Missing in the GOP: Black and Hispanic Nominees for Governor

For decades Republican leaders vowed to recruit more minority candidates and tried to project a “big tent” image for the party, and in recent years they saw some payoff with governors: Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Nikki Haley of South Carolina, both Indian-Americans who have since moved on, and Brian Sandoval of Nevada and Susana Martinez of New Mexico, both Hispanic-American.

But in the first midterm elections under President Donald Trump, whose campaign and presidency included strong appeals to white voters, Republicans have no black or Hispanic nominees for governor in 2018, and few from other racial minorities, in the 36 states holding elections for the position. The overwhelming majority are white men.

And with Sandoval and Martinez leaving by early January, Republicans are at risk of having an all-white bench of governors in 2019.

Democrats this year, by contrast, have nominated black, Hispanic and Native American candidates for governor in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Maryland and elsewhere. This lineup comes after years when Democrats were weak on diversity in governor’s races.

The Republican falloff is striking after past election seasons when party leaders attempted to identify and then rally behind minority candidates for governor in major states, like Ohio and Pennsylvania.

But several Republican leaders, pollsters and former candidates said they see the lack of diversity as a consequence of Trump’s offensive language on race, from Mexicans and immigrants to black football players and the protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, arguing that some prospective minority candidates do not want to defend Trump or be aligned with his party. Other Republicans say that an embrace of white identity has become integral to the party’s culture and voter base under Trump, so it is no surprise that white candidates ran and won in primaries dominated by white conservative voters.

“It’s not complicated,” said Michael Steele, the former chairman of the national Republican Party, who is black. “These efforts have been made more difficult by the ugly rhetoric coming from this president.”

Referring to some of Trump’s most incendiary comments, Steele said “whether you refer to their homeland” in vulgar language, “or whether you call their people criminals and rapists, it’s kind of hard to have a conversation after and say, ‘Will you vote for me?'”

Jon Thompson, a spokesman for the Republican Governors Association, praised the party’s slate of candidates for governor, saying they were “fighting to expand opportunity and grow jobs for all Americans.”

“It’s misleading and unfair to report on candidates based on just one particular year when gubernatorial elections occur every year,” he said.

Abel Maldonado, the former Republican lieutenant governor of California under Arnold Schwarzenegger, said that Trump’s leadership of the party, and his highly successful record of endorsing candidates who went on to win primaries this year, created severe complications for minority Republicans.

“If you’re a Republican and Hispanic, and if you don’t come out to support President Donald Trump, you’re dead in the water,” said Maldonado, who is of Mexican descent. “And if you say you’re against Donald Trump, you lose his base.”

Maldonado argued that the problems stemmed from Trump’s divisive language; his policies, even the proposed border wall with Mexico, are defensible, Maldonado said. Still, the president’s propensity to speak in language that plays on racial stereotypes creates a difficult conundrum that few minority candidates would want to endure.

“I really like the things that he says on trade and the protection of our country. But how he says them? I’ll be honest with you, deep down it bothers me,” Maldonado said.

Republicans are conscious of the juxtaposition between their party’s candidates and the recent surge of nonwhite Democrats nominated in governors races nationwide. Democrats have had a historic nomination cycle in which several progressive candidates running grass-roots, upstart campaigns have secured the party’s nomination, including Andrew Gillum in Florida, David Garcia in Arizona, Paulette Jordan in Idaho, and Stacey Abrams in Georgia — who could be the first black woman to become a state governor.

Some of these Democrats are long shots, and neither party has a particularly impressive record with black candidates for governor. (There have been only two black governors in the modern era, both Democrats, L. Douglas Wilder of Virginia and Deval Patrick of Massachusetts.)

Critics of the Democratic Party are quick to argue that this diversification happened despite many party leaders — who backed white candidates in some of those states in 2018 and in past years — and not because diversity was a priority for Democratic leaders. Nevertheless, the nominations of minority candidates have created contrasting trend lines between the two parties. Trump enjoys anemic approval ratings among minority voters, and Republican operatives fear that this, in combination with a disproportionately white slate of candidates, could pose electoral problems for Republicans in the midterms and beyond.

