Here and there, I’ve read some articles, blog posts, and tweets about the importance of the recent election of African-American Republican candidates to Congress. One example would be Chelsi Henry , who wrote that “these historic wins [of Tim Scott in the Senate and Mia Love and Will Hurd in the House of Representatives] mark a turning point in the Republican Party’s relationship with African Americans.”

I have no reason to doubt that Hurd, Love, and Scott will all be good members of Congress, but I don’t think it is fair to them to imagine that the election of these three African-American Republicans to Congress (or the election of five or ten African-American Republicans to Congress) does much of anything to help the Republican party with African-American voters. Maybe it makes some kind of small difference at the margin. Maybe it makes no difference at all. It isn’t like the elections of J. C. Watts and Gary Franks in the 1990s did much to boost support for the GOP among African Americans nationally.

John Kasich won 26 percent of the African-American vote in his reelection for governor of Ohio. Tim Scott won 10 percent of the African American vote in the course of getting elected to the U.S. Senate. They are both Republicans. Kasich is white and Scott is African American.

That doesn’t mean that Republicans should seek to imitate Kasich’s strategy of expanding Medicaid (though a serious plan to get rid of Obamacare is going to need some kind of provision of expanding coverage for those currently receiving health insurance subsidies). It does mean that when Republicans hit on a strategy that appeals to the fraction of African Americans who have moderately conservative policy preferences but usually vote Democratic, that strategy will work about as well for any competent Republican candidate regardless of that candidate’s skin color. The reverse is also true. Absent a strategy for winning over these moderately conservative African-American voters, the nomination of African American candidates does not help very much.

The measure of Republican progress among African Americans is the proportion of African Americans voting Republican. That is the metric that matters.