Who was the last Republican to win the black vote?
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  Who was the last Republican to win the black vote?
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Author Topic: Who was the last Republican to win the black vote?  (Read 7918 times)
RINO Tom
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« Reply #25 on: July 26, 2018, 02:09:51 PM »

According to Henry Fairlie, Black wards in Cleveland gave the following percentages:

1928 - Smith - 30%
1932 - FDR - 24%
1936 - FDR - 49%

So I'd say 1932, Hoover.

It's ironic that Hoover won the black vote considering he was a virulent racist himself. He opposed anti-lynching bills and was also a fervent supporter of the Lily White Policy. He intentionally did his best to drive blacks from the Republican Party by segregated them and refusing to be photographed with any black leaders. The GOP was never really the party of Civil Rights...even Taft was a racist who sought to remove blacks from the party.

Neither has ever been, hate to break it to you.  Republican attitudes of the mid-Twentieth Century, for example, were the Democrats have been talking out of both sides of their mouths on civil rights for decades, so why can't we?  Then, they were understandably very bitter when this was painted as any more "anti-civil rights" than the 1960s Democratic Party was.
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darklordoftech
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« Reply #26 on: July 26, 2018, 02:21:35 PM »

New Deal programs often left it up to the states to determine if it would benefit blacks. This resulted in the New Deal benefitting blacks in states that allowed blacks to vote while the Jim Crow states made sure to deny blacks in their states any benefits from the New Deal.
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junior chįmp
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« Reply #27 on: July 26, 2018, 02:57:03 PM »

New Deal programs often left it up to the states to determine if it would benefit blacks. This resulted in the New Deal benefitting blacks in states that allowed blacks to vote while the Jim Crow states made sure to deny blacks in their states any benefits from the New Deal.

This isnt really true. Ironically, many New Deal programs were set up to further hurt blacks:

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It wasnt until FDR's advisers and Eleanor pushed him to set up a black cabinet did black voters start shifting over. If anything, Eleanor did most the heavy lifting to get blacks over to the Democratic Party:

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According to Henry Fairlie, Black wards in Cleveland gave the following percentages:

1928 - Smith - 30%
1932 - FDR - 24%
1936 - FDR - 49%

So I'd say 1932, Hoover.

It's ironic that Hoover won the black vote considering he was a virulent racist himself. He opposed anti-lynching bills and was also a fervent supporter of the Lily White Policy. He intentionally did his best to drive blacks from the Republican Party by segregated them and refusing to be photographed with any black leaders. The GOP was never really the party of Civil Rights...even Taft was a racist who sought to remove blacks from the party.

Neither has ever been, hate to break it to you.  Republican attitudes of the mid-Twentieth Century, for example, were the Democrats have been talking out of both sides of their mouths on civil rights for decades, so why can't we?  Then, they were understandably very bitter when this was painted as any more "anti-civil rights" than the 1960s Democratic Party was.

I dont dispute that neither party cared in those days about blacks. But there is this pervasive myth among Republicans that during this time...the GOP was ''better'' for blacks. Neither party cared.
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RINO Tom
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« Reply #28 on: July 26, 2018, 04:09:32 PM »

^ Yeah, even when the GOP was opposed to slavery's expansion, it could be argued that the true "moral crusaders" behind abolition were but a faction of the party; I think you had just as many Republicans who opposed it for reasons that didn't even kind of involve sympathy for Black Americans.  The GOP and Black voters was always a strange marriage, if you ask me, and the "We're the Party of Lincoln!" and "What, are you really going to vote for the party of the KKK and Confederacy??" lines had lost most of their weight by the 1920s.  Obviously, this is simplifying it to near-Old School Republican/ERM64man levels, but fast forward to the 1950s and you pretty much have an indifferent GOP (that would show up to vote "Yea" in huge numbers on civil rights legislation that A) had been watered down enough to appease business interests and their suburban constituents and B) focused almost exclusively on the South, where the GOP had almost no constituents) that could pretty much claim the equivalent of "plausible deniability" on civil rights and a Democratic Party deeply divided between a Southern wing that opposed civil rights for obvious reasons and a Northern wing that was increasingly reliant on Black votes.  From a purely historical perspective, it was one of our most interesting political eras, IMO.
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darklordoftech
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« Reply #29 on: July 26, 2018, 05:10:00 PM »

