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Why the GOP Still Fails With Minority Voters

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

Donald Trump recently tweeted his gratitude for a huge surge -- Hyooj! Hyooj! -- in his black and Hispanic support that, it turned out, did not quite exist.

"A great honor to receive polling numbers like these," Trump tweeted on Sept. 8. "Record setting African-American (25 percent) and Hispanic numbers (31 percent)."

Excuse me? Trump is winning almost a third of the Hispanic vote after calling Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists in his announcement speech? That sounds too strange to be true -- and probably isn't.

Trump links to a website called The American Mirror, which essentially pulls the 25 percent figure for black voters from a SurveyUSA poll of voters who were offered a head-to-head choice of Trump versus Hillary Clinton, who received 59 percent. The rest were undecided.

That's more than twice the 11 percent black turnout for Trump that George W. Bush, received in 2004. Quinnipiac's poll found Trump receiving only 3 percent of the black vote. In CNN/ORC's poll, Trump received only 24 percent among all non-white voters.

Jay H. Leve, president and CEO of SurveyUSA, attributed this to his company's methodology in a telephone conversation. He also noted that their similarly larger-than-most margin for Arnold Schwarzenegger's California gubernatorial race turned out to be right. Ah, the power of celebrity.

 

All of which reminds me of what the great African-American author Zora Neale Hurston wrote in 1945. "There is an oversimplification of the Negro," she declared. "He is either pictured by the conservatives as happy, picking his banjos, or by the so-called liberals as low, miserable and crying. The Negro's life is neither of these. Rather, it is in-between and above and below these pictures."

Fudged facts don't win elections. Quite the opposite, a frontrunner can become swayed by his or her own spin to the point of delusions. Remember how Mitt Romney's team in 2012 expected victory based on polls? Their own base turned out to be less fired up about showing up at the polls than President Obama's base.

Romney's demographically driven defeat spurred Republican Party leaders to launch a major campaign to diversify their appeal for 2016. What happened? Today that minority outreach vision sounds about as fashionable amid the Grand Old Party's primary fights as beehive hairdos and go-go boots.

Few people are more disappointed than black Republicans like Robert Woodson, founder of Washington's Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, which helps neighborhood-based organizations to fight crime, poverty and other dysfunctions.

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(c) 2015 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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