How can we get more black people and people of color to become republican in America? What stops people from wanting to side with the party's politics in the first place?

An opinion from blogger Adam Roach...

I am a white, Christian, middle aged, male, small business owner. I am the Republican Party.

They have a hard time getting me to v**e for them. It’s specifically because of the domestic policy. While I benefited from the recent tax bill, my employees didn’t. Most of them are white too.

So if they have a hard time getting me to v**e continuously for them, how are they going to get the not me?

The issue is that the Republican Party has become a party of social exclusionism. There is little difference between the duopoly on monetary policy, trade policy, fiscal discipline, subsidies, budgetary concerns etc. The only substantive differences are in regulatory policy, science funding and tax policy.

Its all about social conservatism today. I’m a fiscally conservative v**er but I don’t really care about gay marriage, or t*********r issues or kneeling during the anthem. In fact the amount of vitriol the GOP loads into these things actually makes me sympathetic to the other side because whenever I see someone pushing this level of exclusionism I recognize that the underlying prejudice is inherently Un-American.

There it is, Un-American.

How are the minorities supposed to choose the GOP when everything those minorities say or care about is dismissed as whining or laziness?

Too many extrajudicial k*****gs of black men by cops?.....Stop wearing hoodies.

The water system in my town is full of lead?.....Move you slacker.

I work two jobs and can’t pay the bills?.....Tough, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Get a third job.

Healthcare is too expensive!....Don’t buy an iPhone.

The iPhone comment came from a guy who said that his congressional salary of $174k wasn’t enough for him to afford his home in Utah and a place in Washington DC. A guy who hasn’t actually paid for healthcare in more than a decade.

I have watched republicans take a position that is pro-life for fetuses but wave off mass school shootings as part of “the price of freedom”. They can defend that fetus but then fight any program that would feed it, shelter it, give it healthcare.

I’ve watched them use the free speech argument to defend all manner of bad behaviour but then call down a guy for quietly taking a knee as an affront to America.

They want school choice but only as a direct way to further defund public schools.

They promised for a decade to give us better healthcare but at the cost of 10% of the population not having any at all, and what was left over wasn’t much better.

They accuse the other side of fiscal irresponsibility but then spend even more when they have control.

Yet the core problem that is germane to this question is the r****m.

Not all republicans are r****ts but if you are politically active and a r****t, you will be a republican.

Jack Kemp, Bob Dole, Colin Powell are gone. They’ve been replaced by weaker, c*********d men who lack moral vision.

I have known four local GOP chairmen scattered across the South, they were all r****ts and bad at hiding it. That’s local politics. In places with actual black v**ers that were Christian, conservative, hard working and largely gun owners. Lost opportunities.

The GOP as it exists today has become a party of meanness. They have no forward vision and they exist only to cache money for the wealthiest citizens. They have pioneered a new society of debt s***es and they’ve done it for a new society of masters.

B****s and Latinos are pretty good at sniffing out a r****t. It’s a necessary survival sk**l for a minority population that exists lower down the social ladder. Why would they v**e for people that they know will not listen to them? People that think they are less valuable to society? People who think they are superior by virtue of birth alone?

They shouldn’t and they don’t.

The democrats have faced this too but not because of r****m it’s just basic indifference and general malaise.

The GOP has become a pool of single issue v**ers but those issues are not really relevant to them.

School choice is meaningless for people without the means to afford even a subsidized private education.

A******n isn’t really an issue in black/brown America because their large, tight knit families provide the necessary support mechanisms that alleviate many of the socioeconomic pressures associated with the practice leaving only health related concerns as a primary driver.

Guns rights are so far down the list of concerns that they barely register for minority v**ers.

Tax cuts are always popular but eliminating capital gains is only popular with people who have them, that’s not the plurality of the population. Top end cuts don’t matter to poor people, heck low end cuts don’t matter that much when you are in the bottom 35%.

The gay wedding cake debacle is utterly meaningless to minorities, they know what it’s like to be discriminated against and should they have have the luxury of turning down paying business they would at least be civil about it.

New aircraft carriers are cool but Americans who can’t afford whole family healthcare aren’t going to v**e on that.

Then there is the Obama problem.

The GOP was utterly disrespectful to the first black president. They did that for 8 years and they did it in ways that came off as utterly r****t. That little bit of thinly veiled theater will cost them v**es for a generation. When we elect the first Latino it will be much the same and considering the last two weeks the first woman will likely find a similar reception, even if she’s a republican.

Misogyny has a price. The GOP knows this and that’s why their real crime is to disenfranchise as many actual potential v**ers as possible. Roster purges, gerrymandering (by both sides), a criminal justice system that seems almost designed to adversely impact minority communities, permanently yanking v****g access.

This Republican Party as it exists today isn’t even trying to get minority v**es. It’s going out of its way to prevent minority v****g. The minorities are catching on too. If they actually start v****g the GOP as it is currently constituted might just go extinct.

The problem is that the other option is seldom vastly better. The democrats have essentially adopted the moderate republican economic policy, which I’m personally fine with. That’s the problem though, there isn’t really a ton of difference on the one thing people reliably v**e on, their checkbooks.

It looks like with Kavanaugh they might have stepped on a landmine though. Women aren’t a minority, they are half the population. The tackiness that has insinuated itself into the body politic is not helping here and that’ll hurt more than the minority v**e in general because it’s minority women who take v****g more seriously in my experience and women talk to each other.

To answer the question after this long rant:

To attract minorities the GOP needs to fundamentally change its character. Not necessarily its core philosophy but its character. That’s going to be hard with its current members.