What’s Driving Black Candidates to the Republican Party?

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The Republican Party is clearly no place for Black activism as most of us know it. Members of the Party inveigh against what they call critical race theory, and oppose efforts to redress racial discrimination in everything from school admissions to policing and public safety; in some quarters, simply acknowledging that racism exists is considered unpatriotic. And yet the Republican Party has recently attracted an almost unprecedented number of Black candidates to its fold—more than at any time since the Reconstruction era. “In a moment where the Party . . . has really wholeheartedly embraced white-grievance politics,” Leah Wright Rigueur tells David Remnick, “they are endorsing more Black candidates than they have in the past twenty-five years.” Wright Rigueur is a historian at Johns Hopkins University and the author of “The Loneliness of the Black Republican,” which covers the period from the New Deal through the Reagan Administration. The G.O.P., she argues, is exploiting a moment when the long-standing relationship between Black Americans and the Democratic Party is weakening, and it aims to capitalize on an “everyday conservatism” among voters. “It actually makes sense that in the aftermath of Barack Obama—with Black people’s levels of support and warmth for the Democratic Party in decline and the belief among a small sect of African Americans that [it] is just as racist as the Republican Party—that actually frees some people up to actually vote Republican,” she says.