Who was the last Republican to win the black vote?

[Rookie Yinzer]

Love this!

A few thoughts:

I read an old article from The Crisis not too long ago in the months leading up to the election, that was airing out grievances with the Republican party. It mentioned that blacks had given 93 percent of their vote to the Republican candidate in the prior election. I can't find the article at this moment: It was from a political science course I took on African-Americans and Civics. I will try and locate it.

I had always hoped to find out just how the Republican ticket fared in 1912. I had erroneously thought that Teddy Roosevelt had goodwill in the black community and would have siphoned a ton of votes from Taft, but I had never realized how often he flip flopped on issues of racial progressivism. He ending school segregation as governor of New York, but then giving up on prosecuting cases of peonage in the South. Hiring black people to advise him, but then handling the Brownsville affair with such callous towards black service men.

I knew that Franklin Roosevelt was able to flip blacks to the Democrat party, but I always thought that was due to the Great Depression and a desperation to try something new after the catastrophic collapse of the economy. I thought blacks actually went back to the GOP post-Roosevelt, and was surprised at Stevenson's margins particularly. I thought black voters were a swing group during the 1952, 56, and 60 elections and was surprised to see Democrats win this demographic so handily. In my mind I imagined President Eisenhower winning a slight majority both times, and then Kennedy flipping it back with a slim margin brought on by his attractiveness as a candidate and the MLK jail phone call.

Kennedy v. Nixon is the only election where you had both candidates campaigning on a record of civil rights and touting enthusiastically as a positive instead of whispering about it to black-only audiences. Though this was the first election to play out with a vast majority of Americans having televisions so appearance was everything. I do wonder how Civil Rights legislation would have panned out if Kennedy had lived or if Nixon had won. I doubt the black vote would have went so drastically to the Democrats otherwise.

I would have loved to see margins of the black vote in a potential Bobby Kennedy v. Richard Nixon race. He was much more popular in the community than his brother and enthusiasm with black voting was extremely high up until Bobby's assassination. MLK's assassination had motivated an entire generation of black voters to organize and participate--- Bobby's death stifled a lot of that enthusiasm.

I think Trump will do historically bad in 2020. As it stands now, Barry Goldwater has performed the worst of any Republican facing a White Democratic candidate. Trump was able to improve on Romney and McCain with Obama off the ballot keeping low propensity black Democrats home and Hillary Clinton being a terrible candidate to appeal to African-American men. Yes, she won them by an insurmountable margin but many also stayed home and quite a few defected to Trump. I firmly believe Joe Biden would get LBJ '64 or Obama '12 margins with black voters.

I wish the black vote was more competitive. Even if it was only 66/33 in the Democrats' favor. It would make elections more exciting and make Democrats and the GOP work harder. Oh well.