Inside the secretive, dubious, and extremely offline attempt to convert minorities into Republicans

[Nevilledog]

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Alex Sammon
@alex_sammon
The GOP is making a huge push for nonwhite voters, setting up community centers nationwide and courting minorities with an extremely offline, secretive, and media unfriendly campaign, offering free dinners, movie nights, easter egg hunts, more.

prospect.org
The RNC’s Ground Game of Inches
Inside the secretive, dubious, and extremely offline attempt to convert minorities into Republicans
8:22 AM · Jun 1, 2022

https://prospect.org/politics/rncs-ground-game-of-inches-convert-minorities-into-republicans/

In some sense, it was predictable that my search for any information about one of the Republican National Committee’s two dozen community centers would lead me back to Facebook. Years had passed since I’d vacated my account, a period during which the site had been annexed as the primary digital station for conservative messaging. If the party’s newest grassroots outreach initiative existed anywhere online, it had to be here.

I was in search of a contact or a programming schedule at the RNC’s Native American Community Center in Pembroke, North Carolina, in the largely rural, poverty-addled county of Robeson, in the state’s southeast corner. Pembroke marked the 21st community center opened by the RNC of the 2022 election cycle, as part of an overt racial minority outreach program. At that point, in March, it was one of the party’s newest outposts, and the first specifically targeting Native Americans, hazy facts that I found out only because of some scattered local news coverage about its unveiling in late January. Since then, there’d been almost nothing written about it, not in sanguine RNC press releases or small-bore local coverage. If it weren’t for Facebook, I wouldn’t have been entirely sure it even existed.

Even then, I couldn’t find much. That the RNC Pembroke center had an infrequently updated Facebook page made it an exception; I couldn’t find active Facebook properties for the majority of the other RNC community centers that now dot the country, from Southern California to the Midwest to the South. Nor could I find the centers on Twitter or Instagram. A Google search yielded mostly local news coverage of ribbon-cuttings and nothing more. There are no individual websites for each outpost, or even a collective website that lists them all; the RNC’s homepage features only a camouflaged search bar that can be prodded to give up the location of your nearest branch. Buried in an interactive map advertising various regional outreach events (including “Election Day”) are some of the addresses, but there is no contact information given—no phone numbers, no emails, no names, nothing.

The RNC community center model is the latest attempt by Republicans to court nonwhite voters, who have long eschewed the party and been demonized by its leading representatives. But 2020’s frenzied election returns suggested an opportunity. Joe Biden’s share of votes from Latinos decreased by eight percentage points compared to Hillary Clinton’s, according to a report from the progressive polling outfit Catalist. As Vox reported, this marked the “most dramatic shift in a four-year period among the major racial or ethnic groups seen.” The movement was stunning in areas like South Texas, where five heavily Latino counties flipped to Donald Trump.

*snip*

[Effete Snob]

1. "convert minorities into Republicans"

Typical white liberal patronization.

The notion that "minorities", as some indistinguishable mass, have some kind of natural tendency to vote for Democrats or that they broadly align in support of liberal causes, is a bizarre affliction.

You can see it here on DU fairly often, and is reflected in unexamined beliefs such as that if Puerto Ricans decided to become a state, that it would somehow magically add two Democratic senators. Because, sure, a population comprising a large component of strongly Roman Catholic-identifying voters is not going to grasp that the Democratic Party is solidly pro-choice.

One would have thought that the 2008 California result - Obama wins by huge margin while marriage equality fails by small margin - might cause one to think, "Hmm... there was a substantial Obama voting bloc which voted anti-gay... who might they be?" Although, sure, some people on DU who figured out that question were tombstoned for arriving at the correct answer, phrased inartfully.

There are far-right anti-communist Hispanic voters and there are devout Roman Catholic voters. There are African American voters in "get rich for Jesus" religious groups who are anti-regulation and anti-tax Trumpers, as well as various conservative Christian African American voters who are strongly homophobic and anti-choice.

On the other hand, the majority of white people voted for Trump both times, so maybe, just maybe, white liberals could TRY to be a little less patronizing toward minority voters.

[Hortensis]

2. Finally scary smart. Strongly conservative POC are as likely as strong white cons

to sympathize with trumpist passions and culture warring (including promises to persecute and kick other races out, for instance) and to genuinely despise liberals. Strong cons believe in equality for themselves, not everyone.

The white Christian male conservative party has always rejected more than token integration of conservative POC, of course, including Christians. But the stakes are beyond huge now. Once they have the power, they'll be able to advance their hard-core conservative white Christian nationalist agendas as never before. But first, they have to get it.

[appalachiablue]

3. K/R

[iemanja]

4. Personal contact makes a difference in voting

The Democrats need to figure out how to react to this and do some recruiting of their own

[dalton99a]

5. They are always busy like termites

Democrats ignore this at their peril