In 2007, Fauntroy published Republicans and the Black Vote, which was reprinted as a paperback in 2008. In Republicans and the Black Vote, Fauntroy studies the developments that caused the Republican Party to slide from nearly unanimous support among African Americans during The Reconstruction era to nearly unanimous opposition in the 21st century. The book presents a history of the relationship between the Republican Party and African American voters, from the party's founding through the New Deal era to the early 2000s, with a particularly in-depth focus on the four decades starting around 1970. Fauntroy demonstrates that the beginnings of African American voters' near-unanimous rejection of the Republican Party, to the extent that regularly only single digit percentages of African American voters cast ballots for the GOP, only began in 1964 with the candidacy of Barry Goldwater and the ideological clarification of the two major American parties. This was the culmination of a longer trend in which the party identification of African American voters had been steadily shifting towards the Democratic Party for decades, with about two thirds of African American voters supporting the Democratic Party during the New Deal. In Republicans and the Black Vote, Fauntroy studies why this shift happened, supplementing his historical analysis by interviewing Republican policy makers and African American members of the Republican Party. Fauntroy argues that the movement of African Americans away from the GOP was caused both by the clarification of Republican policy stances that are at odds with the priorities of many African American voters, as well as the Republican Party's usage of racially charged symbolism and rhetoric throughout a series of election campaigns. Fauntroy therefore attributes the very low levels of support for the Republican Party among African American voters both to the GOP's public policy and to its political strategy. Republicans and the Black Vote was a finalist for the Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award in 2007.
