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Black Republicans lead political poll reversal

November 14, 2021

Evangelical Christians always vote Republican. Always have. African Americans are attracted to the polls by Democrats. Always will.

Or, maybe not.

Over the past two election cycles, Republicans have made quiet and substantial gains with African American voters by nominating dynamic Black candidates with magnetic appeal. This month, Republican Winsome Sears became the first woman and first woman of color to win a statewide election in Virginia.

“In case you haven’t noticed, I am Black and I have been Black all my life, but that’s not what this is about,” the Jamaican-born immigrant and Marine Corps veteran said in her victory speech. “We have things to tend to. We are going to fully fund our historically Black colleges and universities. We’re going to have safer neighborhoods, safer communities, and our children are going to get a good education.”

Unsurprisingly, her power to disrupt Democrats’ political monopoly on Black voters has triggered vitriolic hate speech from the left. In a recent racist tirade, MSNBC contributor Michael Eric Dyson attacked Sears as a “Black mouth” for “White supremacist practices.” Progressive journalist Glenn Greenwald called it “one of the most repugnant and racist segments broadcast by a TV network.”

“The message could not be clearer: People of color are duty-bound to recite liberal orthodoxy and pledge loyalty to the DNC, and those who don’t are brainless puppets being used,” Greenwald tweeted.

That sentiment had been echoed during the campaign by none other than Democrat L. Douglas Wilder, Virginia’s first Black governor. He openly chastised Democrats for taking black voters for granted.

“No Democrat can win a statewide election in Virginia without massive support from the black community; however, their needs continue to be ignored by those who purport to represent them,” the Democrat  wrote in an open letter to his party. “The people are not stupid; they are voting on issues and for those who speak to the issues that impact their lives.”

Sears’ victory isn’t isolated, but the latest in a series of victories for Black Republican candidates. Not since Reconstruction have there been more African American Republicans in Congress, including Republican Tim Scott, the first African American of either party to represent a southern state in the U.S. Senate.

Across the South, Republicans are expanding their bench with Republican African American statewide officeholders. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Gov. Larry Hogan handed over the day-to-day responsibilities of governing Maryland to Lt. Gov Boyd Rutherford, the first Republican lieutenant governor to ever be re-elected in Maryland.

In the Bluegrass State, Attorney General Daniel Cameron is the first African American independently elected to statewide office in Kentucky’s history and the first Republican elected to the Attorney General’s office since 1948.

Even in deep blue California, Republicans are making gains at the local level by electing Black Republicans. In 2020, heavily Democratic Stockton ousted its incumbent Democrat Mayor Michael Tubbs. Once a rising Democratic star, Tubbs had been heralded by progressives, profiled in an HBO documentary, and financially backed by Oprah. Yet, he was replaced with Kevin Lincoln, a former Marine who campaigned on addressing the city’s homeless crisis.

More and more Black voters are flexing their political power to choose. In 2012, Black voters in Virginia backed President Barack Obama by a 93-to-6 percent margin. Virginia’s Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin doubled that margin this time around by engaging directly with Black communities and prioritizing funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities. For the first time ever, the Hampton Roads Black Caucus, which had endorsed Democrat Terry McAuliffe in 2015, backed the Republican candidate.

Black voters are a powerful political force with gradually changing political views. A June 2021 Morning Consult/Politico national tracking poll found that a solid plurality, 46 percent, of Black Americans felt that recent Black Lives Matter protests were empty rhetoric bringing meaningful conversations, but little change in America when it comes to addressing race relations.

Democrats hoping to stave off Republican gains with Black voters aren’t going anywhere with its far-left agenda. The same survey found that just 21 percent of Black voters believe that critical race theory has a positive impact on society.

If you follow the science, it turns out the magnetic forces aren’t fixed. Like voting blocs, the magnetic poles are constantly changing with gradual shifts that precede an eventual pole reversal. By taking Black voters for granted, Democrats could be headed for a “poll reversal” of their own.




