DELEGATES

Black GOP Delegates See Their Numbers Fall

Only 36 Of This Year's 2,380 Delegates Are Black, Down From 167 Four Years Ago

by Marilyn Werber Serafini

Monday, Sept. 1, 2008


As Republicans fret about how their response to Hurricane Gustav will be judged, nightmares of Hurricane Katrina come rushing back. And memories of how Katrina spotlighted black poverty could draw attention to the fact that the 2008 GOP National Convention is overwhelmingly white.

Convention organizers say they do not track the number of black delegates. Only 36 are black, according to David Bositis, a senior political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. That's a mere 1.5 percent of the 2,380 total delegates, and a sharp drop from 2004, when there were 167 black delegates, 6.7 percent of that year's total.

By contrast, 24.5 percent of the delegates at last week's Democratic convention were African-American, according to the Democratic National Committee. That translated to 1,087 black delegates. Four years ago, some 20 percent of Democratic delegates were black.

The percentage of African-American delegates at Republican conventions had been on the upswing -- growing from 2.6 percent in 1996, to 4.1 percent in 2000, to 6.7 percent in 2004.

At this year's GOP convention, 33 states plus the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands have fewer black delegates than four years ago. Just three states have more. Mississippi and Michigan have the highest proportion of black delegates -- about 10 percent each. They are followed by South Carolina.

Twenty-four states have no black delegates or alternates -- up from seven in 2004. Former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele was the only African-American among the prominent speakers on the convention's pre-Gustav schedule.

A small number of African-American voters consider themselves Republican. "This low level of black attachment to the Republican Party is now almost five decades old," Bositis says.

From 1984 to 2004, young black voters were more likely to identify as Republican than their elders. That's no longer true.

"This represents a potentially troubling [fact] for the GOP because for the last 20 years the Republican Party's best prospect for improving their African-American support was through the younger cohort," Bositis notes. "Further, the 2008 presidential campaign is unlikely to improve Republican prospects since the contest is between a young, charismatic black Democratic nominee and a 72-year-old white Republican nominee."

According to the Republican convention's press office, 13 percent of this year's delegates identify themselves as belonging to an ethnic minority group. The office points out that that is more than double the 6.3 percent at the 1996 convention.

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