I just read that Nic Lott lost the August 7 GOP primary by around 5%:
“Unfortunately, the other Lott also lost—Nic Lott, head of Mississippi Young Republicans and the first black student president of Ole Miss, came up 5% shy of beating Pete Rutland for the Republican nomination in the District 34 state senate seat. This despite the fact that Lott received the NRA endorsement, and despite the fact that Rutland had (according to what I’ve heard) spent next to nothing on campaigning. I would not attribute the outcome to racism right away without some indication that it was a core factor—Rutland was well established and well liked in the community, and Nic Lott was extremely new to the game—but some folks are going to interpret it that way and I won’t argue with that interpretation. The Mississippi Republican Party needs to integrate if it is to prevent the emerging white Republican/black Democrat divide, a division that would not only spell disaster for the Republican Party as black voter turnout increases, but that would also be disastrous for the state as both parties need to be accountable to the entire community. Politics should not be reduced to racial identity, and integration should be a goal of both parties in 2007. With James Meredith and Charles Evers in the party, not to mention strong local politicians like Yvonne Brown, Mississippi Republicans have an opportunity to expand their base. I hope they take advantage of it. District 34 voters had the opportunity to score a real coup and give us a next-generation statewide Republican candidate in Nic Lott, and they blew it. But don’t worry; he’ll be back.”
http://headreactivated.blogspot.com/2007/08/my-thoughts-on-primaries.html
I hope the author is right and Nic Lott indeed will be back. Nic Lott had received not only the NRA endorsement but also the Mississippi Right to Life endorsement, and we need to elect black conservatives to office throughout the South if we’re going to increase the GOP’s percentage of the black vote to 30% or so and thus make the GOP the majority party permanently.
That’s unfortunate to hear. I don’t want to scream racism, although that has to play a factor, however small. The racial polarization in MS is quite extreme, and many Whites in GOP districts tend to think almost any Black pol running is going to be a race-baiting Black Bilbo Bennie Thompson type (only Mike Espy broke through, but when he got into trouble, he fell back into playing the race card bit, despite enormous White support).
It’s truly a shame, as MS has a rich history of Black Republicanism. The first state to send a Black Senator, first to elect one to serve a full 6-year term. As the author stated, current GOPers include James Meredith and former Fayette Mayor Charles Evers (whom is quite elderly now, and is one of the few who remembers the vicious and crooked racist New Dealer liberal Theodore Bilbo — and he and his kid brother Medgar were on the receiving end of one of Bilbo’s diatribes while out on the stump, when he thundered and gestured at the two kids, “One day, those two ni**er children will be running this state ! Do YOU want that ?!”). When Bilbo was born, Blanche Kelso Bruce was his Senior Senator.
Black Democrats in MS is a very recent occurance, and it was a very brutal and very ugly forced integration into a party that didn’t want them. If you take a look, that even up until the ‘80s, Black Democrats were forced to run separate candidates for office (Charles Evers was once one of those candidates, because he didn’t feel comfortable with the White Dem party, although he also didn’t feel particularly comfortable with the National Dems, either, because he wasn’t a rabid left-winger — he ran for Governor as long ago as 1971 and deprived Maurice Dantin in 1978 from winning the Senate race against Thad Cochran, who became the first MS GOP Senator since, yup, Blanche K. Bruce), and the result was the elections of many Republicans.
One would hope that we could make some inroads with running candidates in the Black community, as opposed to just winning in White districts, as with Mr. Lott. Once the GOP solidifies its majority in the legislature, it will certainly behoove Blacks in these districts to ask themselves whether keeping all their eggs in one minority party basket is wise. As it stands, a lot of White Republicans could then say, “We don’t have to even give you crumbs, since you won’t vote for us.” The very ugly downside to racially polarized parties.
***As an addendum, if Cochran decides to retire next year, I think it would be a classy act for him to resign early by maybe a few months and allow Gov. Barbour to appoint Mayor Evers to fill the vacancy out of respect.