But Can He Steal Democratic Votes?

Even Steele’s more responsible critics seem fixated on his race. This largely stems from fears that he will attract black voters to the Republican party. Just before the 2002 election, which Steele won on a ticket with Maryland governor Bob Ehrlich, the Baltimore Sun sneered that he “brings little to the team but the color of his skin.” More recently, a survey conducted by Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher found that “a majority of African-American voters are open to supporting Steele, particularly younger voters.” Belcher recommended that “a persuasion campaign should start as soon as possible to discredit Steele as a viable candidate for the community”–the black community, that is.

This may all prove a false alarm. If Republicans take a drubbing come November, Maryland is about the last state where you’d expect them to pick up a Senate seat. Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly two to one. The state hasn’t elected a GOP senator since 1980. The general assembly tilts heavily Democratic. John Kerry won Maryland by 13 points; Al Gore by 17 points. Even if Steele can siphon a small percentage of black voters away from the Democrats, it’s still a constituency that went 89-11 for Kerry over George W. Bush. Any Republican faces an uphill battle in Maryland, even in a good year.

But in his personal as well as in his political life, Steele, 47, is used to challenges, which may explain why he appears so sanguine about the Senate contest. Throughout our interview in his spacious Annapolis office, Steele brims with wonkish policy chatter, charming anecdotes, playful jokes, and toothy smiles. Well over six feet tall, he is also long on charisma and wry humor.

“I like to tell people I’m an African-American, Roman-Catholic Republican–and I like to live dangerously,” Steele says. He prides himself on being a maverick: a “center-right” black Republican and a “traditional guy” on values, “who also has the ability to connect with the hip-hop community, [and] to connect with a lot of very strong liberals in Montgomery County.” Raised in Washington, D.C., Steele has a B.A. from Johns Hopkins and a law degree from Georgetown, and he served a stint as chairman of the Maryland GOP (the first African American to chair a state party), with several years as a seminarian at Villanova sandwiched in between. Besides Ronald Reagan, he credits his mother, a stalwart “Roosevelt Democrat,” for making him a Republican. She “raised me the right way,” he grins.

Although his spiel on taxes, free markets, Social Security reform, and economic liberty could easily have been written by Jack Kemp, Steele is hardly a doctrinaire conservative–or a reliable partisan. He opposes the death penalty and is unafraid to zing the Bush White House for its ineptitude. He calls himself “an unqualified supporter” of affirmative action, which sounds less nuanced than it is. “Affirmative action is not quotas, and affirmative action is not racial preferences,” Steele says. He cites the chief architect of modern affirmative action, a Nixon administration Labor official named Arthur Fletcher. Steele knew Fletcher, also a black Republican, and spoke with him extensively before Fletcher’s death in July 2005. “He was so frustrated and disappointed at how–as he put it–the other party had ‘bastardized’ affirmative action into a quotas program,” Steele told me. “Because it was never about quotas. It was always about creating economic opportunity.”

Anyone who watched his speech to the 2004 Republican convention in New York can attest to Steele’s rhetorical talents. Small wonder he has no serious primary rivals in his Senate bid. He will, however, have a formidable opponent in the fall–either Rep. Ben Cardin, 62, an elder statesman of Maryland politics, or Kweisi Mfume, 57, the former five-term Maryland congressman and ex-NAACP boss. Both are consistent left-liberals, though Cardin is more moderate and less partisan. Both expect to be well-financed heading into September’s Democratic primary. Both draw on sizable bases. And whichever man wins, he will enjoy the “reverse coattails” of Bush’s unpopularity.

For Steele to win, says Maryland pollster Patrick Gonzales, he’ll need to capture roughly 50 percent of independents and peel off a third of the registered Democrats. “We’ve got him getting 20 percent of the black vote in a matchup with Ben Cardin,” says Gonzales, a nonpartisan analyst. That drops by about five points when Steele is paired against Mfume. Most pollsters give Cardin a small lead in the primary.

