Black Republicans are not political unicorns

Herschel Walker's defeat shouldn't obscure one small but bright storyline for Black Republicans in Congress: In the House, they actually gained seats. Their success should force both parties to think more clearly about how they engage with minority communities.

Republicans lost the Senate race in Georgia because they were again betrayed by Donald Trump's celebrity infatuation. And in fairness, the tendency to "shop out of town" for a Black candidate (Walker is a longtime Texas resident) predates Trump: In the 2004 race for U.S. Senate in Illinois, with their nominee forced to drop out due to a scandal, state Republicans turned to a Black former State Department official who had at least run before for U.S. Senate - from Maryland. He lost badly to a state senator named Barack Obama.

All that said, the pathway toward a more diverse Republican conference is better seen in the House, where two Black Republicans won this year: John James in Michigan and Wesley Hunt in Texas, both West Point graduates. When sworn in next month, they will double the number of Black Republicans in the lower chamber to four.

Granted, that's not a big number - in fact, it might even count as a disappointment, given the record number of Black GOP candidates there were this year. At the same time, it will be the most Black Republicans in the House in more than a century. It also occurs at a time when Black men are drifting toward the GOP and the party is seeing incremental gains in its non-White share of the electorate, even as many progressives label the GOP as "White supremacist."

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In the 1990s, when I served as a Republican staff member on Capitol Hill, the party maxed out with two Black members in the House when Gary Franks (Connecticut, 1993-1997) and J.C. Watts (Oklahoma, 1995-2003) overlapped. Then it dropped to one and then none before South Carolina's Tim Scott became a member in 2011 (defeating the son of onetime Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond in a GOP primary). After Scott moved up to the Senate in 2013, the House was without a Black Republican until Texas's Will Hurd and Utah's Mia Love took office in 2015. Love left office in 2019, and Hurd in 2021, but that same year ex-NFL player Burgess Owens of Utah and businessman Byron Donalds of Florida both entered Congress.

I recount this short history realizing that it can be used both to support my thesis (over the last decade, the number of Black Republicans in the House will have gone from zero to four) and to undercut it (there has never been more than a handful of Black Republicans in the House). But there is more to my argument than numbers.

For one, research in other contexts shows that even a few members of underrepresented groups - women on corporate boards, for example - can affect the dynamic of the larger organization. Maybe Black Republicans can create space for wider and more nuanced conversations. Owens, for example, was critical of both Colin Kaepernick's protests and the NFL's "race-norming" of Black player intelligence to minimize its legal exposure over claims that the game causes long-term brain damage.

For another, I would note that Republicans got this year's two winning candidates not through cynical celebrity-picking, but by recruiting normal professionals with traditional Republican views.

If they so choose, these four House members can now offer legislation as a kind of policy group, promoting Republican views in Black circles and addressing the concerns of the Black community within the Republican Party. Donalds has already demonstrated his ambition for a more visible role within the new House Republican majority.

With Scott in the Senate - a prodigious fundraiser and effective speaker whose national aspirations are already attracting speculation - the message is becoming clear: Black Republicans aren't political unicorns. They exist, and as their numbers grow, so might the appeal of their perspective.

(COMMENT, BELOW)

Previously:
• 10/07/22 McCarthy is no Gingrich --- and his 'Commitment to America' is a fraud and farce!
• 02/16/22 Reagan believed in Supreme Court diversity, too
• 11/16/21 Do Americans REALLY want politics to be normal again?
• 01/08/21 GOP members of Congress are abandoning one of their party's proudest legacies
• 12/28/20 AOC and the ugly world of vaccination politics
• 05/28/20 Meet the Coopers of Central Park: Racist incident or something else?
• 03/05/20 Bernie's anti-establishment message crashes into the Dems' conservative base --- blacks

Robert A. George is a columnist for Bloomberg. He has been writing about New York and national issues for nearly two decades. Previously, he worked on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.