republicans could get 20-30% of the AA vote.<\/span>6<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> These pundits repeat a familiar set of talking points regarding the Democrats\u2019 historical affinity for the Klan and slavery, the supposedly negative effects of the welfare state on African American families, the disproportionate impact of abortion on black women and the apparent disconnect between the views of everyday AAs and Black political leadership on a variety of issues such as school choice.<\/span>7<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> These talking heads challenge the notion that African Americans are racially targeted in police killings and argue that democratic policies promote a victim mentality and dependence on government. Previous research on AA Republicans suggests that these voters are widely representative of the AA community on a variety of demographic factors and are actually less church attending than AA Democrats.<\/span><\/p>

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Methodology\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>

This paper aims to examine African Americans Republicans (roughly 5-10% of the Black community and 2% of all republicans) who vote for the republican party taking advantage of states where voters register by both party and race (NC, FL, and LA) and using data from L2\u2019s voter file to build demographic profiles of AA GOP registrants (about 8% of all African Americans in the USA). This methodology produces a sample of 136,460 Black GOP voters. The findings cut against those of Corey Fields in <\/span>Black Elephants<\/span><\/i>. The analysis shows that Black Republicans are male, richer, and less likely to vote than most African Americans. Further, HatstaqDNA\u2019s voter targeting models offer several insights on how this segment of the electorate might be reached, 56% of our Black Republicans use Fox News as their primary TV news source, and our models suggest that a supermajority (73%) oppose former president Trump.<\/span>8<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n