RNC slashes budget for minority outreach after MAGA takeover

Following the Republican National Committee's takeover by Trump loyalists, the party will be shuttering a heavily-touted program designed to boost minority engagement.

In the wake of some modest gains with Hispanic voters in 2020, the GOP invested millions in a major program they promised would help them communicate with nonwhite voters in swing states like Georgia and Arizona and grow these gains — but flash forward to today, and the whole thing is being canceled.

According to The Daily Beast's Roger Sollenberger, "The program at issue is an initiative from the 2022 midterms where RNC field staff engaged voters through gatherings and events held at community centers in areas with heavy minority populations, most specifically Latino communities."

The RNC initially had almost two dozen of these centers throughout the country, but in January closed down all but five of them in California, Texas, and New York.

"At the time ... the RNC chalked the closures up as a temporary byproduct of its budget cycle," said the report. "However, the organization also announced that it was preparing to double down on these efforts for 2024, opening 40 new centers in Latino, Black, Asian American, Native American, Jewish, and veteran communities across the country. That would include establishing outposts in key battlegrounds like Las Vegas, Nevada, Tuscon, Arizona, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Allentown, Pennsylvania."

Now, one source told The Beast, the RNC's tagline might as well be "Make the RNC White Again."

There was little evidence these community centers were doing much good for the RNC anyway. In 2022, the GOP boasted of some 5,000 events at these centers, from candidate forums to FIFA watch parties, but despite the midterm electorate being significantly more conservative than 2020, they did not see additional gains with Hispanic voters, and most of their highly-touted Hispanic candidates in key House districts lost. In Georgia, after one of these centers was announced in Atlanta to great fanfare, two-thirds of the Latino electorate polled said they still hadn't been contacted by any political party.

Additionally, noted Sollenberger, some of these community centers attracted the wrong kind of attention, like the now-defunct center in Oklahoma City.

"At the opening of the site in July of 2022, the RNC honored Jonathan Hernandez, president of the Oklahoma College Republicans and a political operative in the state," said the report. "But Hernandez was arrested less than a week later on charges of indecent or lewd acts with a minor and forcible oral sodomy. He pleaded guilty, got a five-year suspended sentence, and was ordered to register as a sex offender. After the charges, he had no further involvement with the community center."