Opposition to President Barack Obama’s agenda fueled Tuesday’s GOP surge, and many also connected Obama to the rise of minority GOP candidates.

Michael Steele knows the party he pledges allegiance to has alienated quite of few of those who look like him.
Speaking candidly about race and Republicans, the Republican National Committee chairman bluntly acknowledged that the GOP has done little to convince blacks to support them on the ballot.

As he explained to DePaul University students last week: “We have lost sight of the historic, integral link between the party and African-Americans. This party was co-founded by blacks, among them Frederick Douglass. The Republican Party had a hand in forming the NAACP, and yet we have mistreated that relationship. People don’t walk away from parties, their parties walk away from them.”

I’m surprised he didn’t make the obligatory reference to Abraham Lincoln in answering why the party of red rarely resonates with the black and brown faction of the electorate.

With minorities on their way to becoming the majority in this country, the Grand Old Party is doing a disservice to itself by consistently propping up older white male Protestants candidates — and women who sound exactly like them.

For decades, social conservatives have relentlessly targeted Black Churches as a way to bring more African-Americans into the Republican Party. Despite many sincere efforts, the numbers of church going African-Americans who vote Republican is smaller now than ever before.

While there has been much debate and talk about the Religious Right within the Republican Party, one could equally and strongly argue that African-Americans make up one of the largest socially conservative voting blocs in the Democrat Party. Earlier this year, the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life released a detailed study on the religious views of most African-Americans. The research was unique in that the new analysis found blacks to be the most religious group of people in the United States population as a whole.

According to the research, when compared to other racial and ethnic groups, African-Americans are among the most likely to report a formal religious affiliation with 87% of African-Americans describing themselves as belonging to one religious group or another. The analysis also finds that nearly eight-in-ten African-Americans (79%) say religion is very important in their lives compared with 56% among all U.S. adults.

Since President Obama rammed through Congress his reckless $787 billion stimulus bill the number of unemployed Americans has been steadily increasing, especially among African-Americans. For months that the president’s stimulus bill has failed to create the jobs he promised, and now the NAACP recognizes it, too.

Andrew Simon is a young black Canadian conservative and former Vice President 2004-2006 of the Campus Conservatives at the University of Calgary in Calgary, Alta. He has worked and volunteered for Lee Richardson, a Member of Parliament Calgary, Alta. Andrew Simon is also the radio host of HHR Blog Radio here he speaks about minorities and the future of the Republican Party.

by Dorian Davis  I know some Republicans are inclined to reach out more to minorities in the wake of Gallup’s new poll showing the GOP with a higher percentage of white people (89!) than a Hannah Montana concert. I’ve come up with Plan B. Despite our election of an African-American, Michael Steele, to the Republican [...]