In the last election, Mitt Romney got less than 5% of the African American vote and less than 30% of the Hispanic vote. If I was the GOP Presidential candidate in 2016, here is what I would do to improve that:
I would circulate aggressive ads describing the economic plight of black Americans in the black neighbourhoods, explaining how poverty rates have grown and unemployment has skyrocketed under President Obama. These ads will explain how poorly blacks have fared under one-party Democrat ruled cities. Here is the tough part of the ads: they will also tell African Americans that affirmative action has done nothing to lower the black unemployment, that if anything, it has exacerbated it; and that welfare has only kept blacks poor and ghettoized, while destroying the African American family unit. The overall theme of these ads would be that America works best when all Americans are treated as Americans and not as members of a minority group.
In the Hispanic community, I would run similar ads, telling them that illegal immigration is undercutting the wages of legal Hispanics, and that the only practical effect of education in Spanish is to ghettoize Hispanics.
The concurrent message for general voters would be that the United States treats people as individuals first and foremost; that treating citizens differently with affirmative action; or importing a separate class of helots with no legal rights, in order to provide cheap labour; fundamentally corrupts the American ideal.
Given the uproar such ads would create, why would I run them? Good question. Here’s why:
In spite of the controversy, there have very little downside. In the black and Hispanic communities, the Republican brand is already bottomed out. The few blacks and Hispanics who vote Republican today do so because he they already believe in the traditional American ideal. Everybody else just hears the worst caricatures of Republicans. And with no GOP rebuttal, they believe it.
Second, the truth, particularly the unvarnished truth, is very easy to defend. Politicians tend to forget this because they so rarely champion the unvarnished truth.
Third, the real prize here are the white voters, who make up over 70% of the electorate. The problem with appealing to them directly with issues like immigration reform, border enforcement, anti-bilingualism and ending affirmative action is that they feel that they don’t like being singled out and pandered to.
Pandering to whites doesn’t work because white Americans, unlike all other racial sub-group in America, deny they belong to an ethnic group. In fact, they resent being placed into an ethnic category at all. Rather, they identify with America as a whole. (This is true - for now; but after another 20 or 30 years of mass immigration and race-based demagoguery, it may be back to blood, as Tom Wolfe suggests.)
But if you target the ethnic voters first, and whites only hear the Republican message via the Democrat and MSM and black community leader reaction to it, well that sure doesn’t look like white pandering. If anything, it looks like somebody has the guts to tell people the truth, and they will respect us for it.
The purpose of this strategy is not just to make it morally acceptable for white Americans to vote for necessary reforms but to permanently change the racial status quo. For this reason, it would be a mistake to sugarcoat the message or to present it only to the margins of these groups (say, to the black middle class). For maximum effect, the message must run in the heart of the black and Hispanic ghettos, and the message must be blunt, strong and uncompromising.