Republican outreach to African-Americans has long revolved around the argument that conservative economic policies would alleviate poverty more effectively than liberal social programs. This tradition is spiking again, with possible 2016 GOP hopefuls Rep. Paul Ryan and Sen. Marco Rubio offering plans to combat poverty and promote upward mobility by cutting taxes and retrenching Washington’s role (for instance, by consolidating federal antipoverty programs into mega-block grants for states, as Ryan proposed last week). Paul has joined that sweepstakes by proposing Kemp-like “Economic Freedom Zones” that would slash taxes and environmental regulations to promote private investment in low-income neighborhoods.

But as Virginia Commonwealth University historian Timothy Thurber, author of Republicans and Race, points out, the voices urging greater GOP minority outreach have never succeeded in establishing such policies as a central party priority. And attempts to convince African-Americans that they will benefit from shrinking Washington, Thurber notes, have always splintered against the hard reality that, at least since the civil-rights era, blacks “have looked more favorably on the federal government than other segments of American society.” The minimal return on these Republican efforts is measured in the failure of any GOP presidential candidate since 1976 to win more than 12 percent of African-American votes.