Have you ever seen birds flying in what looked like a disorganized flying mob, and then the birds all simultaneously and perfectly changed direction in formation. It seemed as if the birds were all controlled by the same mind. It seems to me that much of the conversation regarding the political right making gains among African Americans seems to based on the assumption that the African American voters are all part of a hive mind rather than individuals within a community.

This assumption mars the Elbert Guillory ads. Take the part where he says “you scrounge together food stamps to buy Kool-Aid.” Or take the part where he talks about liberals being “our new overseers” on a “plantation”.

It is too bad because those ads have the occasionally powerful moment like the part where he says:

But who among us have they [the Democrats] saved?

It is a good question, but treating the intended audience as a collection of racial stereotypes gets in the way, and so does the absurdly overheated rhetoric. The bad elements in the ads seem designed to win over no persuadable African Americans in particular.

There is a spectrum of opinion among those who identify as African American. From public opinion polls, about 30 percent of African Americans have moderately conservative opinions on economic and social policy. Between five percent and ten percent of African Americans vote Republican in federal elections.

These kinds of discontinuities between ideology and partisan voting behavior are not new in American politics. In the past, you saw similar voting patterns with urban working-class whites and white Southerners. Republicans did not win every urban working-class white. Some of those urban working-class whites were liberal in their policy preferences. But Republicans did manage to convince many right-leaning working-class whites that that the GOP was not their natural enemy.

This was not an easy process. For one thing, many of these right-leaning white voters were not conservatives in the same way that the right-wing of the Republican party was conservative. You could not appeal to them by attacking the New Deal as the beginning of the end of American freedom. Conservatives had to craft a version of the right that could appeal to partisans of Silent Cal while not insulting voters who thought highly of FDR (which didn’t mean that they were all about wage and price controls). Finding that policy and rhetorical common ground was a halting and frustrating process – as you can learn from reading National Review writers like James Burnham and William Rusher in the 1970s.

In the medium-term, aligning African American voting patterns with the expressed policy preferences of African Americans should be the goal. One can hope to make converts to conservative policy preferences, but let’s learn to walk before we run.

There are several things to keep in mind. The first is that many of those African Americans who express conservative policy preferences are probably moderately conservative as to both economic and social policy. Picture a white tea partier, an establishment Republican and a moderately conservative African American. They are probably going to have three different ideas of what a relatively smaller government is going to look like – as well as different priorities. You can probably craft a politics where those three people have more in common with each other than with the median Democratic member of the House of Representatives, but it will take more than rewording a Chamber of Commerce wish list or repeating rhetorical tropes about freedom and the Constitution. It should also go without saying that these three people might have different ideas about the progress of freedom in American history – once again, not a new problem for the center-right.

It isn’t impossible. Republican governors have gotten 20 percent or more of the African American vote in their reelection campaigns. That included a conservative reformist like Mitch Daniels (who got 20 percent of the African American vote while running in a toxic environment for Republicans). But it isn’t going to just happen.