Georgia governor courts black voters, testing larger GOP strategy

Nathan Deal, the 72-year-old Republican governor of Georgia, is fighting for his political life against former President Jimmy Carter’s grandson, two-term state Sen. Jason Carter. And in the process, he’s providing a cautionary tale to national Republicans about how hard it is to win over the black and other nonwhite voters they increasingly need to survive.

Deal has reached out to the state’s growing share of African-American voters — about 30 percent of the electorate and growing — by touting his ambitious overhaul of Georgia’s criminal justice system, which has slashed spending on prisons, given young, nonviolent offenders a chance to avoid permanent criminal records and reduced the number of black men incarcerated in the state by 20 percent in five years. Deal knows how high the stakes are for Georgia Republicans, as fast-moving demographic changes appear to be pushing the long-red state purple.

“Well, considering the fact that a majority of the inmates in the prison system are African-American, we think it would have some resonance with them,” the governor told the Atlanta Journal Constitution in September.

Some of the outreach efforts have paid off: Deal has won the endorsements of several black pastors in the state, and In September he appeared with the rapper Ludacris, an Obama supporter, to promote the first charter school created in the state. On the stump, the governor touts his record of reducing the incarceration of black men.

“This is huge stuff,” Leo Smith, the state Republican Party’s director of minority engagement, told Yahoo News. “The black community is excited about this."

The governor sees his mission of appealing to black voters as bigger than just his own election. Deal’s spokesman, Brian Robinson, told a local radio reporter that Deal is trying to “plant the flag for Republicans” in the black community. “This is an existential problem with Republicans. We’ve got to appeal to minorities.”

National Republicans, including likely 2016 presidential hopefuls Sen. Rand Paul and Gov. Chris Christie, have also preached about the urgent need for the GOP to attract more nonwhite voters if it wants to survive.  And they too are highlighting reform of the criminal justice system as one way to do so. Prison reform embraces the conservative value of fiscal responsibility while disproportionately benefitting black men, who have historically been more likely to be locked away — and for longer periods — for nonviolent drug crimes than white men. Acknowledging that unfairness and actually doing something about it could be a powerful way to reach out to a community that’s been wary of the GOP for decades.

"If Republicans have a clue and do this and go out and ask every African-American for their vote, I think we can transform an election in one cycle," Paul told Politico in October. He is sponsoring six different criminal justice reform bills, including one that would return the vote to nonviolent felons.

But the strategy so far doesn’t appear to be working so well in Georgia. According to an October poll by the Atlantic Journal Constitution, just 6 percent of black voters back Deal over the 39-year-old Carter.

Carter’s campaign has made the case that Deal is racially insensitive, running attack ads on African-American radio stations pointing to comments Deal made in 2010. 'We all heard complaints of the ghetto grandmothers giving out birth certificates and all of that,” Deal says in the ad, referencing the debate about laws that require voters show photo ID. State Democrats, meanwhile, sent out a flier to mostly black households with dramatic images from the protests in Ferguson, Mo., telling Georgians they should vote to prevent “another Ferguson” in their state.

Smith said the “horrible” Ferguson flier was nothing but “fearmongering.” “When you don’t have the substance, you go for the low blow,” he said.

But the truth is most black voters have long distrusted the Republican Party, and rehabilitating its image with them is a long-term proposition, as Deal’s race shows.

“It’s probably going to take years to win over black voters who have been skeptical of the Republican Party for 50 years at this point,” said Andra Gillespie, a political science professor at Emory University. “Interest in criminal justice issues would have to be sustained over a long period of time before Republicans would see the fruit of additional voters coming to the Republican Party.”

The governor’s sweeping criminal justice reforms passed over several years with bipartisan support. They included barring state agencies from asking about the criminal history of job applicants until the interview process, creating re-entry programs to help former inmates get jobs and stay out of prison, and creating prison alternatives for nonviolent drug and property offenders. The reforms saved the state $20 million in one year on county jails and reduced the prison population.

Georgia's House minority leader, Rep. Stacey Abrams, worked collaboratively with Deal on criminal sentencing reform, as well as on his efforts to save the state's HOPE Scholarship from bankruptcy. ("When Gov. Deal has done the right thing, I’ve stood with him," Abrams said in an interview.) But she says criminal justice reform alone is not enough to change the GOP’s spotty record on appealing to the African-American community.

"There has to be more than occasions of engagement," she said. If Republicans think passing a criminal justice bill alone will win over black voters in one fell swoop, she said, they are sorely mistaken.

"Your argument can’t be, ‘I let some of your folks out of jail, so you should vote for me,'" she said, laughing. "Well, you were kind of the reason they were there in the first place, so you only get so much credit for it. So I think there has to be a broader narrative."

Smith, the GOP’s minority outreach director, said he hopes Deal can win over at least 15 percent of black voters. He said that if Deal fails to attract those votes despite his criminal justice and other work, “it would send a message that black Americans have been emotionally manipulated by Democrats.”

“This would lead to even more apathy,” he said.

Either way, if Smith and his fellow Georgia Republicans are going to make inroads into the black electorate, they’ve got their work cut out for them.

--Yahoo News’ Jon Ward contributed to this report.