Matthew Albright, and Christina Jedra

The News Journal

The Delaware GOP is pushing to become more inclusive, changing long-held perceptions.

The party's rising stars are competing hard for the votes in demographics long considered a lock for Democrats.

With Donald Trump as the national party's standard-bearer, the GOP faces a daunting uphill battle.

The stereotypical Republican politician is old, white and male.

Delaware GOP leaders acknowledge that perception, but say it is untrue — and this year they hope to prove it.

"What we're telling people is that the principles that drive the Republican party are inclusive, and we've had candidates up and down our ticket who reflect that," said Charlie Copeland, a former state Senate Minority leader who now runs the Delaware GOP.

Copeland said voters in November will find a ballot with a number of young candidates, women and people of color, a reflection of a concerted effort within the state party to broaden its appeal and ditch its stereotypical image.

To regain a competitive position, the party's rising stars say they are competing hard for the votes in demographics long considered a lock for Democrats — young people, Hispanics, gays and lesbians, and African-Americans.

In a deeply blue state, and with Donald Trump as the national party's standard-bearer, the GOP faces a daunting uphill battle. But Republican candidates say it is in the interest of communities that have traditionally ignored Republicans to start considering them.

"Democrats don't have to work for the black vote, so they invest very little time or energy into including the community," said La Mar Gunn, Kent County NAACP president who is running for lieutenant governor as a Republican. "If you have both major parties vying for your vote and hearing your interests, that's the way that things are going to improve."

Party officials point to several younger candidates in the "millennial" generation like James Spadola, Meredith Chapman and Anthony Delcollo, all of whom are challenging incumbent state senators who have held office for decades.

There is a practical political reason for this emphasis on inclusion — as long as Republicans continue to lose big to Democrats among black, Hispanic, women and young voters, they will continue to be largely irrelevant in statewide politics. Republicans have only 188,491 registered voters, compared to Democrats' 318,991.

Republicans across the country need a new strategy, said Kassra Oskooii, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Delaware. In the mid-20th century, Oskooii said, Republicans began to use racial tensions as a strategy to attract and energize white voters, and it worked – when the country was 85 percent white.

But demographics are changing. The percentage of white Americans fell to 63 percent in 2011, and will further decrease to 47 percent by 2050, according to the Pew Research Center. About 22 percent of Delawareans are black and about 9 percent are Hispanic; percentages that have steadily grown over the past decade.

“This is not a sustainable future,” Oskooii said. “The minorities are becoming an increasingly important part of the electorate as they increase in size.”

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Both nationally and locally, observers say Republicans made it harder for themselves to expand their tent when they nominated Trump, who has received withering criticism for his comments on race and immigration and who polls worse among minority voters than previous GOP nominees.

Many Democrats say Republicans have more than a public relations problem and will not be able to make inroads as long as some of their members publicly oppose policies like immigration reform, minimum wage increases and scaling back harsh criminal penalties that disproportionately affect African-Americans.

Democrats also pride themselves on having the first black president, Barack Obama, and first female presidential nominee in Hillary Clinton.

"I'm proud to be a Democrat because we've always been the party that fights for the underdog," said state Sen. Margaret Rose Henry, D-Wilmington East. "If Republicans say they want to be a party that welcomes diversity, well, that's great, but I have to ask, 'Where have you been all this time?"

Seeking to sway black voters

While it's wrong to assume that any racial or ethnic group votes completely in lockstep, black voters have overwhelmingly favored Democrats in recent years.

Wilmington, where 58 percent of voters were black as of the 2010 Census, has been an ironclad electoral stronghold for Democrats.

Gunn hopes to change that.

He's campaigning hard in the city, arguing Democrats have dominated in mostly black neighborhoods because GOP candidates usually are not visible there.

"If you've always voted Democrat and you've never met the Republican, then who are you going to vote for?" Gunn said. "What I've been telling the party is, we have to be out there. We have to be making noise."

Gunn, who faces state Sen. Bethany Hall-Long in the general election, said he is telling black voters to look at problems that are disproportionately hurting black communities and see if decades of Democratic dominance have fixed them.

Standardized tests show black students still lag behind white peers in school; black residents are far more likely to be the victims of gun violence; unemployment is higher and wages are lower for black families; and six in 10 inmates in state prisons are black.

Gunn also points out that African-Americans have held almost no statewide offices while Democrats have held control. The exception is Chip Flowers, who won the party's nomination for treasurer in 2010 and served for four years, but bowed out of a controversial re-election campaign and left the state.

Delaware has never elected an African-American to Congress, though Democrat Lisa Blunt Rochester would change that if she wins in November.

"The African-American community wants for so much more and has been sold empty promise after empty promise," Gunn said. "I believe people are ready to send a message."

