His rally is a stick in the eye not only of people concerned about coronavirus, but also to Oklahoma’s Black community.

Gillespie: When Barry Goldwater came out in opposition to the Civil Rights Act, that was the signal to the Democratic segregationists that the Republican Party might actually be more of a home for them…

You have the vast majority of White voters, over a 50-year period, changing their party identification and voting behavior to the Republican Party, it turned African-Americans, the largest minority in the South, into a permanent minority position.

And so as a state becomes majority-minority, if the vast majority of those people of color are voting Democratic, then Democrats are betting on it being a matter of time before you start to see the states becoming very competitive electorally both for statewide races and then also in presidential races.

As long as the Democrats maintain a perceptual advantage on issues related to race — whether we’re talking about policing, whether we’re talking about income inequality, whether we’re talking about immigration, whether we’re talking about health care — these are things that would give people of color a very rational reason to continue to support the Democratic Party even if they disagree with the Democratic Party on some issues or complain about outreach and other kinds of things.

We can see how some of those attitudes undergirded Jesse Jackson’s campaigns for president in the 1980s, and we have certainly seen in in this particular moment Black Lives Matter activists pushing to make sure that African American issues of concern at the top of the Democratic agenda and not just an afterthought.

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