Eight years ago, Kevin McCarthy, then the House Republican leader, embarked on a push to recruit more Black Republicans to run for Congress, arguing that the G.O.P. needed to diversify to survive.
By 2022, his efforts had yielded modest success, helping pave the way for four Black Republicans to be elected to the House that year, which boosted the total number of Black Republicans serving in Congress to five, including Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina.
That progress is about to be erased.
All four Black Republicans in the House are leaving Congress next year: Three are seeking statewide office, and one is retiring because redistricting in his state effectively boxed him out of his seat. The exodus is a reflection of the striking and persistent lack of diversity in the G.O.P. ranks of Congress, something that Mr. McCarthy has acknowledged is still an issue even years after his efforts to address it.
“When you look at the Democrats, they actually look like America,” he said shortly after leaving Congress in 2023. “When I look at my party, we look like the most restrictive country club in America.”
Republican leaders who for a time focused heavily on recruiting and electing more Black candidates appear to have allowed those efforts to flag during the second Trump presidency, as the president has denounced and eliminated diversity programs, fired Black officials while installing an overwhelmingly white senior team and presided over an administration that routinely circulates material echoing white-supremacist references, including a racist meme he posted himself. With the president’s gains with Black men dwindling, there are few Black Republicans running for Congress this year, and none regarded as likely to win.
That threatens to make the freshman class photo next year look more like the stodgy country club that Mr. McCarthy described as a major political problem for the G.O.P.
“The more diverse the party is, the more opportunity we have,” he said in an interview. “You want to expand the opportunity for more people to come in.”
Mr. McCarthy said the 2018 election cycle, when the House Republican majority was wiped out by a blue wave, was an “eye opener” that had prompted him to elevate a more diverse slate of candidates, a strategy that included recruiting more women.
But he said the efforts to broaden the party appear to have petered out.
“You had as many freshmen named Mike as women in this class,” he said. (There are three of each currently serving their first term in the House, and no new Black members.)
As some of the oldest and most powerful Black Democrats resist leaving Congress, the few Black Republicans who are serving in the House, none of whom hold leadership positions, are heading for the exit.
Representative Wesley Hunt of Texas, a West Point graduate and Apache helicopter pilot whom Mr. McCarthy recruited in 2022, is running for senate. In Michigan, Representative John James, who flipped a blue district to red in 2022, is running for governor. So is Representative Byron Donalds of Florida, who won his first election to the House in 2020, describing himself as a “Trump-supporting, gun-owning, liberty-loving, pro-life, politically incorrect Black man.”
Representative Burgess Owens of Utah, a former N.F.L. player with a Super Bowl ring who criticized players who knelt during the national anthem in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, chose not to seek re-election after a Republican-engineered redrawing of district lines in his state made it difficult for him to keep his seat.
When they were first elected, these lawmakers held themselves up as proof that Democrats were wrong to claim that President Trump and the party he led were racist.
“I ran in a primary against nine other white guys and beat my nearest competitor by more than 25 points,” Mr. Hunt told Fox News after winning his race. “The left can claim the Republican Party is racist, but my story says otherwise.”
Now, Democrats argue that the wave of departures and lack of serious Black candidates tell a far different story.
“Republicans won’t have any Black members in the next Congress because Republicans have no interest in actually representing Black voters,” said Nebeyatt Betre, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. She said that the G.O.P. has put forward policies that have hurt Black Americans, such as a tax law that slashed health care programs; backing tariffs that raised grocery prices; supporting the war in Iran that has increased gas costs; and a gerrymandering push that targeted Black representation in Congress.
The National Republican Congressional Committee declined to provide interviews for this story with any of the party’s Black candidates. But G.O.P. operatives said the departures were not a sign that their party was becoming less diverse, particularly since three of the retirees are seeking higher political office.
Speaker Mike Johnson “is working hand-in-hand with President Trump and the N.R.C.C. to recruit candidates who look like their districts and win,” said Greg Steele, a spokesman for his political operation. He noted that within the nine-member “MAGA Majority Program,” which highlights top challengers running in key battleground districts, there were one woman and three people of color.
Only one of them is Black.
That candidate, Kevin Lincoln, a former mayor of Stockton, Calif., ran unsuccessfully against Representative Josh Harder, a Democrat, two years ago and is now trying again in a different district, against Representative Adam Gray.
Mr. Lincoln is a halting communicator — Democratic operatives said that they use clips of him stumbling over incomplete answers as examples of what candidates should never do — and Laura Loomer, the right-wing social media agitator who has the president’s ear on personnel issues, has singled him out online for criticism about how he has answered questions about diversity, equity and inclusion.
The other Black candidates running this year are considered less likely than Mr. Lincoln to be elected.
In Michigan, Amir Hassan, a Navy veteran and former law enforcement officer, is challenging Representative Kristen McDonald Rivet in a competitive district. For months, Mr. Hassan was the sole Republican running, but party leaders did not rally around him, instead creating space for two primary challengers who have recently entered the race. Mr. Hassan has not received any financial contributions from House leaders, according to his campaign filings. Mr. Johnson has a nominee fund ready to go in that race to support whichever candidate emerges from the primary.
Mr. McCarthy’s old political action committee, however, gave him $10,000 last year.
In Ohio, Josh Williams, a state legislator, is challenging Representative Marcy Kaptur, the Democratic stalwart and the longest-serving woman in congressional history. He is embroiled in an ugly primary fight, in which he is accusing other Republicans of “spreading lies, peddling baseless claims and recycling debunked stories” in order to “smear my name and reputation.”
And in New Jersey, Tiffany Burress, a personal injury attorney and the wife of former New York Giants star Plaxico Burress, is running for Congress in a district that has long been blue. She is also involved in a messy primary, in which she is constantly attacked by her opponent for not living in the district she is seeking to represent. Her home is facing foreclosure after she failed to pay her mortgage and she has raised less than $75,000 this quarter, with no help from Republican leaders.
Democrats said the candidate quality among Black Republicans running was a sign of how hard it was, in this environment, to recruit more serious contenders.
“It’s going to be really hard for even the most conservative Black Republican to look at this Republican Party and defend it,” said Chris Taylor, a senior adviser to the Congressional Black Caucus PAC. “This is a Republican Party that is at war with Black America.”
