Republicans hope to add a Black image to its brand alongside the faces of Clarence Thomas and Ben Carson. The additional face is that of 37-year-old John James who will again run for a Michigan US Senate seat.

Senator Debbie Stabenow defeated the Army veteran and businessman by 6 and half votes in 2018. However, his supporters, including Black America’s Political Action Committee (BAMPAC), is hopeful that he will win in 2020 because he won the most votes of any Republican at the top of the ticket in Michigan in the last decade when he ran against Stabenow in 2018.

In 2002, James hopes to unseat Senator Gary Peters and become the fourth Black to currently serve in the US Senate. He hopes to join Tim Scott of South Carolina as the second Black Republican currently in the Senate. 

In addition to BAMPAC, James has already won the endorsement of Rush Limbaugh. "John James is what everybody would hope for in a Senator," Limbaugh says. 

However, not everyone is supplying the combat veteran with ammunition. “In short, he's awful,” writes the Detroit MetroTimes. The paper also reports that the West Point graduate apologized for having a swastika in one on his ads. MetroTimes provided a litany of details in the article, “Reminder:  Black Republican John James took white supremacist campaign cash.”

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In Detroit during the 2018 election, John James garnered only 4.8 percent of the vote.

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The Detroit News reports that in the Democratic stronghold of Detroit, which has the most African-Americans in the state, James garnered only 4.8 percent of the vote, despite aggressive campaigning. He lost the race against Stabenow though the current president won Michigan by 10,704 votes, which is about half the capacity of Detroit’s Cobo Hall.

In stark contrast, for the 2017 Congress, Peters got a 100 percent score from the NAACP. And, he once represented Michigan’s majority Black District 14, now represented by Congressional Black Caucus member Brenda Lawrence.