The March 15 elections will pit Donald Trump against Gov. John Kasich in the latter’s home state of Ohio. As a large winner-take-all primary, it is a must-win for the anti-Trump coalition. It could also have real symbolic value.
The Republican Party has long accepted and occasionally embraced racists, from Sen. Strom Thurmond to Mitt Romney’s acceptance of Trump in 2012. As a result, the party’s standing with people of color, and African-Americans in particular, is terrible. The party hasn’t won more than 15 percent of the black vote in a presidential election since 1976. In 1984, when Ronald Reagan defeated Walter Mondale 59-41, he still couldn’t break single-digit support from black voters.
The reasons aren’t terribly hard to see. From Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” to Reagan’s “welfare queens” to the “law and order” rhetoric of the 1990s, the Republicans have been quick to let racially coded language fly. In more recent years, the party’s acceptance of Rudy Giuliani, Ann Coulter and the birther movement have made it clear that their culture of racism has survived.
Trump, then, is merely the culmination of a long line of morally poor, politically calculating decisions. But he is one of the worst examples of racism in American politics nonetheless. He’s shared racist memes, referred to Mexican-Americans as drug dealers and rapists, encouraged the beating of black protestors and supports a national registry of Muslims. The Republican Party as a whole may have a race problem, but Trump takes it to another level.
His closest competitor in Ohio is, by contrast, one of the best hopes the party has of reform on race. In his 2014 re-election bid, Kasich won 26 percent of African-American votes. That’s more than four times better than Romney's performance in 2012.
It is also far better than any major Republican in South Carolina or the Midwest. For reference, here are the percentages for some other 2014 victors: Nikki Haley (6 percent), Lindsey Graham (6 percent), Tim Scott (10 percent), Scott Walker (10 percent), Rick Snyder (9 percent) and Mitch McConnell (8 percent). So Kasich’s 26 percent is pretty stellar in context.
His policies and statements also stand in sharp contrast to Trump. He called the death of Tamir Rice “a heartbreaking tragedy” and moved to reform the police system in Ohio. There were protests, not riots, following the grand jury’s acquittal of the officers who killed Rice. While in Congress, he hired an African-American to be his legislative director and made it clear that his office belonged to the people of Ohio, regardless of their race or party affiliation.
To be fair, he has said problematic things. This is particularly true with regard to Latinos, of whom there are relatively few in Ohio. Even then, he hasn’t ruled out a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, in contrast to Trump’s insistence on mass deportation.
Kasich isn’t perfect. But as Trump calls for a GOP that displays its racism openly and proudly, the governor has been quietly working for all of his state’s citizens and has been rewarded for it at the polls.
In Ohio, the voters who know Kasich’s approach best will get a chance to decide whether the Republicans should embolden or rebuke the racists in their party. Encouragingly, it looks like they might vote for tolerance and sanity in the end.