Florida Republicans Hope To Win Support From Black Voters
BOCA RATON -- Still reeling from losses they didn't expect, Republicans strategists are hoping black voters, who are the Democrats' most stalwart supporters, will help bring them future victories.
"[We] must in some way, some form, recruit blacks and other minorities," said the Rev. O'Neal Dozier, the African-American pastor of Worldwide Christian Center in Pompano Beach and a Republican Party activist. "We cannot win with the white people alone. We have to reach out and we have to pull in the blacks."
A Census Bureau analysis of voter participation released last month found that in 2012, for the first time in American history, a higher percentage of blacks voted than whites.
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Like 83 percent of black registered voters in South Florida, Williams, 50, is a Democrat. In Broward and Palm Beach counties,
just 3 percent of black voters are registered Republicans and 17 percent are independent/no party affiliation voters. Among all voters, South Florida is 50 percent Democratic, 26 percent Republican and 24 percent independent/no party affiliation.
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Steele and Charles Zelden, a professor of history and legal studies who specializes in politics and voting at Nova Southeastern University, said Republicans need to avoid political blunders, like the efforts by Republican-controlled state governments, including Florida to tighten voting rules before the 2012 election. Those moves were widely seen in the African-American community as an effort to disenfranchise voters.
The result, Wright said, was a backlash from black voters who turned out en masse, and voted Democratic, largely to support President Barack Obama's re-election, but also to show they couldn't be stopped from voting.
Steele said Republicans are doomed if they don't find new supporters from a range of demographic groups.
"Not just African-Americans, all voters.
How many demographics did we win in 2012? One," he said. Republicans lost the vote of "every class of citizen except old white men. Nothing against old white men, but America's more than that."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/10/florida-republicans-black-votes_n_3413305.html
The door was closed before right-wing celebration of Martin's murder .. now it has been nailed shut.
Tell me more about what a great time it is to be a black conservative.