The conventional wisdom says Cardin, the establishment favorite, would make the stronger opponent. But it’s also possible that if black voters feel Mfume wasn’t given a fair shake they could pull the lever for Steele, or perhaps just stay home. “Mfume is more than another Senate candidate,” Donna Brazile, the Democratic consultant, has written. “He will become a symbol of how Democrats intend to treat qualified black candidates in the future.” Says USA Today columnist DeWayne Wickham: “Democrats need to counter [Steele] with their own black candidate, or run the risk of further alienating their black base.” The Maryland Democratic party has never nominated an African American to run statewide. As Mfume told me, “The issue of race is all over this campaign.”

STEELE HAS THOUGHT LONG and hard about blacks and the GOP, and he offers a surprising take. Republicans are the historic party of civil rights. “Every major piece of civil rights legislation ever created and promulgated in the United States Congress” was written or supported by Republicans–“from the very first piece to the last piece, the Voting Rights Act of ’65. Every economic tool that’s ever been designed by the United States Congress–from ‘forty acres and a mule’ during Reconstruction to affirmative action–was done so by Republicans.” Despite all that, Steele argues, the events of the 1960s–from the GOP’s reluctance to embrace Martin Luther King to its post-Goldwater adoption of a “southern strategy”–opened the door for blacks to leave the party in droves.

Blacks made crucial strides under Reagan and George H.W. Bush, says Steele, but thanks to the Democrats, “you still had hanging over the party this rhetorical discord about who we are, and what we really feel about black people.” Then “along comes someone like me, who gets elected state chairman, I’m on the executive committee of the RNC, and I’m telling people, ‘Y’all better wake up. Because this is a new era.'” Steele says there’s been a nascent shift rightward in the black community, particularly among younger black men “who were all about the American Dream. They read the story. They saw the movie. Now they want to go out and live it. And the reality for them was, Which party was talking to them about that? Which party’s policies were really addressing that? And it was the Republican party.”

This hit home for Steele during the 2002 campaign, when, as he tells it, “A young brother came up to me and he said, ‘You know, I’m thinking about voting for you.'” Steele thanked him, and asked why he was hesitant. Well, the young man admitted, he was a tad uneasy about the GOP’s attitude toward blacks. He also had qualms about social conservatism. But he ended up by saying, “I love your message on money.” Steele, too, is bullish on the GOP’s “empowerment” message. “It’s one of the things that drew me to the party. It’s one of the things that I took from Ronald Reagan’s first run [for the White House] in 1976. It’s what made me a Republican–that and my mother.”

Unlike his youthful supporter, Steele finds common ground with the social right on most core issues. He’s staunchly pro-life. He opposes embryonic stem cell research. And he rejects both same-sex marriage and gay civil unions (though he also opposes the Federal Marriage Amendment, preferring the matter be left to the states). While this endears him to national conservatives, it poses a problem in liberal Maryland. Steele caught a barrage of flak this past winter after he indirectly compared embryo-destroying research to medical experiments in Nazi Germany. He later apologized for his offhand remark.

As the Democrats see it, Steele’s social views bolster their claim that he is too closely tied to President Bush, who remains woefully unpopular in Maryland. Democrats also howl that Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and ex-White House chief of staff Andy Card have all headlined fundraisers for Steele, whose campaign has already raised over $2.6 million. Last week the Washington Post reported that former president George H.W. Bush and his wife Barbara will appear at a Steele event in Chevy Chase, Md., on May 19.

Republicans expect a nasty campaign, the tone of which was set not only by the racist anti-Steele outbursts last fall but also by the revelation that two Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee staffers had illegally acquired a copy of Steele’s credit report. The DSCC apparently had no knowledge of this–and the two staffers resigned–but GOP leaders were left fuming. One of the staffers pleaded guilty in March to fraud.

A Rasmussen poll released in late April had Cardin leading Steele by 10 points, 45-35 percent, and Mfume holding a smaller, 4-point edge, 42-38 percent. It may come down to how many onetime Democrats Steele can pick off in Maryland’s “Big Three”: Baltimore City, Prince George’s County, and Montgomery County, all of which lean overwhelmingly Democratic. He should do well in the rest of the state, which generally votes Republican. True to his personality, Steele remains relentlessly upbeat. “I tell people all the time, ‘Get your popcorn,'” he says. “It’s gonna be fun.”

Duncan Currie is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.