Must Read: "Racial woes: GOP fails to recruit minorities"

May 20, 2008 -- As John McCain tries to court minority voters today, a new report on Politico.com highlights how the Republican Party's "highly publicized" outreach over the last few years has lacked infrastructure and has yielded little results. The article focuses on candidate recruitment, noting that while Democrats have several candidates in "winnable House races who are either black or Hispanic," the GOP has none.

John McCain rally: Photo by james (CC)

Article continues below...

In the article former Republican Vice Presidential candidate and Congressman Jack Kemp describes the GOP's minority candidate recruitment efforts as "pitiful," and former Republican Congressman J.C. Watts notes, "[t]here's an entire infrastructure that needs to be thought through, and it seems to me no one is interested in building that."

Below are excerpts of the article, which can be found online at:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0508/10464.html

Politico.com
Racial woes: GOP fails to recruit minorities
By: Jim VandeHei and Josh Kraushaar
May 19, 2008

"Just a few years after the Republican Party launched a highly publicized diversity effort, the GOP is heading into the 2008 election without a single minority candidate with a plausible chance of winning a campaign for the House, the Senate or governor...the GOP is fielding only a handful of minority candidates for Congress or statehouses - none of whom seem to have a prayer of victory.

"At the start of the Bush years, the Republican National Committee - in tandem with the White House - vowed to usher in a new era of GOP minority outreach. As George W. Bush winds down his presidency, Republicans are now on the verge of going six - and probably more - years without an African-American governor, senator or House member. That's the longest such streak since the 1980s. Republicans will have only one minority governor, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, an Indian-American, when the dust settles on the '08 elections. Democrats have three minority governors and 43 African-American members of Congress, including one - Illinois Sen. Barack Obama - who is their likely presidential nominee. Democrats also have several challengers in winnable House races who are either black or Hispanic...

"So who's to blame for this diversity deficit? Jack Kemp, the former Republican congressman and vice presidential nominee, says the culprit is clear: a "pitiful" recruitment effort by his party. 'I don't see much of an outreach,' he said. 'I don't see much of a reason to run.'...In all fairness, Republicans have never been very good at attracting strong minority candidates, especially African-Americans...The dilemma is simple: Who wants to run when the Republican brand is so unpopular and money is so scarce?"

Source: DNC