Before Barack Obama delivered his speech supporting Kamala Harris in Pittsburgh on Thursday, he made a more intimate appearance at the Harris-Walz campaign offices in the city’s East Liberty neighborhood. “Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives or other reasons for that,” he told the assembled staff and volunteers, referring to a specific kind of Harris-skeptical Black man he anticipated they would encounter during their voter outreach. “You’re thinking about sitting out, or even supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you?” Obama likened this attitude to betrayal. “Women in our lives have been getting our backs this entire time,” he said. “When we get in trouble and the system isn’t working for us, they’re the ones out there marching and protesting.”

The erosion of support among Black men for Democrats, including Harris, is a real trend. According to polling from NBC News, Black men have voted for the Democratic presidential nominee at lower rates in every general election since 2008, when it peaked at 95 percent. (It fell to 87 percent in 2012, 82 percent in 2016, and 80 percent in 2020.) A recent New York Times–Siena College poll found that only 79 percent of Black voters overall intend to back Harris in November, while Black support for Donald Trump is tracking higher than ever at 14 percent. Maybe most remarkably, a September poll by the NAACP found that 26 percent of Black men under 50 years old said they would support Trump.

Obama’s broadside, which quickly went viral, was further proof of his status as the party’s resident scold. The glaring exception to his 2012 declaration that........

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