One should keep in mind that both parties were "big tents" at times in their history. For example, Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater were both Republicans at the same time while Hubert Humphrey and Strom Thurmond were both Democrats at the same time.
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RINO Tom
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« Reply #30 on: July 26, 2018, 05:12:05 PM »

One should keep in mind that both parties were "big tents" at times in their history. For example, Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater were both Republicans at the same time while Hubert Humphrey and Strom Thurmond were both Democrats at the same time.

I mean, that is an indisputable fact.  However, I think people use that "fact" to fit their agendas, and they end up saying something like Nelson Rockefeller was more liberal than Robert Byrd because of civil rights alone, which is absurd.
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darklordoftech
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« Reply #31 on: July 26, 2018, 05:26:49 PM »

One should keep in mind that both parties were "big tents" at times in their history. For example, Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater were both Republicans at the same time while Hubert Humphrey and Strom Thurmond were both Democrats at the same time.

I mean, that is an indisputable fact.  However, I think people use that "fact" to fit their agendas, and they end up saying something like Nelson Rockefeller was more liberal than Robert Byrd because of civil rights alone, which is absurd.
People certainly do take certain aspects of the "tents" out of context to paint a picture that suits their agenda. They'll often pretend that the aspect of the "tents" that don't suit their agenda never existed. I'm also aware that "conservative" and "liberal" are far more nuanced than civil rights.
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Doimper
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« Reply #32 on: July 26, 2018, 11:29:05 PM »

I started a thread on this a while back. Smiley

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=221358.0

Regarding a few comments above, Eisenhower never won the Black vote (even with having a pretty good civil rights record and a segregationist on the other ticket ... I think that should remind people that Black voters abandoned the GOP LONG before any perceived REAL courting of the South by the GOP), and Hoover almost certainly beat FDR among Black voters in 1932, while losing the group in 1936.  Here is everything I could find:

2016 - 89% DEM, 8% GOP
2012 - 93% DEM, 6% GOP
2008 - 95% DEM, 4% GOP
2004 - 88% DEM, 11% GOP
2000 - 90% DEM, 9% GOP
1996 - 84% DEM, 12% GOP
1992 - 83% DEM, 10% GOP
1988 - 89% DEM, 11% GOP
1984 - 91% DEM, 9% GOP
1980 - 83% DEM, 14% GOP
1976 - 83% DEM, 17% GOP
1972 - 87% DEM, 13% GOP
1968 - 85% DEM, 15% GOP
1964 - 94% DEM, 6% GOP
1960 - 68% DEM, 32% GOP
1956 - 61% DEM, 39% GOP
1952 - 76% DEM, 24% GOP
1948 - 77% DEM, 23% GOP
1944 - 68% DEM, 32% GOP
1940 - 67% DEM, 32% GOP
1936 - 71% DEM, 28% GOP
1932 - 77% GOP, 23% DEM

The following (http://www.blacksandpresidency.com/herberthoover.php) are the results of just one subset, the Black wards of Harlem:

1928 - 78% GOP, 28% DEM
1924 - 78% GOP, 28% DEM
1920 - 97% GOP, 3% DEM

It is also estimated (http://www.blacksandpresidency.com/herberthoover.php) that Wilson won about 5-7% of the Black vote in 1912.

For much more, we'd need to purchase some well-written books. Smiley

Bumping an old thread with a quibble, but it looks like Robert Caro came up with some different numbers for this (though I haven't found where he sourced them from):

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^ Interesting.  I have read quite a bit that 1948 was the first election that Democrats really realized that they "needed" the Black vote to win (whereas before 1948, they were content with using Black votes to prop up their urban machines but certainly saw other coalition groups - specifically White Southerners - as much more important to their success).  I'd love to see the numbers these historians have access to.

