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Angling for Hip-Hop Appeal
Russell Simmons and Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele meet with students, including Seth Ragin, 6, at an event at the Laurel Boys and Girls Club.
(By Marvin Joseph -- The Washington Post)
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"He has reach," she said.
Mark Anthony Neal, an associate professor of black popular culture at Duke University, agreed that Simmons "has tapped into the hip-hop generation" and used that skill to reach consumers. But he's not sure it will reach voters. "I don't think he's has shown he can do that yet," Neal said.
Hughes -- who chairs the nation's only publicly traded company headed by an African American woman, with about 71 stations across the country, including its Washington flagship, WMMJ (102.3 FM) -- also has potential to help, especially if she is able to draw any of her many celebrity friends behind Steele's candidacy.
A recent gala celebrating the 25th anniversary of her broadcasting empire drew Janet Jackson, Sean Combs, Jay-Z, Ruben Studdard, Danny Glover, go-go music pioneer Chuck Brown, roughly half the record industry and just about every major African American political figure, including Steele.
But even if the two help Steele reach young black men, it's unclear how much that will improve his election chances, said David Bositis, who studies black voting trends at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.
"Of all the groups in the black population, they are the least likely to vote," Bositis said.
Bositis also predicted that, if Mfume wins the Democratic primary, "that's the last time you'll see Steele pursuing black voters."
Benjamin F. Chavis Jr., a former NAACP president who co-chairs a nonprofit group with Simmons called the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, said that even if Mfume is the Democratic nominee, many African Americans will continue to follow Steele.
"Steele's candidacy offers a lot of hope and has inspired the positive aspirations of a lot of people in Maryland," he said.
In a brief interview, conducted as a stretch limo idled in an alley in Laurel, Simmons laughed that Steele was only the second Republican he's supported. (New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was the first.) But then he turned serious.
"We're not looking for a hip-hop Republican," he said. "We're looking for someone concerned about the war on poverty and ignorance, and anyone who is open-minded about that, as the lieutenant governor seems to be."
