Earlier this week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) got caught in a controversy of his own making while discussing the issue of voting rights, telling reporters:
“The concern is misplaced because if you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.”
As the AP reported, that set off a wave of criticism for obvious reasons:
The comment implied that Black voters are somehow not American and underscored the concerns of voting rights advocates that Republicans in state legislatures across the country are explicitly seeking to disenfranchise Black voters. The timing was also notable, coming the same day that McConnell engineered a filibuster to block voting legislation that Democrats and civil rights leaders say is vital to protecting democracy.
Mitch tried to walk back his remarks as the full fury of the online shitstorm hit him:
McConnell addressed the controversy at a news conference in Kentucky, calling the criticism an “outrageous mischaracterization of my record as a result of leaving one word out inadvertently the other day, which I just now have supplied to you, is deeply offensive.”
Now, however, Patriot Takes has unearthed a video of McConnell circa 2015 in which he proudly brags that Republicans do well with white voters:
“My party does really good with white people and I’m proud of that.”
During the same 2015 Aspen Institute forum where McConnell expressed pride in being popular with white Americans, he mused on why blacks don’t want to join the GOP, according to Mediaite:
He accused Black voters of being “locked down against Republicans,” and the only hope he expressed for making inroads was the existence of some Black Republicans.
But perhaps most strange was McConnell’s assertion that “it certainly hasn’t been helped by having the first African-American president be a Democrat. I mean, that didn’t do us much good on that front” — as if Barack Obama just fell to Earth and into the Oval Office in a stroke of misfortune for the GOP.
Republicans love to say they’re not bigoted, racist, or opposed to civil rights for minorities in the United States. But that’s just another lie they tell along with all the others.