Jack & Jill Politics

You’d think with all that Tea Party support that Black Republicans would be burning up the primary polls this year, right? (snicker)

Yeah, the Tea Party for some super strange reason (hmm….could it be the rampant racism in their ranks?) is not sweeping a bunch of black Republicans into office. Wonder why…? Only one — Tim Scott in South Carolina — might be able to make it all the way to Congress as a black Tea Party Republican. Unless you do something about it and vote against him if you live in the SC. If elected, he’d be the first black Republican in Congress since that poor suffering soul, J.C. Watts. Don’t hear much from Watts these days, do we?

Garance Franke-Ruta at the new WhoRunsGov blog from WaPo says: Not a record year for black Republicans, after all (not so much…)

As executive director of the Frederick Douglass Foundation, Timothy F. Johnson aggressively made the case in the spring that 2010 represented a historic year for the Republican Party’s recruitment of African American candidates. The first midterm election following the inauguration of the country’s first black president and the first under a black GOP chairman saw a post-Reconstruction record 30 to 32 African Americans raise their hands to stand for election for the House, Johnson told any journalist who would listen, leading to favorable headlines in the New York Times, Politico, the Daily Caller and elsewhere.

But those who studied African American political history told me at the time there was no evidence that this was the case, and neither Johnson nor the National Republican Congressional Committee were able to provide historical data to substantiate the claim that 2010 represented a record year.

“We don’t have historical data … but would confirm that this cycle certainly is the highest numbers we have seen, in terms of African American candidates in recent election cycles,” said Paul Lindsay, Deputy Communications Director of the NRCC, earlier this year.

Well, the primary data are now in — and Johnson’s claim that 2010 would be a record year is out the window. Only 13 African Americans are left running for the House on the GOP ticket this fall. That’s a higher number than in recent cycles, but nowhere near record levels — and far below the number running just a decade ago.

As recently as 2000, 23 African Americans ran as GOP nominees for the House, according to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, the leading national institution that gathers data on African American elected officials and general election candidates. (It stands to reason an even greater number were candidates before the field was whittled by primaries.) [snip]