Robert Martin, the Republican candidate for mayor in Wilmington, said the GOP struggles to attract the black vote because of “propaganda” from the Democratic party. The last Republican mayor was Harry Haskell in the early 1970s.

“People think if you’re black and Republican something has to be wrong with you,” he said.

He said the black community sometimes associates Republicans with “white wealthy males trying to take away your grandmother’s Social Security check.”

“They see the Democratic Party as Santa Claus, and here comes a Republican and we say, ‘We’re going to take something away,’” he said. “(Republicans are) not the Grinch that stole Christmas. It takes a fiscally conservative person to say we’ll have to pay pensions and other things down the road.”

Martin, who is black, said African-Americans who express conservatism are sometimes “demagogued by our own people,” which maintains the status quo. He maintains the black community and Republicans have similar values.

“If you ask the average mature black person, do you think a man and man should be getting married, overwhelmingly they’ll say we’re for traditional values,” said Martin, who works in real estate. “A lot of black people do not want handouts. …They want the support to give them a hand up. If you talk to most black people they’ll tell you, ‘I just need that opportunity but if I don’t get it, I’m going to need some help.’ ”

Henry says she respects her Republican colleagues in the Senate but has been disappointed to see them oppose bills she says would help reduce disparities for minority residents in Delaware.

"If they really want to do something on this, they can start to vote for things to make everyone's life better," she said.

Henry points to Republican opposition to bills that would raise the minimum wage; several bills that would scale back harsh "three-strikes" criminal sentencing laws, which aimed to reduce the racial disparities in prison; and the Wilmington Education Improvement Commission's plan to overhaul city schools.

"Time after time, when they have a chance to stand up and be counted, they haven't," Henry said.

Gunn argues that Republicans don't think it is wise to rely on government-funded assistance to fight poverty and other problems. Instead, they think government needs to get out of the way of businesses creating jobs.

The Rev. Martin Luther "King and Frederick Douglass didn't talk about a minimum wage," Gunn said. "They wanted a maximum wage."

It's clear Gunn has some convincing to do.

Jeremy Collins, a Wilmington civil rights attorney, said the GOP has a track record of policies that “marginalize and oppress communities of color.”

“They take the (National Rifle Association) line and this perverted view of the Second Amendment and tout that policy over what we know we need to maintain safer communities,” he said.

Collins said many black people don’t feel Republicans are on their side when it comes to police departments using force against unarmed citizens.

“They overwhelmingly amplify voices of people who support and almost applaud these violent law enforcement officers over the nonviolence voices of protesters,” he said.

Collins said the GOP will continue to struggle with minority recruitment until they overhaul their ideology.

“All the things they are about are counter to the interests of communities of color,” he said. “The only thing they could do to change that is to change the reality. They’d have to put people before politics.”

The Rev. Donald Morton, executive director of Complexities of Color Coalition, a Wilmington advocacy group, said many African-Americans will continue to "stay away from that which has burned us in times past."

"I could almost ignore the racist comments if they didn’t somehow morph into racist policies," he said. "Part of the problem with the GOP is it's trying to have a face that its heart doesn’t match."

A push for Latinos

Hans Reigle, the Republican challenging Rochester for Congress, held a leadership briefing with about a dozen Hispanic leaders on Monday. Reigle said he hopes to bring more diversity to the party with such events.

“We are the party of inclusion,” he said.

Jose Echeverri, a financial advisor and board member at Delaware State University, attended the event. He said it’s a “myth” that the interests of Hispanics are at odds with the GOP; that the values of the Latino community — including faith and self-sufficiency — align with that of the party.

“We are a working people,” said Echeverri, who runs an All-State Insurance agency. “We love to be self-employed. I don’t want to pay taxes more than I should. I don’t want government behind me. These are all traits of Latinos. We love God. We love the church. We love the family. This is who we are.”

Congressman Carlos Curbelo, a Reigle supporter who represents southern Florida, said immigrants like his father are stifled by democratic systems, like laws that limit work hours. Curbelo spoke at Reigle's event in Dover.

“My dad wanted to work 80 hours,” said Curbelo, whose parents are from Cuba. “He made it because of the free enterprise system. A lot of the regulations being put in place today are hurting those people that are going to keep people suppressed. The more we keep people suppressed, the more disenfranchised they feel, and society starts breaking down.”

Nelly Jordan, a former vice chairwoman for the Delaware Republican Party, said she believes Central American immigrants are attracted to the Democratic Party because they think, “They’re doing all this for us." But, she said, democratic programs ultimately limit upward mobility.

“They get sucked into the system that Democrats offer,” said Jordan, a 73-year-old Lewes resident who emigrated from Chile in 1970. “They keep them low.”