“If we’re a big tent we need to make that clear and we need candidates that reflect the country as a whole,” said Brendan Steinhauser, former campaign manager for Texas Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican Party leader. “And we’re not seeing those numbers right now.”

Steinhauser said the party has gone backward since 2014, when it had more prominent minority governors nationwide — including Jindal and Haley — and more white politicians appeared comfortable campaigning in minority communities.

“Focusing on the base and Anglo voters more than ever is just not going to work,” Steinhauser said.

Whit Ayres, a prominent Republican pollster who wrote a book called “2016 and Beyond: How Republicans Can Elect a President in a New America,” said that while the party could benefit from more minority candidates, this election cycle could also just be an anomaly. Ayres, who worked with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s failed presidential campaign in 2016, pointed to several minority Republicans who are currently in prominent offices, such as South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and Haley, who stepped down as governor of South Carolina to become Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations.

“We have many candidates both in Texas and Florida, like Marco Rubio, who have won a majority of the Hispanic vote in their campaign,” Ayres said. “So it’s perfectly possible for Republican candidates, without in any way moderating their fundamental principles, to succeed in the Hispanic community. But you have to try.”

The party has nominated a handful of candidates for governor who are not white men, including an Asian-American nominee in Rhode Island, Allan Fung, and a Samoan-Hawaiian woman in Hawaii, Andria Tupola. There are also nonwhite Republicans elsewhere on the party ticket this year. John James, a black Republican, is the party’s choice for Senate in Michigan; he received Trump’s endorsement. And Republican gubernatorial nominees have chosen six candidates for lieutenant governor who are racial minorities, including a Cuban-American woman in Florida and a Native American woman in Minnesota.

Republicans with closer ties to Trump’s administration brushed aside the idea that the president has made it more difficult for minority candidates to succeed within the party.

“If you’re an establishment, traditional Republican, this is a tough environment no matter what,” said Ari Fleischer, a former White House press secretary who has oscillated between supporting and criticizing Trump. Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House and a vocal defender of Trump, said candidate recruitment is always a difficult task, but particularly in a political environment he described as “anti-conservative.”

Referring to Judge Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s Supreme Court nominee who has faced sexual misconduct allegations, Gingrich said: “Take a look of what’s happening with Kavanaugh. If you’re a normal, rational person do you really want to do this? It’s harder to recruit across the board because of how tough and how brutal it’s been.”

Gingrich said Trump and other White House officials are aware they need to “increase their margins” among black and Latino voters. He said he expected a robust effort to increase minority turnout for Republicans before the midterm elections in November, but he did not offer specific remedies besides “social media.”

Some political observers on the right and the left contended that this turnout effort would be much easier to accomplish with a more diverse slate of candidates. Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, said he believed the party’s slate of candidates was indicative of a larger trend, fueled by Trump: the coalescing around white identity and interests.

“This is telling about the future of the Republican Party,” Johnson said. “As this country grows to be a more diverse country, they’re becoming more of a monolith.”

Frank Keating, the former Republican governor of Oklahoma and one-time chairman of the Republican Governors Association, said that Republicans need to be careful to ensure they are projecting that their party is welcoming to all.

Keating said, in Oklahoma, he and fellow Republicans faced a similar diversity problem in the 1990s and they made a concerted effort to find minority Republican voices, which culminated in the election of J.C. Watts, the first black Republican House member elected to Congress from a state south of the Mason-Dixon Line since Reconstruction.

“You have to go out of your way to do” recruitment, Keating said. “Because a lot of people just think, ‘Politics is not the place I want to be.'”

He added a warning shot for the Republican Party: “This cycle may be an anomaly, but we need to focus make sure we don’t have two election cycles of an anomaly.”