The road to the White House this year will run through Black communities — and all indicators point to a rough and tricky path for Democrats. Polls show a massive jump in the level of support among Black voters for Donald Trump, from 12 percent in 2020 to 17 percent now, according to a December survey by GenForward, a data project based at the University of Chicago. More recently, a New York Times–Siena poll had even more startling results, reporting that 23 percent of Blacks would vote for Trump if the election were held today. That would be the highest level of such support for a Republican presidential candidate since Nixon got 32 percent of the Black vote in 1960.
How is this possible? This is the candidate who launched his political career by promoting birther lies to undermine the legitimacy of Barack Obama, the first Black president. He has a long history of racist comments and activities, going back to his vilification of the Central Park Five. At every rally, he makes abundantly clear that his movement is a vehicle for aggrieved whites to take back the power they feel they have lost. Is Joe Biden so unpopular that he could lose even this most loyal of Democratic constituencies?
Black Republicans I spoke to think the Trump surge is real. “He’s going to double those margins and increase the margins with Hispanics as well,” says Scherie Murray, a Queens-based political consultant and a former member of the party’s state committee. “What we’re seeing now is people being frustrated with our political class and feeling it in the pocketbook.”
John Burnett, a Harlem businessman who is first vice-chairman of the New York State GOP, agrees. “It’s not a huge sample size, but sometimes when I travel to different places, like Milwaukee, Pennsylvania, and I talk to people, they say, ‘Trump is Trump — but I like what he has to say.’”
The overwhelming majority of Black voters swing Democratic, but it would be a big mistake for Democrats to simply write off recent polls as a statistical anomaly. In a close race, it only takes a handful of voters to flip a state: Four years ago, Biden won Pennsylvania by an airtight margin of fewer than 82,000 votes. He carried Michigan by only about 154,000 votes and Wisconsin by fewer than 21,000 votes. Even a small dip in Democratic support in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee could give Trump those states and the Electoral College — precisely the scenario that doomed Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Trump himself seems intent on alienating Black voters, claiming, for example, that reverse racism by Black prosecutors is the reason he is having so many legal troubles. Which means Biden and the Democrats largely have their fate in their hands when it comes to retaining voters’ allegiance.
“Republicans have had this kind of loosey-goosey outreach plan for winning over Black voters for close to 80 years. The problem is that for Republicans, Black voters present a little bit of a conundrum,” says Leah Wright Rigueur, a political historian at Johns Hopkins and the author of The Loneliness of the Black Republican. “They’re constantly doing these mental calculations about what is the least amount of work we can do in order to get the most output from Black voters without alienating our core base of white voters?” Indeed, in March the Republican Party said it was shutting down community centers charged with grassroots outreach efforts to Black and Latino voters nationwide (after the news broke, the party quickly claimed that the community centers would remain active).
As Rigueur points out, Trump doesn’t need Black voters to vote for him in big numbers: Stoking disenchantment within the Democratic Party can get the job done just as well. “Over the course of the last 12 years, there’s been an increase in the number of Republicans pouring money into digital media that is directed at not winning over Black voters but depressing Black voters. It’s not voter suppression — everything that they do is completely legal. But all of those things are based on the one premise of getting Black voters to move away from the Democrats, which is a kernel of truth rooted in this tense relationship between Democrats and Black voters,” she says. “So the biggest single factor that is driving this polling and attitude is not the Republican Party or anything that the Republican Party is doing. It’s what the Democratic Party is doing or not doing.”
In conventional political terms, Biden has delivered a ton of goodies to Black communities, from selecting Kamala Harris as his vice-president to making Ketanji Brown Jackson the first Black woman on the Supreme Court. He has named Jamie Harrison chairman of the Democratic National Committee and reworked the political calendar to make heavily Black South Carolina the first primary state instead of New Hampshire. The Biden administration has directed over $7 billion to historically Black colleges and universities, and last year Black unemployment fell below 5 percent for the first time since the Department of Labor began tracking the statistic in 1972.
Pretty good stuff — but for some Black voters, not enough.
“This is where we get into descriptive versus substantive representation,” says political scientist Christina Greer of Fordham University. “A lot of Black voters are like, ‘Why have we got all these Black people in charge and my life isn’t changing? Why are my economic circumstances not exponentially better if I can look at how we had a Black president and we’ve got a Black mayor? Why is it that my schools are still bad, my neighborhood is still what it is?’”
Burnett agrees, saying the disaffection is exacerbated by Democratic positions on immigration. “When certain urban neighborhoods are overwhelmed by a preexisting homeless crisis, high rents, and a level of unaffordability in so many different categories, but yet they see individuals — we’re talking about illegal immigration — being placed in the front in terms of housing, even in some instances cash payments; they’re rolling off the red carpet,” he says. “And then they say, ‘Wait a second, we vote for you guys, and we can’t even get your attention on basic things, but you can find money to educate them, give them free health care, but when it comes to our needs as a Black community, it falls on deaf ears.’ I think Black people are sick and tired of being sick and tired. So some of them will actually exercise that level of protest by voting for Trump in the general.”
“A third of Black voters have consistently polled as saying that they want stronger border control and having essentially xenophobic preferences, even Black migrants who come to the United States,” Rigueur told me. “Africans and West Indians tend to be conservative in some respects. I don’t know that the Democratic Party has an answer for the complaints that Black folks are offering on the question of immigration.”
Trump and the Republicans are bound to play on those points of discontent as well as focus on a slice of Black men who are attracted to Trump’s bombast. “Trump brings that macho element who is not afraid to speak and tell the truth from their perspective,” Burnett told me.
“We have to remember that Donald Trump has been with Black people for
40 years. He’s been in rap songs since like the ’80s and ’90s as this beacon of success,” says Greer. “You know, flashing gold and a guy who doesn’t take any mess.”
On the one hand, there is evidence to suggest that Black voters who have always been conservative are finally allowing themselves to vote for the conservative party. On the other, there are voters who can be persuaded to return to the Democratic fold if they feel that Biden is going to make their lives better. The balance of the election just might lie between these two groups.
Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the April 8, 2024, issue of New York Magazine.
Want more stories like this one? Subscribe now to support our journalism and get unlimited access to our coverage. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the April 8, 2024, issue of New York Magazine.
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