GOP actions tell the tale

“They plan to make the District of Columbia a state — that would give them two new Democratic senators,”said then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., explaining his opposition to D.C. statehood in a Fox News interview two years ago.

His position hasn’t changed. Neither has my support for full enfranchisement of Americans residing in the District of Columbia.

This column, however, is not about the pros and cons of D.C. statehood.

My attention is fixed on McConnell’s assertion that making the District the 51st state would create, for him, a world-class anathema, i.e., “two Democratic senators.” With McConnell, party registration determines voting representation. That’s undemocratic.

A stipulation: Washington, D.C., politically speaking, is a Democratic town. Relevant statistics back that up.

At the time of November’s election, the District had 401,092 Democrats representing 76% of all registered voters. Independents, at 85,911 or 16% of the electorate, were the city’s second-largest bloc. Republicans trailed a distant third with only 29,947 or 5.4% of all registered voters.

Those numbers preordained the presidential election results.

The GOP ticket headed by President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence was unceremoniously swamped by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris — 18,586 to 317,323 votes. Team Trump closed out election night with 5.4% of the vote.

How weak is the Republican Party in the District? In the November elections, the GOP failed to field candidates in contests for D.C. delegate, and Ward 2, Ward 4 and Ward 7 council seats. In the two contests with Republicans on the ballot, the Ward 8 and at-large candidates received only 2% and 3% of the votes respectively. So, McConnell is probably right. Should the District make it to statehood, two Republicans from the new state of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth, are unlikely to enter the Senate chamber and join him on his side of the aisle.

But whose fault is that?

Join me on a trip down memory lane. The journey may help people like McConnell understand why the GOP has such poor standing in the District, and in most of America’s largest urban areas.

Black people once formed a strong base of the Republican Party.

The first Republican president Abraham Lincoln’s freeing of the enslaved had something to do with it. So, too, the Reconstruction era, which saw Blacks elected and appointed as Republicans to public offices in states of the defeated Confederacy dominated by Democrats.

Once returned to power, southern Democratic state governments suppressed Black political rights — despicable actions that were aided and abetted by violence after dark. All of which deepened Republican roots in the Black community.

That spirit was captured in a Sept. 23, 2003, interview by the History Makers with now-retired D.C. Court of Appeals Chief Judge Theodore Newman Jr.: “I was raised as a Republican … My father [Theodore Roosevelt Newman] was a Republican in Macon County, Ala., who when asked why he wasn’t a Democrat would pull down a … window shade on which he had copied the party symbol of the Democratic Party of the state of Alabama. It was a white rooster with its motto being ‘White supremacy — for the right,” and daddy said if you believe in that you vote Democrat.”

Conditions remained that way well into the Great Depression and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which began to loosen the Republican Party’s grip on Black voters.

But as more Black people gravitated to the Democrats, White Southerners moved with more than deliberate speed out of the Democratic Party, briefly flirting with the States’ Rights Democratic Party, before landing in the Republican Party, where they are now the GOP’s heart and soul for, in my view, all the wrong reasons: race and civil rights.

Let us recall some of the key events that helped trigger the White Democrats exodus: the 1954 Supreme Court decision desegregating schools, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, George Wallace’s 1968 presidential quest on a segregationist platform, and President Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” to exploit White grievance with federal racial and social policies.

And what is keeping many Blacks, people of color and fair-minded Americans out of local Republican parties in large cities such as the District? How about: Republican policies that favor the wealthy and ignore urban America; a Republican president’s inflammatory racial rhetoric; a criminally neglectful Republican response to a coronavirus pandemic that disproportionately affected Black and brown people. Or simply consider the voting restrictions being cooked up in Republican statehouses across the country.

And the Senate minority leader quakes at the prospect of two Democratic senators representing the new state?

What does McConnell expect? And whose fault is that?