Former Republican National Committee head Michael Steele claimed Tuesday night that the GOP is ignoring minority voters. Outreach to minorities is "not part of the mainstay of the party," Steele said, speaking on Hardball. "That's the one area were I do have a great deal of concern."
Steele agreed that Republicans are not making an effort to woo minority voters in urban centers and that they are not going to African-American and other minority communities to make inroads. "They're not," he said. "And that's the problem."
It didn't mark the first time that Steele has criticized his own party for excluding non-whites from its coalition. When he was RNC chairman, he said that African-Americans had no reason to vote for Republicans. "For the last 40-plus years we had a 'Southern Strategy' that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South," Steele said in 2010.