Fauntroy, Michael K. Republicans and the Black Vote.

• Author: Bitzer, J. Michael
• Position: Book review

Fauntroy, Michael K. Republicans and the Black Vote. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2007. xi + 180 pages. Cloth, $49.95.

In current American politics, black voters are unique among most voting groups; they offer an undying commitment to the Democratic Party. In 2004, exit polls indicated that only eleven percent of African Americans supported incumbent Republican President George W. Bush. In recent elections, typically eighty to ninety percent of black voters have supported Democratic presidential nominees. This represents a dramatic reversal of political allegiance by black voters; it was Lincoln and the Grand Old Party (GOP) that initially sought, and gained, the electoral loyalty of black voters. In Republicans and the Black Vote, Michael K. Fauntroy, a public policy professor at George Mason University, offers an extensive review of the historical relationship between the GOP and African-American voters. While he presents a solid and grounded overview of the transformation of this voting bloc, Fauntroy's work could have been strengthened by offering more extensive research into the impact of how modern-day Republicans seek black votes, rather than just providing descriptive observations.

Fauntroy sets out to investigate why the modern Republican Party has so alienated black voters, and argues that the disconnect is related to the modern GOP's public-policy stances and the ideological clarification of both political parties in the past forty years. To demonstrate this decline in both electoral and, more importantly, party identification, Fauntroy presents a valuable table in the first chapter, documenting through a variety of sources the shift of black voter allegiance from 1936 to the present. While African Americans were an integral component of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal coalition, a solid third of black voters still identified themselves with the GOP up to 1944. It was not until 1964, a pivotal year in presidential and party alignment, that one notices the single-digit level of black electoral and party identification for Barry Goldwater's states'-rights, conservative Republicanism. The subsequent limping along of black support for the GOP, both in terms of presidential vote and party identification, since Goldwater's restructuring of the Republican Party serves as the foundation for Fauntroy's work.

In his historical overview of the relationship between Republicans and black voters, Fauntroy relies on solid...