Queens GOP office a disingenuous play for party diversity
Monday’s Daily News story that the Republican National Committee will open an office in Queens to expand the party’s “reach and activity” in “non-traditional GOP communities” seems all too familiar. Probably because we’ve heard the GOP sing this disingenuous tune many times over the last several years.
Nearly three years ago, I ventured to the Christian Cultural Center in the East New York section of Brooklyn on an assignment for City & State. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus was hosting a “listening session” with influential African-American Republican leaders, including the Rev. A.R. Bernard and the Rev. Michel Faulkner – who recently announced his intention to challenge Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2017 – on how to “make a sale” to minority communities that overwhelmingly vote for Democrats.
The Republican National Committee was coming off of a demoralizing 2012 election cycle in which their presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, made the boneheaded, racially charged comment that 47 percent of Americans “pay no income tax” and would automatically vote to re-elect President Barack Obama. It was a tone deaf remark that, even Priebus acknowledged, was not helpful to the party’s efforts to attract voters of color.
Fast forward to February 2016 and the Republican Party has still not reconciled this residual identity crisis from 2012. The party has once again become hostage to divisive, thinly veiled, racially charged rhetoric from its top contenders, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, mitigating whatever supposed gains they were trying to make three years ago in a heavily black Brooklyn neighborhood.
On major issues such as immigration, Trump and Cruz have hewed to the tired party line of securing the border, first and foremost, and then summarily deporting as many undocumented immigrants as the government can find. How does the GOP think that platform will play in a county where nearly half the population are immigrants? Never mind that the GOP has also been leading a bogus push for stronger voter identification laws in a number of states, laws that disproportionately marginalize voters of color.
The New York Republican Party has always operated as a more moderate arm of the national committee, but setting up shop in one of the most diverse counties in the nation nine months before the November election – and closing it soon thereafter – reeks of a PR stunt rather than a genuine play for party diversity. Consider these remarks from Priebus in East New York three years ago:
“You can’t get to know people and you can’t have authentic relationships if you parachute in four months before an election.”
The GOP should follow its own advice. So long as Trump and Cruz are the party’s foremost presidential candidates, good luck stealing votes from an increasingly diverse electorate.