Nate Cohn’s piece in the New Republic, which relies on results from a Pew survey out this week, offers some blunt conclusions on the challenges of Republican rebranding: relatively few rank and file Republicans actually want the party to shift toward more moderate ideological positions, and those who do are generally matched by GOP voters who would just as soon shift to the right, and substantially outpaced by the numbers who prefer the status quo.

To be sure, there are methodological challenges that Cohn acknowledges but deserve more analysis: for example, a survey that assumes that voters are correctly identifying, or that they even mean the same thing, when they describe their party’s “current position”, is begging for a set of false positives. But anyone who spends time at Republican activist events can attest that the gist of the data feels about right. To the extent there is enthusiasm for redefining the party, it is more oriented around hopes for “better messaging” or a “more positive way of framing our arguments” than a wholesale desire to revisit actual substantive policies.

That’s a challenge, for a variety of reasons that I will keep addressing in these pages, but I’ll pull out one aspect of it for an extra word of elaboration: the goal of broadening the party without changing it very much explains a lot about one particular African American outreach effort that is becoming faddish on the right: capitalizing on prospective tensions inside the Democratic base between blacks v. Latinos by emphasizing the potential costs that legalizing undocumented immigrants might have on black low wage workers.

I happen to be a skeptic of the Senate immigration legislation, who would prefer Republicans counter it with an amalgamation of approaches that cross conventional lines: support of something like the DREAM Act that prioritizes immigrants who migrated as children or teenagers, combined with a more rigorous employment verification regime and tougher border enforcement, and strengthening the penalties for illegal immigration to match, say, Canada’s felony status for undocumented workers and genuinely stiff sanctions for smuggling.

But that skepticism does not translate into an intuition that black unemployment or limited access to jobs dominated by illegal immigrants is a major economic consequence of reform. The evidence of any trends to that effect seems highly selective. Most of the case rests on an overreliance on data showing that illegal immigration diminishes low level wages even further, without accounting for the obvious: the alternative to reform is not some national dragnet that would deport most of the illegal immigrant population, and open up previously immigrant dominated jobs, but a muddling through with the status quo in which the undocumented population ratches up each year and may hit 14.5 million by 2018. Nor do the arguments that blacks are adversely affected by a pathway to citizenship grapple with another just as apparent fact: the long waiting period for actual citizenship will still mean that the current undocumented pool remains for most of the next decade what it is today: a collection of workers who have become accustomed to abysmal wages and can’t sue or comfortably complain to federal safety regulators. In other words, a more attractive labor source to certain elements of the low skill retail, construction and agri-business sectors than blacks with legal status could conceivably be.

And the heavy flaws in the effort to lure blacks with immigrant bashing don’t compare with another underlying political reality: if a politician’s sympathy for low income blacks surfaces only in the context of thwarting immigration legislation, but has no antecedents in other contemporary policy fights, like extending unemployment benefits, or preserving the recently expired FICA tax cuts, that candidate is unlikely to plausibly position himself as a champion of low wage black aspirations.

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Artur Davis: Another Poor GOP Strategy For Pursuing Black Votes

Thomas Edsall’s column on the South’s racially polarized politics is so many clichés—the notion that thinly disguised bigots are astride the region’s Republican Party, that they have meanly pushed black state legislators to the margins, that they are presiding over some modern reign of terror on the black and poor, and that the Supreme Court has just made it fundamentally worse by setting aside a major provision of the Voting Rights Act.

But he is not wrong about a premise that lurks throughout his argument: more than any place in America today, the South is a zone where ideology and party do correlate almost entirely with racial identity. Measured against the backdrop of a national electorate where Barack Obama actually exceeded four of the last five Democratic presidential performances with whites, the South’s “white equals Republican” reality is jarring. To a disconcerting degree, routine ideological debate over spending priorities, education, and voting requirements turn into a perpetual argument over whether the intent of every policy is to disadvantage minorities. It’s a stultifying kind of environment.

At the risk of repetition, I’ll mention one more time that liberal critics like Edsall miss the perverse contributions that racially gerrymandered districts have made to the marginalization of black political interests: by guaranteeing that black voters are cordoned off into their own singular political communities and have only a marginal presence elsewhere, courts have ensured that those interests will never really be elevated outside black voting precincts. And the meme that it is malicious Republicans who have driven those gerrymandering trends ignores altogether the extent to which African-American Democrats and federal courts have sanctioned, actually demanded, those district lines.

It’s also worth reiterating another observation I have made in these pages. The Democrats whose fortunes have declined so precipitously in the region since 2008 are still only recently out of power in the Deep South, at least at the legislative level, and have a mixed to poor record of alleviating a range of sins Edsall and most liberals complain about, from tax systems that over-burden the working class, to bargain basement Medicaid programs, to thin levels of social services, to weak environmental protections.

To be sure, southern Republicans can go depressingly tone deaf in their choice of priorities, from North Carolina’s rollback of criminal procedure protections in a state where weak employment is surely something more voters are fixated on, to Alabama’s meat-ax approach to illegal immigration, to the lack of GOP support in most of these states for the kind comprehensive education reform that might boost the region’s abysmal rankings in data that measure the quality of life for children. And yes, the South certainly lacks its share of imaginative, Mitch Daniel type Republicans who see entrenched poverty as the kind of dilemma conservative ought to be engaged in addressing.

But to the extent that minority southerners are, in Edsall’s terms, “hindered from shaping the policies that determine social and economic mobility and the overall quality of life”, the reasons are more complex than the cause effect that Edsall suggests. The solutions have as much to do with ending a bipartisan accommodation to special interests that are averse to cutting edged innovations as they do with taking Republicans to task. Of course, had Democrats not squandered capital on expanding casinos, and soft-pedaling clear-cut evidence of corruption within their own ranks, they might well have found a high ground that stanched their bleeding with at least suburban, educated whites who might be receptive to a progressive platform. And if the all too recent Democratic rule over southern legislatures had really produced the “New South” that Edsall and others are claiming is under siege, he might have a moral point rather than a partisan political one.