Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney is not winning when it comes to wooing black voters, according to a new NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll, which shows President Barack Obama beating him by 94 percent to -- wait for it -- 0 percent, according to the Huffington Post [5].
The president also trounces Romney among Latino voters, about 2 to 1. Overall, President Obama has a lead among all registered voters, 48 percent to Romney's 44 percent.
The numbers aren't a complete surprise -- the Republican party has fared poorly with black voters for decades. But there was a moment in the mid-aughts when the GOP was starting to see hints of progress. Both Bob Dole and George W. Bush actively courted conservative black voters [6] and even managed to eek into double digits. (Not a small accomplishment, considering Democrats regularly won 90-plus percent of black voters in national contests for decades.) In 2005, Ken Mehlman, who was then running the Republican National Committee, even apologized to black leaders [7]for the party's use of racially divisive tactics, in a gesture that suggested that Republicans were making a serious play to slice off bits of the black electorate.
But Barack Obama's campaign in the 2008 upended even those meager gains. Obama won 96 percent of the black vote [8] in an election that also saw unprecedented African American turnout.
Mitt Romney addressed the NAACP in July to make his pitch to African Americans. "With 90 percent of African Americans voting for Democrats, some of you may wonder why a Republican would bother to campaign in the African-American community, and to address the NAACP," Romney said to the audience. "Of course, one reason is that I hope to represent all Americans, of every race, creed or sexual orientation, from the poorest to the richest and everyone in between."
Read more at the Huffington Post [5].
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