Ben Carson has a mission. The world-renowned neurosurgeon who has shot unexpectedly into second place in the race to become the Republican candidate for the White House, is trying to woo back to his party a group of voters that for years has been thoroughly alienated from it – African Americans.
On Friday that mission took Carson to Ferguson, Missouri, the two-thirds majority black suburb of St Louis that became the crucible of the Black Lives Matter movement following the police shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown in August 2014.
His “driving tour” of the town made for an unlikely choice of campaign setting – Carson has dismissed the Ferguson unrest as the work of a few “cruel-hearted outsiders”, accused Black Lives Matter of “creating strife” and insisted that Brown’s death had nothing to do with race.
In a press conference held soon after his tour of the town, Carson said that he would be happy to meet the leaders of Black Lives Matter. But he said he had a “beef” with the movement.
“They need to add a word,” he said. “All.”
Carson added: “All black lives matter. Including the ones eradicated by abortions, the ones eradicated on the streets every day by violence. We need to look at all these factors that have kept the black community in a very dependent position for decades.”
Despite his beef with Black Lives Matter, Carson’s appearance in such a seminal location in the recent history of US race relations points to a political ambition that is real. He really does want to win back black voters that in successive presidential cycles have been driven away from the Republican party in droves.
It was that ambition that brought Carson to Harlem earlier this month, where he set up shop in a legendary soul food restaurant, Sylvia’s. It’s also why John Sousa, the national chairman of Carson-supporting Super Pac The 2016 Committee, on Friday put out an appeal to potential donors that lauded the candidate as “as an icon in the black community”.
“Ben Carson is well known to most African Americans,” Souza said, “and he is revered and respected for his many accomplishments, as well as his faith, and humility.”
But Souza also warned that the Republican party faced a demographic crisis that saw its black vote languish at just 7% in the presidential election of 2012 – a crisis that would again give “the Democrats an edge in 2016 if the nominee is anyone but Ben Carson”.
Souza was right about the demographic crisis. In the past two presidential elections, Barack Obama virtually wiped out GOP support among African Americans – he took 95% of the black vote in 2008 and 93% four years later.
The last time the Democrats drew less than 90% of such support was in 2004, when John Kerry took 88% to George Bush’s 11%.
Carson supporters believe such an apocalyptic electoral landscape obscures the fact that there is a longstanding tradition of black conservatism that is open to the right GOP candidate. They point to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll from last year that found 37% of African American voters describing themselves as conservative, four points more than those who identified as liberal.
Carson fans also see potential in Obama’s imminent departure from office. Hillary Clinton, the establishment favourite to replace him, used to be able to rely upon the affection felt by large numbers of black Americans toward her husband. But to some degree Bill Clinton damaged that goodwill with his cantankerous behaviour towards Obama in 2008, on the campaign trail in South Carolina.
The former president made remarks that were widely interpreted as playing the race card, comparing Obama’s success in the state with that of Jesse Jackson in his 1988 presidential run, and also decrying Obama’s stance on the Iraq war as a “fairytale”.
John Weaver, chief political strategist to one of Carson’s rivals for the Republican nomination, Governor John Kasich of Ohio, told the Guardian he believed there was potential for the party to win back black support. He pointed out that Kasich won 26% of the African American vote in his 2014 re-election campaign.
“So Republicans can do it,” Weaver said. But he added: “It takes effort and an agenda that all Americans see as inclusive, in which no one is left behind.”
Weaver said that in past presidential cycles the party had failed to take the issue of minority voters seriously enough – and had been punished at the polls as a result.
“The math just doesn’t work for us,” he said, “unless we have a candidate and an agenda that’s more inclusive, both in tone and in policy.”
The scale of the mountain to climb is underlined by analysis from the Pew Research Center. It shows that while 37% of black voters may self-identify as conservative, only 11% see themselves as specifically Republican. With that figure falling to 7% in the 2012 presidential election, the vast gulf between possible support and electoral reality is laid bare.
“It’s going to be very difficult for Republican candidates to win back an appreciable number of African Americans,” said Professor Randall Kennedy, a race relations expert at Harvard Law School.
“The issue of racial conflict and unfairness has been a salient aspect of American life this past year, yet was it discussed in the GOP debate? Barely for a minute.”
Kennedy said there was a strong strand of conservative thinking that ran historically through church-going African American communities. That in itself should be fodder for Carson and his brand of do-it-yourself individualism that emphasises self-help over government handout.
As Carson puts it in his book, Gifted Hands: “As I think of black youth, I also want to say I believe that many of our pressing racial problems will be taken care of when we who are among the minorities will stand on our own feet and refuse to look to anybody else to save us from our situations.”
Randall Kennedy said the conservative tradition among African American communities should be amenable to a Republican appeal. But there was no sign of that working.
“The great mass of black voters has been deeply turned off by the way the Republicans have been at best indifferent toward them,” he said, “and at worst have displayed a camouflaged hostility that panders to the party base.”
Ross Baker, professor of political science at Rutgers University, bore a similarly bleak message for Carson. In his view, Obama was so revered in African American families that he had sealed the ties between the Democratic party and black voters for generations to come.
“Ben Carson’s on a fool’s mission,” Baker said. “If he thought he was going constituency shopping in Ferguson today, he was in the wrong neighbourhood.”
