GOP voters slow to embrace minorities

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Beaufort's County Council chairman looked at the open House District 123 seat last year and saw the opportunity to open new doors by becoming the first black Republican woman to serve in the state Legislature.

In a district where the GOP nomination is tantamount to election, she didn't survive a primary when faced with a white Realtor from Hilton Head Island.

"Yes, it's very, very difficult and it makes it more difficult when other minorities see how hard it is. No matter how much effort, how much involved you are, it's still very hard," she said.

She worries her loss will deter others from running.

President Bush attracted more black votes in 2004 than in recent memory, but South Carolina lags behind other newly Republican states in the South in putting minorities on the GOP ballot — and getting them elected. The latter is an issue not limited to this state. Where Georgia fielded at least 19 black Republican candidates at the federal, legislative and county commission level, South Carolina managed seven. Only Tim Scott, re-elected to the Charleston County Council, and four others made it to the general election ballot.

Scott and Hairston, still in her first term, are the only two elected black Republicans at any level in South Carolina.

"Obviously, we're almost starting from zero," said Luke Byars, executive director of the state Republican Party. "We're not fooling ourselves that we have a long way to go."

Other GOP minorities fared better.

Republicans returned their lone Hispanic incumbent, Gloria Arias Haskins of Greenville, to the state House and elected Nikki Randhawa Haley, who is of Indian ancestry, to a Lexington County House seat. She defeated incumbent Larry Koon in the primary.

Studies show black candidates — of both parties — are often hobbled by an inability to raise enough funds for viable campaigns and their constituencies don't produce enough donations to assure their issues are heard by white incumbents.

But with the vast majority of black voters firmly in the Democratic column, they face hurdles and ramifications unknown to their white counterparts, Hairston said.

"I know it's possible, but the Republican Party has a hard time getting its message to the minority community," she said.

Hairston lamented that as a minority candidate and incumbent, "you don't get the real support and mentorship" a white candidate would.

Her primary defeat and those of other black Republicans make it more difficult to recruit minorities as voters, activists and candidates, she said.

Hairston has faced some personal retaliation, too, as her husband's stucco business has been shunned by some Democrats and Republicans

"I was really surprised by that. There are African-Americans who are mostly Democrats who had a problem (with her), and not everyone in the Republican Party" has been supportive. "I feel like an endangered species."

But, she says: "It was a great opportunity, worth everything."

Changed times During Reconstruction and beyond, South Carolina sent more black Republicans — eight — to the U.S. House than any other former Confederate state.

But backroom deals that settled the 1876 election in favor of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes led to the end of Reconstruction, the resurgence of the Democratic Party to power it would wield in the South for nearly a century, and the disenfranchisement of most blacks until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Byars said the state GOP is trying to build from the local level and pointed to a sharp increase in minority delegates to the 2004 Republican National Convention.

"We hope that will bear fruit," he said of the party's latest outreach effort. "We started where we know best, our own precinct apparatus, and spread out from there."

South Carolina's 89-member delegation to the 2004 Republican National Convention was 10 percent black and Hispanic, up from 1 percent in 2000. But the Democratic delegation increased its numbers, too, rising to 43 percent minority from 37 percent.

Republicans hope the modest increase in candidates and national convention delegates will pay off down the road.

The Republican National Committee has established an office geared toward attracting black voters and candidates.

Getting a handle on the number of black Republicans running for or holding elective office at the various levels is difficult because there is no clearinghouse for such information, regionally or nationally.

Georgia leads While Georgia had the region's largest number of black Republican candidates last year, only Willie Talton, a former Democrat, won election.

"It helps to have a big metropolitan area like Atlanta," Byars said.

As in South Carolina, black Republicans mostly ran in Democratic-dominated black majority districts and lost in November or were eliminated by white Republicans in spring primaries. Most tend to come from the ranks of professionals, entrepreneurs and business executives.

Marty Kline, spokesman for the Georgia Republican Party, said, "a lot of them were running in tough districts."

"In Georgia, we've looked at it as a long-term program, not just for one election," Kline said.

In 2004, Herman Cain, CEO of Godfather's Pizza, ran second among three nominees for U.S. Senate seat of the retiring Democrat Zell Miller, ultimately won by Republican Johnny Isakson. Georgia's GOP also had two black candidates for U.S. House seats, 16 for the Legislature and one for a county commission seat.

Only Willie Talton, who ran unopposed for a state House seat, was elected. He is the first black Republican lawmaker in the Georgia Legislature since Reconstruction.

Florida has one elected black GOP legislator, Jennifer Carroll, who won her seat in 2003.

In North Carolina, Winston-Salem City Councilman Vernon Robinson led the Republican primary field for the open 5th Congressional District but lost the runoff to Virginia Foxx, who won election easily in the heavily Republican district.

GOP goal Robinson paced all candidates in fund raising, drawing significant out-of-state donations from conservatives as he ran under the slogan: "Jesse Helms is back! And this time he's black."

Alabama gained its first black Republican state lawmaker since Reconstruction when Rep. Johnny Ford changed parties last year. Two black Republicans were on the ballot in Tennessee in 2004.

In terms of numbers, the Republican Party doesn't need — and doesn't appear to be seeking — a huge shift of blacks from their Democratic roots, just enough of the Christian conservative, professional and business elements to add a few points to each November's turnout, enough to stymie Democrats' comeback hopes.

Candidates may be slow in coming, but some exit polls from the November election showed President Bush attracted 15 percent of the black vote, a far cry from mid-single digits that have been the norm.

Move other contests into that 15 percent area, and "you will change the outcome of a lot of close Southern elections," Whit Ayres, a Washington-based Republican pollster, told The Associated Press recently.

Nationally, Republicans have seen their meager gains in Washington erode. Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, the last black Republican senator, was defeated in 1978. Of two black House members elected in the 1990s, both are gone — Gary Franks to re-election defeat and J.C. Watts to the private sector.

Some analysts attribute the limited but increasing black interest in the GOP to rising household incomes, younger voters who have grown up since the civil rights era and question total allegiance to the Democratic Party and older, more conservative black Democrats turned off by the national party's stance on abortion and gay marriage. Dan Hoover covers politics and can be reached at 298-4883.