Bloc by block

CHARLESTON, S.C.—If Randy Green invites you into his North Charleston apartment, he’ll likely march straight down the hall and point to one particular frame on a wall of family photos: It’s a picture of his baptism a few months ago at the inner-city campus of Seacoast Church.

Green’s baptism came after a long series of tough experiences. After working as a carpet installer and struggling to make ends meet, the North Charleston native says he suffered three heart attacks and couldn’t return to heavy manual labor. For a while, he slept in the back of his van.

Eventually, Green found a spot in a low-income apartment complex, and he met members of nearby Seacoast Church through their farmers’ market in the high-poverty area. He liked the ministry, so he volunteered to help.

A few fresh tomatoes and cucumbers later, Green tried the church’s Sunday morning worship services. “I had never been to church with white people before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect,” he said. “But once I started looking at the people themselves, I realized: ‘They’re all about the Lord.’”

Green talked about his multiethnic church on a scorching afternoon in June, as a handful of Seacoast staffers knocked on nearby doors, inviting children to Vacation Bible School and offering plastic sacks of fresh vegetables.

They wiped sweat from their foreheads and talked with an elderly woman who needed help cutting her grass. A few houses away, they visited a widowed mother of two teenage daughters who needed home repairs.

It’s the kind of summertime pavement pounding that helps a church know its neighbors and their needs—both material and spiritual.

The church’s goal isn’t political, but the example is instructive for conservative politicians wondering how to reach out to minority groups that don’t usually vote for them. A helpful first step: Walk down the streets of your district and meet them.

That may sound simplistic, but it’s part of a serious strategy for at least one conservative politician: Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., the first black Republican senator elected in the South since the era of Reconstruction. Scott grew up in a single-parent home here in North Charleston. He’s also a member of Seacoast Church.

As a lawmaker, he’s visited every county in the state, sometimes meeting constituents without mentioning he’s their senator. He’s volunteered at Goodwill. He’s bagged groceries. He’s shared a shift at a Moe’s Southwest Grill, mopping floors and chopping chicken.

The senator once rode the bus system through Charleston, anonymously chatting with passengers. He says one woman told him she caught the bus at 10:30 a.m. to make sure she was on time for her 1:00 p.m. shift at a Walmart across town. Another man said his employer had cut his hours to avoid paying for insurance under the healthcare mandate.

Sometimes voters recognize Scott. Sometimes they don’t. Either way, he listens.

Such efforts likely won’t deliver huge percentages of minority votes to the Republican senator. (He won about 10 percent of black votes in the 2014 election.) But he says he’s committed to hearing constituents and making a conservative case to all voters, not just ones he thinks he can win.

Bob Woodson, a black conservative and longtime poverty-fighting activist, thinks such efforts are important. He says despite the predictable discussions of minority outreach during election years, many more Republicans should have been trying harder a long time ago: “That means actually getting out of your car and talking to people.”

A handful of other Republican congressmen have made efforts to reach other minority groups by simply showing up over a period of time—sometimes pursuing creative methods with unexpected results.

Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colo., faced a tight reelection campaign in 2012 after his redrawn district became 20 percent Hispanic. That year, he won by only 2 percentage points. In 2014, House Democrats made Coffman their top pick for defeat.

Coffman, a Marine Corps veteran, learned a new discipline: He bought a Rosetta Stone language course, hired a tutor, and learned Spanish. He even agreed to debate his Democratic opponent in Spanish on television a few days before the 2014 election.

Coffman’s Spanish wasn’t refined, but the effort was popular, and the lawmaker says he understood Hispanic voters better. He won his race against his Democratic opponent by 9 points. (The same year, Republican Cory Gardner defeated incumbent Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., partly by working Hispanic communities usually the domain of Democrats.)

In Virginia in 2014, Barbara Comstock targeted Asian voters during her bid for the seat of retiring Republican Congressman Frank Wolf. Political polling of Asian voters yields a range of results—and the group encompasses a wide range of nationalities—but surveys showed some 73 percent of the fast-growing ethnic group voted for President Obama in 2012.

Comstock vied for Asian votes in the president’s backyard, partly by leaning on her experience working on Asian human rights as a Virginia state delegate. On election night, Comstock won a seat considered one of the most likely to flip to Democratic control.

Still, black voters may be one of the most unreached groups for many Republicans who don’t try because they think they can’t succeed. But even during an unpredictable presidential election, Woodson says it’s not immediate success that counts when it comes to minority outreach.

It’s sustained effort for more than one political season: “You don’t plant and harvest in the same year.”

FOR REPUBLICANS, the harvest hasn’t been plentiful when it comes to African-American voters in recent decades.

Black voters have backed Democrats in significant numbers since at least the 1940s, when Democratic President Harry Truman desegregated the armed forces and confronted racial bias in federal employment. Black support for Democrats skyrocketed in the 1960s (despite stronger Republican than Democratic support for civil rights) and reached a peak in 2008 when Barack Obama became the nation’s first black president. Obama won some 96 percent of black votes that year. He did nearly as well in 2012, picking up 93 percent of black voters.

The Cook Political Report says black voters may be the “overlooked key” in the 2016 presidential election. The report says in 2012 black voters accounted for Obama’s entire margin of victory in seven states: Florida, Maryland, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Without those states’ 112 electoral votes, the report says, “Obama would have lost decisively.”

Six of those are potential swing states this year.

