The Year of the Black Republican?

Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell is running for governor. He sees himself as an agent for increasing competition for the black vote. (By Kiichiro Sato -- Associated Press)

Democrats will not select their nominee until September, but polls have shown Steele trailing both Rep. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.) and former NAACP president Kweisi Mfume. If Cardin becomes the nominee, Steele is likely to seek to exploit any disappointment within the black community over Mfume's defeat.

Blackwell's Challenge

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Blackwell, 58, is a former mayor of Cincinnati and a former Ohio treasurer. He was the first African American to be elected statewide, in 1994. He said he sees himself as an agent for creating more competition for the black vote. "I thought it was in the interest of the African American community to reconstruct a competitive two-party system," he said.

Last week, he won a nasty primary against Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro, casting himself as less tied than his opponent to the tarnished administration of GOP Gov. Bob Taft. His challenge now will be to try to distance himself from the scandals that have driven Taft's poll numbers into the teens, while uniting the party.

Blackwell proudly trumpets his ideology and is staunchly conservative on both economic and social issues. His election would change the character of a state Republican Party long dominated by the more moderate business wing rather than by social conservatives.

Blackwell championed the successful 2004 ballot initiative to ban same-sex marriage in Ohio, a position that could attract support from both white evangelicals and African Americans. This year, he is promoting a state constitutional amendment that would impose tight spending limitations on state and local governments. Local government officials from both parties are opposed.

Strickland said Blackwell has the potential to cut into the black vote in November. He stressed that he will not take African Americans for granted.

Black Democratic mayors are now pressing Strickland and state Rep. Chris Redfern, the party chairman, for commitments to an urban agenda as the price for their endorsement.

Republicans have made clear gains among Latino voters in the past decade, but their efforts to attract African American votes have met continued resistance. One reason, according to Dianne M. Pinderhughes, a political scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is the bond between blacks and the Democratic Party created by the civil rights battles of the 1960s, for which there has been no Hispanic equivalent.

For Latinos, "there wasn't a major event, like the legislation of the 1960s that Lyndon Johnson or the Democratic Party were involved in that brought blacks into Democratic Party in large numbers and led to partisan identification for a whole generation," she said.

That bond has proved difficult for Republicans to break. But Democratic strategists respect the Republicans' willingness to look over the horizon and make the investments that could change old patterns.

"The Republicans have a longer-term view of things than we Democrats sometimes have," said Cornell Belcher, the Democratic National Committee's pollster.

If anything, the hurdles facing Republicans today are higher, given the paltry support for Bush among blacks -- numbers that have worsened in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

But these campaigns are not just about victory, said David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

In a Democratic stronghold such as Maryland, he said, "if they saw an increase of 5 percent of the black vote, I think, they would figure they had died and gone to heaven."

Mosk reported from Maryland. Political researcher Zachary A. Goldfarb and research database editor Derek Willis contributed to this report.