As if the Republican presidential candidates weren’t providing enough evidence of the party’s disdain for black voters, State Senate gerrymander artists have made the sentiment in Western New York as clear as lines on a map.

Despite all the lip service about wanting black support, mapmakers have drawn a new district for Buffalo’s Mark Grisanti that echoes the coded messages of the party’s national candidates: whites only.

Instead of having Grisanti compete for black voters, party leaders simply got rid of them.

Running against incumbent Democrat Antoine Thompson two years ago, Grisanti won a close election in a district that included African-American parts of Buffalo and Niagara Falls and in which blacks accounted for 33 percent of the voting-age population.

To make Grisanti’s task easier this time, they created a ridiculously shaped district that would be a mere 5 percent black, lopping off Buffalo’s East Side and all of Niagara Falls.

After winning last time, Grisanti was on black talk radio vowing to represent the interests of African- American voters as ardently as those of other constituents. Now he needn’t worry.

And if Republicans don’t have to worry about the black vote, Democrats don’t, either. They can take blacks for granted as long as the GOP sends the message that it doesn’t want them at all.

That message already has been resonating with any African-American who listens to Newt Gingrich single out blacks when talking about food stamps, though most recipients are white. They hear it when he counsels black students to clean bathrooms instead of telling them to do their homework.

Blacks get the message when Rick Santorum derides “bla . . .” people who want other people’s money. And there is no mistaking the sentiments in Ron Paul’s racist 1990s newsletters.

Now the state GOP is reinforcing the message with political ethnic cleansing. The new map would remove almost all black voters from a competitive district and put them in two districts—one Republican and one Democratic—where they will make little difference in terms of partisan outcome.

It’s hard to be part of a two-party system when only one party wants your vote.

Erie County GOP Chairman Nicholas Langworthy has nothing to say on that point, disavowing any responsibility for the map.

“There was no effort by anyone here in the local party to create that district” was about all he would say, predicting that it will be vetoed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, anyway.

One can only hope. But neither a Cuomo veto nor court intervention will erase the message the party is sending.

Beyond simply telling blacks that it doesn’t want to compete for their votes, the new map also dilutes their power by splitting the Buffalo and Niagara Falls black communities, according to Buffalo NAACP President Frank Mesiah. In a letter to Cuomo, he compares the state GOP’s ploy to those of Southern states enacting new voter ID restrictions.

“In [New York State], the method is different, but the strategy is the same,” he wrote.

That strategy seems to be abandoning any effort to appeal to blacks, considering African-American voters useful only for one thing: scaring white voters.

Fortunately, as evidenced by the success of President Obama and other black politicians elected with significant white support, much of the country has moved beyond that.

It’s telling that in our two-party system, we don’t have a second party that’s as good as the electorate.

rwatson@buffnews.comnull