Votes they once were able to attract ...
^ Votes we were once able to attract?
The last time Republicans were able to attract black voters, Civil War veterans were still walking on the Earth. Even Reagan and Nixon, when they winning 49 states, struggled to get 10% of the black vote.
Blacks will never vote Republican in our lifetime. These are not votes that could be ours.
A sizable number of Blacks voted Republican for Eisenhower, it was only after that the bottom fell out. The tide started turning with the Great Migration, where the black community was introduced to the newer, Northern wing of the Democrats, which had started to grow in inner-city poor ethnic communities and was about social spending and acceptance of marginalized groups rather than racism. (Basically, the Al Smith wing rather than the James Cox wing, if you will. They were united in opposition to the hegemonic "mainstream" of wealthy industrialists and Yankee farmers, and that was pretty much the main thing keeping them under the same Democratic name.) So inner-city Northern blacks were more receptive to the Democrats' economic message, and started to push for civil rights within a party that was rapidly changing for the better. Obviously, then it took 1964 for the switch to be complete and for blacks to be so solidly Dem.
