'Minority outreach' will be casualty of the RNC’s 'full-on MAGA makeover': report

13 March 2024

During the GOP's pre-MAGA era, many prominent Republicans — including the Bush family and strategist Karl Rove — viewed Latinos, both white and non-white, as crucial to their party's growth. President Ronald Reagan famously said, "Hispanics are conservative. They just don't know it."

Cuban-Americans in Florida have been voting GOP for generations, but as Reagan, the Bushes and Rove saw it, Democrats would be in trouble if enough Mexican-Americans in the Southwest and the Midwest and Puerto Ricans in the Northeast went Republican.

The Republican National Committee (RNC) has had a minority outreach program that Democratic strategists have been keeping a close eye on, as Democrats don't want to lose voters. But according to the Daily Beast's Roger Sollenberger, that program is in danger thanks to the "full-on MAGA makeover" the RNC is getting.

With Ronna Romney McDaniel no longer in charge, the RNC has new leadership that includes Chairman Michael Whatley and Co-Chair Lara Trump (former President Donald Trump's daughter-in-law). Lara Trump, who is married to Eric Trump, has made it clear that her #1 priority for 2024 is helping her father-in-law win the presidential race in November.

In an article published on March 13, Sollenberger explains, "The program at issue is an initiative from the 2022 midterms where RNC field staff engaged voters through gatherings and events held at community centers in areas with heavy minority populations, most specifically Latino communities. In January, The Messenger reported that the RNC had already shuttered most of the nearly two dozen Hispanic Community Centers that served as the base for the program, leaving just five open…. Two people with knowledge of the plans told The Daily Beast that the RNC has decided to scrap that effort."

Sollenberger continues, "Instead, the people said, the community center program now appears to be another casualty of the RNC's recent restructuring — a bloodbath that has already claimed several dozen jobs, including senior leadership posts, along with the apparent decimation of field operations and other strategic realignments that could come at the cost of Republican candidates across the country not fortunate enough to be named Trump. Instead of going after minority voters, the RNC apparently plans to remake itself even more in Trump's image."

An RNC source, interviewed on condition of anonymity, told the Beast that the RNC's new slogan might as well be "Make the RNC white again."

"The RNC previously indicated that the rationalization for temporarily closing the centers was financial, considering the party's cash woes," Sollenberger notes. "But if that’s also the explanation for a permanent shutdown, the savings would be thin."

Read the Daily Beast's full report at this link (subscription required).

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