The Republican Party obviously bears no direct responsibility for the state of places that have not elected a Republican in more than half a century. Elijah Cummings and most of his colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus run unopposed in election cycle after election cycle.

And that’s the point.

Ultimately, the black community stopped considering the GOP simply because the party stopped showing up. It really is not unreasonable for any demographic to think a party considers them to be second class citizens if that party doesn’t even bother to ask for their votes.

The past five decades of ceding the black vote – in fact, the entire political communications battlefield in the black community – to the Democrats, not some strange Democrat alchemy, is what has transformed voting for Democrats from simply an expression of political preference to almost a matter of black culture and identity – there really is a widely held sentiment within the black community that says that unless you’re a Democrat, you’re not “really black.”

This is despite the fact that black people’s views on individual political issues – abortion, gun control, law enforcement, immigration, taxes, school choice, etc. – are every bit as varied and diverse as in any other community.

The reality is that instead of fighting for the black vote, the GOP decided, decades ago, to don the green eyeshades and look at the balance sheet, calculate where it would get the most bang for the buck and simply write off African Americans and its own proud history as the party of slavery’s abolition and equal rights before the law regardless of race and ethnic origin.

Even worse, the Party stubbornly continued to do so long after it became clear that this was an untenable miscalculation for both itself and the black community. The GOP’s “experts” continue to refuse to acknowledge how the toxic relationship between the Republican Party and the black community and the deliberate refusal to fix it is damaging the Party with other demographics.

The Democrats are not just targeting minority communities with their continuous shrieks of “racism!” Large numbers of the white demographic GOP experts obsessively focus on, particularly women in the suburbs, are hearing these shrieks and starting to believe it.

Bottomline, the Republican Party needs to apologize for its wholesale abandonment of the black community, and the deliberate failure to fight tooth and nail for the votes of black people.

That was wrong. And it’s a wrong that needs to be acknowledged, one that calls for an unreserved apology to the black community.