by Joseph Lowndes, University of Oregon and Daniel Martinez HoSang, Yale Divinity School
Former Republican South Carolina Governor and United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley launched her bid for president recently in a video that began by describing the racial division that marked her small hometown of Bamberg, South Carolina.
Meanwhile, another presumptive GOP candidate, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has continued his crusade against “woke ideology,” most recently on a tour of Pennsylvania, New York and Illinois, presenting himself as a defender of law and order.
Taken together, these events present a fundamental question about the future of the Republican Party.
Does it continue to move rightward, exciting its base by stoking white racial grievance?
Or does it pursue a multiracial strategy that can expand the party’s reach?
Recent trends in the GOP suggest that it wants to do both – and that indeed the two strategies are not so much at odds as it might appear.
Right-wing candidates of color on the rise
In a striking development, Michigan Republicans selected in February 2023 a Christian nationalist and election denier as chair of the state party.
This rightward shift of the party is not itself surprising.
What’s striking is that Kristina Karamo, a Black woman, was elected over a white male candidate who also had Trump’s endorsement.
The same voters who elevated Karamo also cheered Trump’s supercharged racist rhetoric against Black people, immigrants, Mexicans, Muslims and nonwhite countries more generally during his campaigns and presidency.
And yet Karamo is hardly an anomaly.
While the party has made no substantive changes or moderation to its politics or policies around long-standing racial justice issues, it is slowly but steadily growing more racially diverse in its grassroots base, elected officials and opinion…
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