I don’t think this is quite the right way of looking at things.
Some black voters who normally vote Democratic may be willing to consider voting Republican.
In Mississippi last Tuesday, some African-American voters said they voted in the GOP U.S. Senate primary for embattled six-term incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran in his battle against state Sen. Chris McDaniel, who enjoys tea party support.
Harris said that many African-American voters align best with the Republican Party on social issues — abortion, gay rights, school choice, prayer in schools — but diverge when it comes to the federal government’s role in protecting civil rights and providing a social safety net. With black voters, “economic issues always trump social issues,” Harris said.
But it’s going to be an uphill climb.
There are plenty of religious, socially conservative blacks who strongly oppose abortion and gay marriage. But they tend to vote Democratic anyway, not simply because of economic interests but also because the Republican Party doesn’t respect them and wants to make it harder for them to vote. In other words, there are social, rather than economic reasons that only four percent of blacks vote for the Republican Party. I would not be surprised if simple things like the birth certificate controversy and other demonstrations of lack of respect for the president cost the GOP several percentage points with the black community. Every time some Republican calls the president a Muslim or a tyrant or lazy, another group of black folks gets pissed off and vows never to align themselves with the former party of Lincoln.
In fact, I’d argue that it is social issues that trump financial issues with the black community, because there are a lot of blacks who make enough money to be tax-averse, but this generally doesn’t lead them to become supportive of Republican candidates. You’ll occasionally see notable exceptions, especially among well-paid athletes or entertainers, but these are the exceptions that prove the rule.
The most counterproductive thing the Republicans have done is to mess with voting rights. Both the legislatures and the Supreme Court have gone after black people’s access to the polls, and that is a sin that will not be forgotten.
The number of African-American voters has increased steadily: 12.9 million in 2000, 14 million in 2004, 16 million in 2008 and 17.8 million in 2012.
In 2012, blacks for the first time voted at a higher rate, 66.2 percent, than did whites, with a rate of 64.1 percent, or Asians or Hispanics, with rates of about 48 percent each.
The entire point of voter ID laws was to suppress the black vote and it did not work. The suppression effort galvanized the black community and they turned out in record numbers. This had nothing to do with economic interests.