The conventional wisdom dicatates that Michael Steele, GOP candidate for Maryland Senator Paul Sarbanes' open Senate seat, has a difficult road to hoe in a state with a 2-1 Democratic voter advantage. Candidate Steele is a GOP headliner, along with Ken Blackwell (OH-GOV) and Lynn Swann (PA-GOV) as part of a campaign to make 2006 the "Year of the Black Republican" in promoting African-Americans for statewide office.
What makes Steele's campaign exceptional is the GOP targeting of Maryland's historically-Democratic voting bloc of African-Americans, which, at 28% of the state's population, is well above the national average. Perhaps it's no surprise that Steele's campaign website is deliberately subdued with respect to his party affiliation, and perhaps it's even less surprising that Steele declined attending a GOP fundraiser in Maryland to stand with George W. Bush. From today's Washington Post:
Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. stood on a riser shoulder to shoulder with the president, but the party's leading candidate for an open U.S. Senate seat in Maryland, Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele, was absent.
What does amuse is that the Post cites: "Analysts disagreed over whether Steele was sending a message." Perhaps the analysts in question are not familiar with the more
recent polls that reveal Bush's disapproval ratings in Maryland: 92% for African-American voters and 71% for women voters.
Steele's success in November relies on capturing a far greater share of the African-American vote than 8%. While Bush did headline a Steele fundraiser last November, Steele was careful to distance himself from the President:
Then it was Steele's turn to speak. But as he stood at the lectern, towering over the president, he offered no specific praise for any of his policies.
Steele seemed annoyed when I asked him about this later. "So let me get this straight, I'm going to invite him to Maryland, the bluest of the blue states, where the president on a good day has 32 percent approval, which he probably had nationally at that time, 2 percent African-American approval, and you are going to focus on the fact that I did not say, 'Thank you, Mr. President?' I think it was enough that I had the president here when everyone told me not to.
My Mama Told Me: You Better Shop Around
What's a Black Republican to do when his own party's policies repel the constituency he is trying to reach? The same poll mentioned above, conducted by Gonzalez Research, claims 21% of African-Americans favor Steele over a Democratic opponent, while Steele's internal polling show a lower figure of 14%. His current principle strategy is to court vote-rich Prince George's County -- a DC suburb, his home county, and the nation's most affluent majority-minority county. Simply put, he pitches an alternative to the Democratic establishment, trumpeting themes of empowerment and minority achievement.
In consumer terms, the pitch is, You've shopped with them for generations, why don't you come down the street and see what we have to offer?
Single-issue absolutism is often maligned in the interest of maintaining Democratic majorities. There is a flip-side, however -- a climate of perceived erosion in civil rights is likely to impact the historical Democratic base of women and minority voters, weakening allegiances and opening the door to the question: What have you done for me, lately?
In a meeting with 60 Democratic African-American women business owners:
Dorothy Bailey, a Democrat who helped put the program together and introduced Steele as "this handsome man," is the former chairwoman of the Prince George's County Council.
He began his remarks by saying, "I am the luckiest man in Prince George's County right now, because I am in a room of successful African-American women, and that's a powerful place to be." The women nodded and applauded. He continued in the same vein: "You're out there. You're creating wealth. Legacy wealth. Like the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Oprah. Like Bob Johnson."
I asked Bailey, a handsome woman with close-cropped graying hair and a self-assured bearing, if she had ever supported a Republican before. "Oh, no," she said. "Never." On at least one key point, she disagrees with Steele. She is strongly in favor of abortion rights -- as, she suspects, the vast majority of the women at the tea shop were -- and Steele is staunchly against them. "In life or politics, you make a list of 10 things that are important," Bailey told me. "If you get 8 of those things, you're ahead of the game. You never get all 10."
Bailey is now a Steele supporter, won over by Steele's focus on procurement of federal small business loans for minorities. Steele's plan for victory in Maryland is to win the minority vote with a message of economic opportunity, particularly with younger voters, while distancing himself from the very unpopular President.
If Benjamin Cardin prevails over African-American Kweisi Mfume in the Democratic primary, an additional wedge is introduced: that Maryland has never elected an African-American to statewide office. While Cardin enjoys a larger lead over Steele than Mfume does in current polling, post-primary the issue of proportional representation will be unavoidable in a Cardin-Steele matchup. According to Joe Trippi, GOP success in peeling away the African-American vote in Democratic Maryland, signals that "it's over" for the national party (Disclaimer: Joe Trippi advises the Mfume campaign). One thing is certain: a Steele victory in Maryland represents a real shot across the bow for Democratic ambitions beyond 2006.
TRIVIA QUESTION: Who is Michael Steele's most famous (infamous) relative? Answer in tip jar.