Steel: ‘Zuckerbucks’ Corrupted the 2020 Election for Big Tech

May 30, 2021

Dark Money. Citizens United. The Koch Brothers.

Remember when Democrats used to decry the corrupting influence of corporate money in politics?

“Today, the Supreme Court kept open the floodgates to uninhibited special interest spending in our campaigns and in our politics,” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi lamented following a 2012 Supreme Court decision to uphold Citizens United. “Their disappointing decision to uphold Citizens United deals yet another blow to a fundamental American value: that the voices of the people determine the outcome of our elections, not the checkbooks of the few.”

Nine years later, the Democrat Party is content to see American elections outsourced to “the checkbooks of the few” – so long as the checks are signed by Big Tech.

While mainstream media headlines have focused on President Trump’s bans from TwitterFacebook, and Instagram after the election, Big Tech’s greatest election manipulation came well before voters cast their ballots and in a decidedly traditional way.

Good old-fashioned money in politics.

Too late to affect the outcome, the public is slowly learning more about how Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and his wife, Priscilla Chan, funneled more than $419.5 million through two non-profit organizations to influence the 2020 election.

At the time, Zuckerberg framed the donation as necessary to help election officials prepare for unforeseen challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet far from personal protective equipment for poll workers and contactless voting, Zuckerberg’s millions bankrolled get-out-the-vote campaigns.

The public should be deeply troubled by the partisan affiliation of the private groups tapped by Zuckerberg to enhance voter participation. The bulk of the Zuckerberg money – $350 million – was channeled to the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL). The group’s founder and executive director, Tiana Epps-Johnson, is a former Obama Foundation Fellow and Election Administration Director of the far-left New Organizing Institute. According to CTCL’s own report, election officials spent the funds on “social media and advertising” and allowed government officials to “purchase thousands of dollars in billboards, television commercials, radio, etc.”

The second group receiving Zuckerberg election funds, the Center for Election Innovation and Research, spent $69.5 million in 23 states. Its funding was inequitably distributed to aid battleground states. More than half of CEIR grants were distributed to just four swing states: $13.2 million to Pennsylvania, $11.9 million to Michigan, $5.6 million to Georgia; and $4.8 million to Arizona.

New York has double the population of Michigan, yet received just $5 million – less than half of Michigan’s funding. If the funds were truly meant “to provide nonpartisan, accurate, and official voting information to the public,” why did more populous but uncompetitive states receive less money?

More than six months after the election, the public still doesn’t have a full accounting of the full extent of how these organizations spent nearly a half-billion dollars. The only available accounting: a locked Google spreadsheet that identifies the 2,500 government agencies that received funding, but that doesn’t share how much each entity received or how the funds were spent.

“The full extent of the grants isn’t known,” NPR News concluded in its December 2020 investigation into the unprecedented privatization of the 2020 election administration. “The Center for Tech and Civic Life declined repeated interview requests from APM Reports to discuss the funding and how it was used. In late October, the group listed the jurisdictions that received funding on its website but didn’t disclose dollar amounts or funding priorities for each jurisdiction.”

In addition to the partisan affiliations of its founders and lack of transparency for how the money was spent, the public should be concerned that the group’s voter turnout efforts were heavily concentrated in Democrat strongholds in swing states.

The Associated Press confirms that CTCL distributed “$6.2 million to Wisconsin’s five largest cities, $10 million to Philadelphia, and $6 million to Fulton County, which includes Atlanta.” A March 2021 report by the Foundation for Government Accountability found that Democrat counties received 92 percent of CTCL’s funding in Pennsylvania.

“It just doesn’t pass the smell test,” says Nicholas Horton, research director for the Foundation for Government Accountability. “Government should be a neutral, fair arbiter of the election process, and the public should have no doubts and full confidence in that process when going to vote in the polls.”

Shawn Steel, a former chairman of the California Republican Party, is a member of the Republican National Committeeman.
 





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