Martha T. Moore

USATODAY

It is not easy to win over African-American voters to the Republican Party, says Felice Pete, a Raleigh, N.C., activist who is trying to do just that. Of the 6.6 million registered voters in the state, only about 35,000 are black Republicans. In fact, Pete says, "It's just so hard to recruit a black Republican, I just had me a black baby, and I'm raising him Republican.''

Now Reagan Douglass Pete, age 2 1/2, goes along with his mother as she tries to engage black voters with the GOP cause. A former chair of the Wake County Republican Women's Club, Pete is one of a small cadre deployed in the Republican party's efforts, mapped out after their losses in 2012, to broaden the appeal of the party to demographic groups it had overwhelmingly lost.

The first step may not even be garnering votes but just gathering names. "The main focus on the staff is to go out and introduce themselves to the (black) community, build relationships with the community and identify who are Republican, leaning Republican, conservatives, (or) independents but lean Republican,'' says Kristal Quarker Hartsfield, national director of African-American initiatives for the Republican National Committee.

In the 11 states where the GOP has hired directors for African-American voter engagement, there are specific targets for the number of contacts and voter identifications, not to mention vote goals.

"You start with the engagement, you build the trust, and you ask for their vote,'' says Tara Wall, the RNC's senior adviser for black media. "Eventually you will see the fruits of that.''

In North Carolina, Pete gave a "barbershop talk" in Charlotte this month. That's not a marketing title — it was held at The Cutting Room, a barbershop, and was arranged by Earl Phillips, one of three RNC staff working on black voter engagement in the state.

"I got some good responses. The most liberal of them in the room were able to reason about government influence in their lives,'' Pete says. "Conversation went the gamut, but freedom resonates with people.''

In Michigan, Wayne Bradley, a former talk-radio host, does his work from a Detroit office opened with fanfare last fall by Chairman Reince Priebus and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. Bradley has met with local pastors and attended Bible study groups. He hosted a roundtable with the black Chamber of Commerce. On Saturdays, he goes to Dixon Barbershop to talk up the GOP and its policies.

"I definitely think there will be a difference, and when you're starting from where we're at, you can only go up,'' Bradley says.

The first group of black voters to be won over by the RNC effort were black Republicans who had heard such promises before — like Ken Blackwell, former Ohio secretary of State, now a member of the party's advisory committee on African-American outreach. He has just helped launch Black Conservative Fund, a political action committee created to back African-American Republicans.

"Outreach is an overused, outdated and ineffective measure in terms of terminology use. I'm almost exhausted through my experience with outreach programs,'' Blackwell says. He approached the RNC effort, launched in early 2013, with "healthy skepticism.'' He's not expecting visible results in November's midterm elections but rather "trends that will portend well for the next cycle.''

"I'm only interested in a sustainable effort,'' he says.

When Priebus announced the effort, "People were like, 'Here we go again; is this for real?' " says C.J. Jordan, president of the National Black Republican Leadership Council, But now she believes it because the RNC is putting money into necessary staff to sustain its effort. "Not just staff in the RNC headquarters, not just staff in dealing with black media — because we've had that — but an actual national director, that's in house, in political (operations). That's totally different,'' she says.

Some black conservatives have been more than critical. Former RNC chair Michael Steele, the party's first black chairman, who pledged a "hip-hop Republican'' outreach effort during his tenure, has said the party can't engage black voters while simultaneously favoring voter ID laws that disproportionately affect African Americans. Crystal Wright, who writes the "Conservative Black Chick" blog, says the Republicans were far too slow implementing voter outreach efforts after the 2012 election. "Outreach says that we are other, we are not worthy of being thought of as mainstream Americans,'' Wright says.

Democrats are convinced Republicans will never be able to appeal to black voters no matter how many times they invoke the Party of Lincoln. Voter ID laws, cuts to food stamp programs and opposition to the Affordable Care Act and periodic inflammatory comments by Republican officials all undermine their outreach.

"The GOP's problem with engaging black voters is a combination of two things: their very toxic rhetoric … with the combination of their out-of-touch policies,'' says Kiara Pesante, a spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee. She called the current Republican voter engagement drive "rinse and repeat. They've been doing this for 10 years, and none of it has worked.''

Jason Johnson, a political scientist at Hiram College in Ohio, doesn't doubt the party leadership's commitment to reaching black voters but says they have yet to bring along everyone else. "You still have a lot of state leaders who would rather hold on to pulling off 46-45% of the white vote and suppressing the black vote, than trying to get 15% of the African-American vote,'' he says.

Black Republicans doing the outreach are convinced there is room for growth. School vouchers, support for small business and opposition to gay marriage are issues they see as winners with black voters — if those voters could re-evaluate their allegiance to voting Democratic.

"African Americans are one of the most conservative groups on the planet,'' said the RNC's Hartsfield. "There's a disconnect between how conservative we are and how we vote.''

Last fall, Atlanta's Morehouse College, the academically elite men's college that is historically black, got its first College Republican chapter. It has about a dozen members, "which is a big number, at our college,'' says Mark Smith. This month, College Republicans plan to relaunch a chapter at Central State, a historically black college in Wilberforce, Ohio.

"What I think they're focusing on now, for the most part, is a mixture of probably the folks who are out of college, 25-40 range,'' Smith says. "If you talk to older folks like my grandparents or older folks in the church, they're not getting that engaged by the party.''

"I tell people not to say they're Republicans. Once they don't say they're Republicans, they got a lot of 'Amens,' '' Pete says. Less than a year into the RNC effort, getting black voters to formally change party affiliation may not be within reach. "Is our interest to get them to change their party or just have them vote Republican? My interest is just in having them vote Republican.''