Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy doubled down on his comparison of a Black female lawmaker to a member of the Ku Klux Klan, remarks that have outraged Black leaders.
Some say the messaging indicates a failure of the Republican Party as a whole and signals the party may not be as serious as it says about engaging with Black voters.
Ramaswamy, who has gained traction after last week’s Republican presidential debate, on Friday likened Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) to “modern grand wizards” of the KKK.
He backed it up when asked about it Sunday: “I stand by what I said to provoke an open and honest discussion in this country,” he told CNN.
“It’d make the grand wizard of the KKK proud,” Ramaswamy posted later that day. “It’s driving reactionary attacks. It needs to end.”
Adrianne Shropshire, executive director of BlackPAC, an organization focused on mobilizing Black voters, vehemently pushed back against the comparison.
“Republicans seem to have decided that in order to stop Democrats, they have to stop Black women,” she said.
“We’re not rewriting history or turning it on its head to suggest that a ‘grand wizard’ is anything other than what it is,” Shropshire said. “This language has never been about persuading Black voters. It is about stirring the racist stew that they have cooked up in their party and throwing it at Black women.”
Pressley hit back at Ramaswamy’s comparison on MSNBC’s “Politics Nation” over the weekend, calling “the verbal assault” from the presidential hopeful “shameful” and “dangerous.”
“It is not that long ago that we were besieged by images of white supremacists carrying tiki torches in Charlottesville. It was not that long ago that a white supremacist mob seized the Capitol, waving Confederate flags and erecting nooses on the West Lawn of the Capitol,” Pressley told host the Rev. Al Sharpton. She added that her “ancestors and living family members have been brutalized, lynched, raped by the Ku Klux Klan.”
But the congresswoman said Ramaswamy isn’t “occupying any real estate” in her mind as she continues her work on racial justice.
In a request for comment on Monday, Ramaswamy’s team pointed The Hill to the candidate’s post on X, formerly Twitter, where he once again held firm on his statement that Pressley made racist comments in 2019, when she said that the country doesn’t “want any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice.”
In between his name-check of Pressley and his reiteration on Sunday, a racially motivated shooting killed three Black people at a store in Florida and the nation marked the 60th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s March on Washington, a cornerstone of the civil rights movement.
Earlier in August, Ramaswamy promised that if he secured the GOP nomination, he’ll “bring along voters of diverse shades of melanin in droves” to win the general election. Some have pointed out that Ramaswamy’s comments are at odds with that pledge, made in a Fox News appearance.
Democratic strategist Antjuan Seawright said Ramaswamy’s comments toward Pressley — which he labeled “disgusting” — indicate a disconnect between the GOP’s desire to win the support of more diverse voters and their actions toward those demographics.
“I think it’s further proof that the Republican Party and those who are seeking to lead their party are not serious or intentional about bringing along, or bringing into the fold, voters of color, people of color … nor are they serious about understanding the ever-changing diversity of this country,” Seawright said.
“MAGA extremist” candidates, he added, “are not serious about anything other than trying to embrace the extremism that now makes up the Republican Party.” He also suggested Ramaswamy’s comments are an effort to “say anything to get a reaction out of anybody.”
Cliff Albright, cofounder and executive director of Black Voters Matter, added that Ramaswamy’s comments might not be what Black voters are listening to, but it doesn’t mean they won’t have an effect on who shows up at the ballot boxes for 2024.
“I don’t think most Black voters were really paying attention to the Republican debate or the conversations in the aftermath. Most people aren’t even aware of what Ramaswamy was saying, who he is,” Albright told The Hill.
Still, Albright said, Ramaswamy’s comments do speak to core of the Republican Party.
“They’re speaking to their base, which is hungry for that type of red bait,” said Albright. “They’re certainly not speaking to Black voters, they’re not really speaking to any reasonable or serious voter outside of the base that just wants more of the same.”
Republican presidential candidate Asa Hutchinson on Sunday criticized Ramaswamy for “not really looking at real life in America.”
The Hill has reached out to other GOP presidential campaigns for comment.
Even before Ramaswamy made his remarks toward Pressley, his fellow GOP presidential contenders have knocked him as a “rookie” and torched his lack of political experience during the party’s first debate last week. But polling puts the novice candidate around third place among the Republican primary field, indicating his campaign is seeing some momentum.
But as the nation reels from yet another mass shooting – now under investigation as a hate crime – Seawright warned that Ramaswamy’s rhetoric could cause “real harm, detrimental harm” to Pressley and others.
“We’ve seen what happens when politicians use certain words and they’re not checked in real time. We’ve seen historically what that has led to, and the power of hate, the power of bigotry, the power of division and racism,” Seawright said.
“This could potentially lead to Ayanna Pressley — an innocent Black woman, a mother, wife, member of Congress — having to rearrange her life because she’s become a target.”
Shropshire added that over the last five years, surveys from BlackPAC have shown Black voters consistently identified racism as one of their top three motivating issues.
She said such rhetoric cause an outpouring of Black voters come 2024 – and not for Republicans.
“If the Republican Party wants to inspire record Black turnout, they should continue down this path,” she said.
