Black GOP Holds High Hopes in Tuesday's Primary, Runoff Elections

Three black candidates are vying for GOP nominations.

ByABC News
June 22, 2010, 10:26 AM

June 22, 2010 -- A congressional runoff in coastal South Carolina on Tuesday could represent a breakthrough for that rarest of political minorities: African-American Republicans.

A win by Tim Scott over Paul Thurmond would put Scott on track to become the first black Republican to serve in the House since 2003. Scott is a potential icon for the GOP at a time when Census figures show the nation's white population is shrinking.

"If you want people to stop thinking you are an angry white male party," says Princella Smith, a black Republican strategist who lost an Arkansas primary for a congressional seat last month, "having an African American win in a Republican primary would debunk that."

Scott is one of three black candidates vying for GOP nominations as voters make their choices today in runoff and primary elections in South Carolina, North Carolina, Mississippi and Utah. The others are House candidates Bill Randall in North Carolina and Bill Marcy in Mississippi.

Scott has the best chance of making it into office this fall, says David Bositis, who tracks the success record of black candidates at the Washington-based Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a think tank. That's because Scott is a Republican running in a district that hasn't sent a Democrat to Congress since 1978. In 2008, voters there favored Republican John McCain over Barack Obama, 56 percent to 42 percent, for the White House.

The winner of the Scott-Thurmond race would face Democrat Ben Frasier in the fall.

Other viable black GOP congressional candidates this year include Allen West, running against Democratic Rep. Ron Klein in Florida; StarParker, opposing Democratic Rep. Laura Richardson in California; and Bill Hardiman, in a crowded GOP primary in western Michigan. Most of the two dozen black GOP candidates still in the running for House seats this year, however, are "sacrificial lambs," says Bositis, because they are vying against veteran incumbents in heavily Democratic districts.

To earn the party's nomination, Scott must defeat the son of longtime senator Strom Thurmond, who died in 2003. The elder Thurmond ran for president in 1948 as a segregationist — a viewpoint he later repented in the post-civil rights era.