The 2020 Republican National Convention featured a procession of minority speakers that was, as reported at the time, almost certainly unprecedented.
The 2024 R.N.C. lineup may rival or exceed it.
It would be easy to mock this week’s lineup of speakers of color as mostly performative, but you would be wrong to do so. Republicans are strategically — almost surgically — trying to carve away minority voters from Democrats. And to some degree they’re succeeding.
Let’s recall how we got here: In 2013, not long after losing a second presidential election to Barack Obama, Republicans produced a 100-page report titled the “Growth and Opportunity Project,” often called the Republican autopsy.
It chastised the party for “driving around in circles on an ideological cul-de-sac” and insisted that it must broaden its appeal to minority voters: “We need to campaign among Hispanic, Black, Asian and gay Americans and demonstrate we care about them, too.”
Of course, in 2016, Republican voters spurned a crowded and relatively diverse Republican field in favor of Donald Trump, the man who mainstreamed birtherism and who traffics in racially and ethnically inflammatory statements — “I think Islam hates us,” “look at my African American over here” and so on. It felt like a full rejection of the autopsy.
But as time went on, the party began achieving its diversity objectives while seemingly spurning them: According to an April report from the Pew Research Center, “White voters make up 79 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners. In 1996, they constituted 93 percent of the party’s voters.”
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