Thread by @william_sturkey

1/ Thread on black voters and GOP: The GOP narrative about black voters is that we’re stuck on the DNC “plantation,” but black voters are actually rational actors who vote in their best interests. I know this because I am one of them.

2/ Black people voted in large numbers for the Republican Party until 1964. In fact, between 1948-1964 the black vote mattered a lot to both parties, as Henry Lee Moon predicted in 1948 with Balance of Power

3/ In 1960, Nixon chased the black vote based on his record, but lost it in the North to Kennedy based on JFK’s promise on civil rights and appeal to young black people in the North. This mattered so much b/c of population shifts of Great Migration.

4/ But Nixon in 1960 still had some major black endorsements, including Jackie Robinson & MLK’s dad

5/ Kennedy won the Northern black vote, which tipped the scales in 1960 (barely). But Nixon still did better among black voters than any GOP candidate ever since (no GOP candidate has ever come close to 30% since 1960)

6/ When asked to explain what happened, Nixon told Ebony magazine: "I could have become President. I needed only five percent more votes in the Negro areas." He wrote an article in Ebony in 1962 about how to get back the black vote for the GOP.

7/ But the GOP went a different way in 1964 by nominating Barry Goldwater, who essentially voted against ending Jim Crow by voting “no” against the CRA of 1964.

8/ Black Republicans lamented this at the time

9/ Longtime GOP supporter Jackie Robinson warned in 1964 of the GOP becoming a party “for white men only.”

10/ Cartoonists at the time lamented the shift away from the Party of Lincoln (like, hey, the party is fundamentally changing--it's no longer the Party of Lincoln):

11/ This realignment of the GOP was obvious both then and now. Look at this 1964 editorial from Charlotte:

12/ Black support of the GOP sunk to new lows in 1964, Goldwater received essentially the same level of support among black voters as McCain did when he faced Obama in 2008

13/ The GOP initially discussed how to fix this, but then ultimately kept moving away from black voters

14/ Ronald Reagan, a Goldwater supporter (and opponent of Medicare), was fond of saying: "I didn't leave the Democratic party, the Democratic Party left me." Well, the same could be said of black voters and the GOP.

15/ To act as if these shifts didn't occur is 1) ignorant; 2) ahistorical; 3) completely ineffective; 4) intellectually disingenuous.

16/ The best argument for black participation in the Democratic Party is captured in Barbara Jordan’s 1976 speech at the DNC:
americanrhetoric.com/speeches/barba…

17/ Her point is simply this: she could not exist in the Republican Party in 1976, which is essentially still true today.