George W. Bush won 40 percent of the Latino vote nationally in 2004. But things have gone downhill since then: John McCain won only 31 percent of Latinos and Mitt Romney won only 27 percent.

Curbelo said the GOP hasn’t been working hard enough to engage with minority communities.

“Republicans are guilty of assuming Hispanics won’t vote for them,” he said. “So they don’t show up.”

Maria Cabrera is the first Hispanic woman on Wilmington City Council. She said Republicans have an opportunity to connect with Latinos on what they agree on.

"We want people to be here legally," said Cabrera, a Democrat, who ran unsuccessfully for mayor this fall. "We don't want people to be here from Latin America or other parts of the world that are here undocumented and pose a threat. We have American values. But if they want to reach out to the Hispanic community, they can’t win us over with the rhetoric going on right now."

What role does Trump play?

A similar identity crisis has been playing out on the national stage.

After Obama overwhelmingly won among minority voters in the 2012 election, the national Republican Party crafted a "post-mortem" report that urgently called for the GOP to do more to court those groups.

“Public perception of the Party is at record lows," the report said. "Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the party represents, and many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country. When someone rolls their eyes at us, they are not likely to open their ears to us.”

The report continued: "We need to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian, and gay Americans and demonstrate we care about them, too. We must recruit more candidates who come from minority communities"

Some political observers say the party has done the opposite by nominating Trump — polls suggest he could get an even smaller share of the Latino vote than McCain or Romney, and some polls have his support among African-Americans in the low single digits.

A centerpiece of Trump's campaign has been his hard-line stance on immigration, calling for a wall across the Mexican border and mass deportations. He has also strongly favored "law and order" policies Democrats blame on the over-incarceration of African-Americans.

The way he has described communities where Hispanic and black Americans reside — during Tuesday's debate, he said they were "living in hell" — has drawn condemnation.

When Trump and other Republicans talk like this, it turns off black voters like Kia Ervin, a Wilmington resident who said she leans conservative but can’t get herself to vote Republican.

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The nonprofit professional is from Fort Washington, Maryland, a prosperous majority-black area, and is pursuing her second master’s degree at Harvard University.

Still, when she encountered police after a minor car accident soon after the 2015 death of Sandra Bland, she asked herself: “Am I going to get killed for a routine fender bender?”

“I’m an educated, professional woman but this is what I and my friends feel. It’s like a dual world,” she said.

Ervin said news stories legitimize her fears. She questioned why police took in suspected terrorist Ahmad Khan Rahami alive in New Jersey last month but killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice, a black boy who was shot in 2014 while holding a BB gun in Cleveland, Ohio. She said she wants her representatives to understand that dichotomy, but she doesn’t feel many Republicans do.

“When you minimize that and imply ‘law and order,’ there’s no trust,” she said, referencing a phrase Trump uses frequently on the campaign trail. “Those are the barriers.”

Henry said Trump and other national Republicans make it hard for local Republicans to make an appeal to minorities.

"When you listen to his supporters, there's almost a frenzy. It's so scary, because what Donald Trump proposes is that we discriminate," Henry said. "I suspect that a lot of Republicans in this state, who are good people, don't agree with that. But I don't hear the Republican Party here being eager to denounce him."

Rob Arlett, Delaware state chairman for the Trump campaign, said Democrats' criticisms of Trump are the "same old broken record" of politics that divide Americans along racial lines.

"Donald Trump is all about the platform, and that platform is protection for all Americans and prosperity for Americans," Arlett said. "If you want lower wages and higher unemployment, than don't vote for him."

Many Republicans downplay the significance of Trump, saying local voters can distinguish between a Republican running for their local Senate seat and a national-level politician.

"It's not a battleground state. The presidential race hasn't been a focus of much that we have done as a party, and I don't really think it's what the Democrats have focused on either," Copeland said. "All politics is local."

And Gunn points out that Trump doesn't have anything to do with the issues that affect communities daily.

"When Amy Joyner Francis died, neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton got involved," he said, referencing the Howard High School student who died after a fight in a school bathroom in April. "People are going to vote for the person who is there, the person they know."

Contact Matthew Albright at malbright@delawareonline.com, (302) 324-2428 or on Twitter @TNJ_malbright. Contact Christina Jedra at cjedra@delawareonline.com, (302) 324-2837 or on Twitter @ChristinaJedra.

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Delaware's racial makeup

State GOP officials are seeking to diversify the party in Delaware, where the population is 63 percent white.

White- 63 percent

Black- 22 percent

Hispanic- 9 percent

Asian- 4 percent

Other- 2 percent

Source: 2015 U.S. Census Bureau data