‘We’re on offense’: Republicans look to minority outreach to make 2022 gains in SC
When Sen. Tim Scott took the stage last week at the South Carolina Republican Party’s Silver Elephant Gala, his speech centered around one main theme: the Republican Party gave him “a second chance.”
Scott described growing up in a low-income household and struggling through school. Now the only Black Republican in the U.S. Senate looks back fondly at the chance to get his start in politics through the South Carolina Republican Party at a time when many didn’t have confidence in him.
“I am thankful for being a part of the great GOP and the ‘great opportunity’ party, that’s who we are,” Scott told a packed room at the Columbia Convention Center last Friday.
Prominent Black Republicans like Scott and other leading conservative people of color continue to be the face of a growing initiative from the Republican National Committee to focus on minority outreach, led by individuals like Paris Dennard, the Republican National Committee spokesman and director of Black affairs.
“In this election cycle, we’re on offense,” Dennard told The State last week. “We are not playing defense anymore. We are highlighting the contrast between Republican leadership and the failed Democratic leadership at the White House, the House and the Senate.”
Dennard dismissed that the path could be rocky given past statements from former President Donald Trump, such as when he denigrated African countries during a bipartisan meeting with U.S. senators in 2018, and called some Mexican immigrants “rapists” in his campaign launch remarks.
Democratic support from minority groups is “chipping away,” Dennard said, blaming it on Democrats being “out of touch.” He said Trump “opened the floodgates” for minority voters, referencing Trump’s gain with Black and Hispanic voters in the 2020 presidential election.
South Carolina Democratic Party Trav Robertson told The State that Democratic support isn’t declining, and the recent 59% vote by Kansas voters to keep abortion legal in the state is evident of that. He said that Republicans care more about “the rights of rapists and pedophiles than 10- to 11-year-old girls,” and voters, including people of color, will “overwhelmingly reject that” around the country and in South Carolina.
A recent New York Times/Siena College poll that asked whether voters would back a Democrat or Republican running for Congress showed Democrats ahead of Republicans among voters of color by about 25 percentage points, one of the smallest racial gaps in the last century.
While there has been declines in Democratic support among minorities, Robertson emphasized gains within the Democratic Party, specifically among older white voters. He added that Black or Hispanic communities, for example, are not “monolithic voting blocs,” and called it “insulting” to assume they are.
“I think there’s always a give-and-take of anything when you’re always trying to communicative with voters,” Robertson said. “It doesn’t matter what socioeconomic status, what ethnicity or what gender.”
To Dennard, the shortcomings of minority outreach within the Republican Party came from a lack of effort — an issue he and other members of the RNC are trying to fix, he said.
“The Republican Party of old did not do a good job at engaging with minority communities,” Dennard said. “We had our base, we could win with our base.”
In South Carolina, Dennard said the Republican Party has seen “tremendous growth” in rural outreach, specifically Black voters. In rural communities, the focus is having conversations with conservative and moderate Democrats about Republican values, he said.
In 2020, the South Carolina Republican Party reported that out of all the Black voters contacted in their victory program, 66% turned out to vote, according to Claire Brady, S.C. Republican Party communications director.
From 2020 to 2022, there was a 70% increase in the number of S.C. Republican minority candidates that filed for offices from the top of the ticket down to county offices. In S.C. Republican Party organizations and committees on the county level, less than half of office or committee positions are filled by minority, primarily Black, members.
Aside from get-out-the-vote efforts and conversations, Republican engagement with minority groups has taken root most notably with the establishment of RNC community centers, which are staffed full-time by members of the local community.
There are currently no RNC community centers in South Carolina.
Dennard said there are 33 RNC community centers around the country, which promote involvement through a variety of activities: canned food and baby formula drives, judo lessons, financial literacy lessons and cryptocurrency education.
RNC community centers were essential for Republican candidates like Mayra Flores, a Latina Republican who flipped a historically Democratic U.S. House seat in Texas in a June special election, Dennard said.
This story was originally published August 6, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
