I made a long post about this in another thread and why I think minorities generally vote Democrat, and why minorities may be unlikely to vote for the Tea Party. I figure many of the reasons are similar for the Republican party in regards to the latter explanation. Here's the general summary of the reasons I felt it was likely you'd have blacks, which make up the largest minority, voted Democrat and I think some of it would apply for some other minorities as well:
Click the arrow to get the more in detailed quote. I just didn't want to repost the whole long post into this thread.
That's a good list. Thanks for pointing me to it.
Personally, I think there are two main reasons:
1) There is a strong perception that the GOP is racist. That perception is partly based on fact. Some Republican politicians make subtle, or even no-so-subtle, appeals to racial fears, the average Republican politician in Congress only supports civil rights legislation 15% of the time where the average Democrat does 93% of the time, a decent percentage of Republican posters in places like foxnews.com are openly white supremacist, etc. But, of course, it is also partly an erroneous, or at least overly broad, conclusion.
2) The three issues black voters identify as their highest priority are poverty, racial inequality and health care. Republicans don't have a plan to address any of those three. In all three cases, the Republican position is that we should do nothing and hope it works itself out. Generally speaking, Republican candidates don't mention those issues at all in their platforms. So, you wouldn't expect voters for whom those are central issues to vote Republican.
Now, in my view, for a national party that seeks to govern the entire nation, including members of all races, to have legitimacy it needs to have a platform that appeals at least to a meaningful portion of all races. I just think of that as a basic foundational requirement for any claim to legitimate governance. A system of government that is nearly universally rejected by an entire racial group feels to me like it can't possibly claim to represent the people as a whole. So, to me, one of the most crucial things the GOP needs to be tackling is how to address the two issues above.
I would think that the GOP would be seeking every opportunity it can to clarify that it opposes racism. It would be denouncing it's members who say or do racist things, it would be proposing legislation that shows how racism can be mitigated within a conservative framework. I would be hammering out clear policy positions on poverty, racial inequality and health care and figuring out how to make a persuasive case about why their policy would lead to significant improvements in that area. The conservative ideology should have conservative sorts of solutions to those problems on the tips of everybody's tongues. I am absolutely convinced that if I was suddenly in charge of the GOP I could significantly fix it's race problem without changing a single policy stance on anything in a matter of weeks. I think it would be fairly trivial. Make a public speech denouncing white supremacy and saying that it had no place in the GOP, denounce some of the overt white supremacists in the party like David Duke and whatnot. Spend a few days with some policy wonks ironing out realistic plans for how conservative solutions can be brought to bear on poverty, racial inequality and health care, introduce those and get the politicians in the party to stump on them. Done.
To me it seems like the GOP just isn't even trying to bridge that gap though. There are conservative responses to those problems out there, but they don't really bother talking about them. The majority of Republicans oppose racism privately, but they seem unwilling to do it publicly. It's almost like they want to remain alienated from non-white voters. If that's true, and they've really made some Machiavellian calculation that they get more of a boost in the polls by seen as racist than they lose, then I think that really is a serious moral problem for the party. On the other hand, if it isn't true, and they actually do want to appeal to all races, then it seems like utter and inexplicable incompetence that they aren't doing anything to fix it.