A key question for November: Will black voters turn out in historically high numbers again? And a key question for future cycles: Will Republicans make a serious effort to reach them?

It’s difficult to predict turnout, but a Quinnipiac poll in late June reported 91 percent of black voters said they support presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. One percent said they backed Republican Donald Trump.

Sen. Scott mostly demurs on the topic of Trump, though he did call the candidate’s insulting remarks about a judge with Mexican ancestry “racially toxic.” These days, reporters often ask Scott about Trump, but Scott is more interested in talking about poverty.

It’s a topic he knows firsthand.

In his early childhood, Scott lived in a 1,000-square-foot rental home in North Charleston with his mother, brother, and grandparents after his parents divorced. The family of five heated the house with an oven in the winter. Scott’s grandmother worked as a maid. His mother went back to school, eventually working 16-hour shifts as a nursing assistant.

During his freshman year at Presbyterian College, Scott deeply embraced faith in Christ—an experience he says transformed his life. After graduating, he became a city councilman, then a U.S. congressman. In 2012, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley appointed him to the seat vacated by retiring Sen. Jim DeMint. Scott won the seat outright in 2014.

On election night, Scott looked across the packed room at the North Charleston Performing Arts Center: “To every single mom who struggles to make ends meet, who wonders if her efforts are in vain, they are not.”

Since becoming a senator, Scott has voted to defund Planned Parenthood, repeal the Affordable Care Act, and hold former Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress.

He’s also pushed for anti-poverty bills that would offer more school choice for children from low-income families or with disabilities and legislation he says would encourage business investment in distressed communities without spending federal dollars on new programs.

While a harrowing presidential election season has overshadowed much of that public discussion, so have some other black leaders.

Rep. James Clyburn, a Democratic black congressman from South Carolina, disdained Scott’s appointment to the Senate, telling The Washington Post in 2014 he’s a black man who “votes against the interest or aspirations of 95 percent of the black people in South Carolina.” Hilary Shelton of the NAACP told the paper, “We can tell when people are coming to sell snake oil.”

Scott brushes off those criticisms, saying the black voters he’s met in high-poverty areas aspire to work, and he wants to encourage structures that make finding jobs easier. Poverty rates among African-Americans remain twice as high as the rates for whites.

Scott isn’t the only Republican reaching out to low-income communities. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, R-Wis., released the broad strokes of a poverty-fighting plan in early June.

Proposals include giving states and local governments more direct involvement in administering benefits, consolidating government programs, and providing more access to job skills training.

Ryan has noted the government runs more than 80 different poverty programs that cost about $750 billion a year, but that the poverty rate has barely budged since President Johnson declared war on poverty in 1964.

That’s not a new revelation, but Ryan didn’t reach his latest conclusions from a comfortable Capitol Hill office. Instead, he reached out to Woodson, the conservative, anti-poverty activist who founded the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise. In 2013, Ryan asked Woodson if he’d introduce him to nonprofit groups helping needy populations across the country.

Woodson said he agreed, but only if Ryan committed real time to it: “I don’t do drive-bys,” he told the congressman. Over the next year, the pair made a dozen low-profile trips to high-crime, drug-ridden neighborhoods, spending the entire day with community members and local leaders. The pair continue to make such visits.

When Ryan announced House Republicans’ poverty proposal in June at a faith-based group called House of Help City of Hope, director Shirley Holloway said it was the third time the speaker had visited the center in Washington’s tough Anacostia neighborhood.

After speaking about the plan, Ryan opened the floor for reporters’ questions. They asked him what he thought about the latest Trump controversy.

OF COURSE, most black voters don’t fall into low-income categories, and some black business leaders oppose some Democratic policies. For example, the National Black Chamber of Commerce and the African American Mayors Association have expressed concern over Obama administration proposals to expand federal regulations on air pollution.

The groups’ leaders worry additional regulations could slow job growth in urban communities by forcing companies to close sites or fire workers. Jobs and economic concerns remained top issues for African-American voters, according to a Gallup poll last year, but so did race relations after a rash of white police officers killing black men in urban areas under controversial circumstances.

One of those shootings happened last year in North Charleston, less than two miles from Seacoast Church’s inner-city campus. Michael Slager shot and killed Walter Scott, an unarmed black man, during a foot chase after a traffic stop. Slager shot Scott in the back as he fled, and he now faces a murder trial.

On a recent Tuesday afternoon, staffers from Seacoast continued their rounds through the neighborhood. The church site (called the Dream Center) houses a healthcare clinic and sponsors a Christian mentoring program for local youth. A house next door hosts a ministry for single moms.

Local kids play basketball in the church gym. And at least once a week, North Charleston police officers spend time with kids at the center.

When Sen. Tim Scott (who attends the church’s Mount Pleasant campus) talks about reaching out to communities, he sounds as enthusiastic about the Dream Center as he does about his legislation. He says building relationships and nurturing families in the context of the local church is the first step toward helping neighbors.

Maria Wilson, who lives two doors down from the Dream Center, has found that to be true. She’s the widowed mother of two teenage daughters and has been attending the church since her husband died last year. On this hot afternoon, members of a church team cut wood in the backyard and prepare for renovations on Wilson’s kitchen.

Wilson, originally from Sierra Leone, is grateful. She has health problems and no family living nearby, but says she and her daughters have come to matter to the church: “They take good care of us.”

It’s an encouragement in a tough neighborhood and in a tough season that political solutions alone won’t satisfy.