ESPN host Stephen A. Smith thinks that if, for one election, every black American voted Republican, it would send a message to both parties that the demographic is not under any one particular party’s control.
“What I dream is that for one election, just one, every black person in America vote Republican,” Smith said Tuesday afternoon at the Impact Symposium at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. His explanation:
From what I’ve read, Barry Goldwater is going against Lyndon B. Johnson. He’s your Republican candidate; he is completely against the civil rights movement. Lyndon B. Johnson was in favor of it — civil rights legislation. What happens is, he wins office, Barry Goldwater loses office, but there was a Senate, a Republican Senate, that pushed the votes to the president’s desk. It was the Democrats who were against civil rights legislation — the southern Dixiecrats. So because President Lyndon B. Johnson was a Democrat, black America assumed the Democrats were for it.
According to the clip, recorded and first published by Breitbart, Smith clarified further that black people voting for the Republican Party would be a great way to get both parties to pay attention to the racial demographic’s needs:
Black folks in America are telling one party, “We don’t give a damn about you.” They’re telling the other party, “You’ve got our vote.” Therefore, you have labeled yourself “disenfranchised” because one party knows they’ve got you under their thumb. The other party knows they’ll never get you and nobody comes to address your interest.
During his impassioned monologue, Smith likened blacks voting for Republicans to customers “shopping around,” essentially asking shops to “cater to them” so that they will do business.
“We don’t do that with politics,” he lamented, “and then we blame white America for our disenfranchisement.”
In the 2012 election, 93% of black voters supported President Barack Obama, with just 6 percent casting their ballots for the losing Republican ticket. That disparity led the Republican Party to publish an autopsy report detailing ways it can try to win over more votes from minority groups.
