Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell went viral for the second time this week for a 2015 clip in which he boasts that he’s “proud” Republicans do “really good with White people.”
Earlier this week, McConnell faced backlash when he commented at a press conference that “African-American voters are voting at just as high percentage as Americans.”
And on Friday, a McConnell clip from 2015 resurfaced, causing backlash along similar lines. The “Patriot Takes” Twitter account posted a 39-second clip of McConnell with the caption “Unearthed: Mitch McConnell, at a 2015 event: ‘My party does really good with white people and I’m proud of that.’”
The clip has racked up over half-a-million views already.
The clip is from a 2015 Aspen Institute forum and was part of a longer chunk in which he describes the need for Republicans to reach out to Hispanic voters. Whether the context helps him or hurts him is for the viewer to judge, but here it is:
I think it’s important for us in order to be competitive in the big election, the presidential election. I mean, we’re pretty competitive in Congress. We control both houses.But to win the big office, we need to do better with Hispanic Americans. This is not anything you don’t already know, but America is certainly changing. I believe it’s the case that when Ronald
Reagan was elected, 84 percent of American voters were white. I think I read the other day that in 2016, 70 percent probably will be white.My party does really good with white people, and I’m proud of that. But we need to do better with other parts of our electorate.And I think the part of the American electorate that is the most open to us is Hispanic-Americans. And they happen also to be situated in a number of these states in significant numbers Colorado, Nevada, Florida, Florida and a growing number of Hispanic Americans in other states, just not as big a number as in several of these key states. So I’d like to see us nominate somebody who, you know, can appeal to that segment of the American electorate.
During that same event, McConnell closed the loop on what he left unsaid above, which was the writing off of Black voters. A few minutes later, in response to a question about the GOP’s “brand” with Black voters, McConnell was almost comical in his musings.
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
And of course, the broader context to all of this is McConnell’s obstruction of President Joe Biden’s push to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
Watch above via The Aspen Institute.