Same here, and I'm sure Caro especially has a massive quantity of data tucked away. Interestingly, his 1956 numbers appear to align with yours:

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Also interesting:

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All Along The Watchtower
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« Reply #33 on: August 01, 2018, 01:13:24 AM »

One should keep in mind that both parties were "big tents" at times in their history. For example, Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater were both Republicans at the same time while Hubert Humphrey and Strom Thurmond were both Democrats at the same time.

I mean, that is an indisputable fact.  However, I think people use that "fact" to fit their agendas, and they end up saying something like Nelson Rockefeller was more liberal than Robert Byrd because of civil rights alone, which is absurd.

At the same time though, race and racial attitudes define and divide American politics in such a deep way that if you are going to neglect them, you might as well try analyzing UK politics without talking about class.

To put it more bluntly: The rise of modern American "movement" conservatism and its consolidation within the Republican Party is perhaps the key development in recent US political history, and this form of conservatism is implicitly (and increasingly, explicitly) based heavily - though not exclusively - on hostility to the expansion and enforcement of civil rights (and more recently, anything to do with "diversity" ie. immigration, multiculturalism, along with whites losing their majority status, and so on). Fact.
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Fuzzy Stands With His Friend, Chairman Sanchez
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« Reply #34 on: August 05, 2018, 05:52:26 PM »

According to Henry Fairlie, Black wards in Cleveland gave the following percentages:

1928 - Smith - 30%
1932 - FDR - 24%
1936 - FDR - 49%

So I'd say 1932, Hoover.

It's ironic that Hoover won the black vote considering he was a virulent racist himself. He opposed anti-lynching bills and was also a fervent supporter of the Lily White Policy. He intentionally did his best to drive blacks from the Republican Party by segregated them and refusing to be photographed with any black leaders. The GOP was never really the party of Civil Rights...even Taft was a racist who sought to remove blacks from the party.

I think you are a bit unfair to Hoover.  I base this on various portions of V. O. Key's Southern Politics, which primarily discusses the Democratic Party in a one-party region, but has a chapter "A Note On The Republican Party" which explains the nature of the Southern GOP back in the days of the Solid South.

The Republican Parties of the various Southern states did not serve as parties whose purpose was to contest elections.  They contested very few.  Eastern TN traditionally elected two (2) Mountain Republican Congressmen, and the GOP was occasionally competitive in areas of Western NC and the far western reaches of VA, but there was no pathway for these folks to ever gain significance in any of there states.  These party organizations DID play a role in nominating Republican Presidential candidates, and they DID serve as the dispensers of Federal Patronage in those states during GOP Administrations.

By 1928, the Black and Tan Republican organizations were out of power (although there were still some prominent black Republicans in the South).  Hoover supported the factions of the GOP in the South that had the juice and swept the South 161-6.  What's more, the GOP was actually competitive in the Southern States in 1928 due to Democrat Al Smith's Catholicism.  There were a number of prominent Hoovercrats, most of them in the Upper South (VA, NC, TN) and in TX, but there even some in the Deep South.  V. O. Key points out that rebellion against the Smith ticket in the South was the greatest where blacks population was the lowest (NC, VA, TN, FL, TX).  The states that stayed Democratic were the states with the highest black percentages (AL, GA, MS, LA, SC) and AR, whose own Sen. Joseph Robinson was Smith's running mate.

There is evidence that Hoover held racial views that would certainly be considered racist today.  His wife did have the wife of black Rep. Oscar dePriest over to a White House gathering for Congressional wives, and if that doesn't sound like a big deal to folks here, they have no idea of the firestorm that occurred when T. R. had Booker T. Washington over for dinner at the White House.  In his lifetime, Hoover did much legitimate humanitarian work, a good deal of it at his own expense, and he did it for all sorts of groups of poor and starving people.  The balance of Hoover's life deserves a bit more leniency in its assessment; a leniency I would not give to, say George Wallace or Strom Thurmond.
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