Photo: MIchael Nigro/Sipa USA/AP Photos
With two weeks until Election Day, media pundits and worried Democratic strategists are agonizing over the notion that Black male voters — who will likely make up less than 7 percent of the total voting population this season — are turning their backs on Kamala Harris in numbers that could cost Democrats the White House. Worried Democrats should quit scolding and start doing what political parties were created to do: quickly cut whatever deals are necessary to satisfy a key constituency that has, justifiably, felt ignored in recent years.
The first hint of the problem seems to have been an August poll by the NAACP that found “only” 63 percent of Black voters planned to support Harris, which is more than quadruple the 13 percent supporting Trump but considerably shy of the 90-plus percent support Democrats grew accustomed to during the years Barack Obama led the ticket. Strategists noticed, with rising panic, that 26 percent of younger Black men (under 50 years old) said they plan to vote for Trump, compared with 49 percent for Harris.
“We have not yet seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities as we saw when I was running. I also want to say that that seems to be more pronounced with the brothers,” Obama said in an odd, imperious scolding of Black men at a Pittsburgh office of the Harris-Walz campaign. “And you’re coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses. 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 and other reasons for that.”
Not so fast, Mr. President. Obama’s history-making candidacy captured an estimated 95 percent of the Black vote in 2008, and his re-election in 2012 nearly repeated that feat while also sending the percentage of Black-voter turnout higher than that of whites for the first time ever. Democrats remember those days fondly, but it was always a mistake to think those insanely high levels would be repeated and institutionalized.
“One of the things that we’ve seen since Obama has left office is that the number of Black people willing to vote Republican has been slowly creeping up. It’s a resetting of the mean,” political historian Leah Wright Rigeur told me. “What people forget is that the Black vote for a Republican presidential candidate has gone as low as 4 percent, but it’s also gone as high as 18 perent. So if Donald Trump gets 18 percent of the Black vote, it’s very much within the range of what we’ve seen over the last 60 years.”
Obama’s remarks underlined the unquestionable truth that sexism often plays out in subtle ways, and it’s safe to assume that some Black men — just like their white, Latino, and Asian counterparts — find it hard to get comfortable with the idea of Harris or any other woman as leader of the nation. But it is also true that Black men have valid reasons to be disenchanted with the Democratic Party — and reasons to be curious about what a Trump presidency might deliver.
“Black men don’t need to be lectured to about values,” says Quentin James, who runs a political action committee dedicated to electing Black officials. “Most Black men just need to be engaged and informed, and all we’re seeing now are the effects of a lack of spending on communicating and engaging them.”
Democrats have known since Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016 that carrying the all-important industrial midwestern states requires maximum turnout in the Black communities of Detroit, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia. The problem is that Dems have assumed they could generate Obama-era levels of excitement for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden — and now Kamala Harris — without a substantial, sustained political investment up front.
“You’re going to pick on Black men and blame us for everything. What did you deliver to Black men in the past four years?” the activist and commentator Van Jones said at a recent university discussion in California. “We wanted the George Floyd police-reform act. Didn’t get it. We wanted the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Didn’t get it. And we wanted the EQUAL Act, the next step in criminal justice reform, and didn’t get that. Three things we wanted, and we got zero, zilch, nunca, nada, nothing.”
By contrast, Jones noted, Trump signed the First Step Act, which granted early release from federal prison to more than 30,000 people — a monumental rollback of mass incarceration that Democrats rarely discuss, although ex-Speaker Nancy Pelosi and current minority leader Hakeem Jeffries worked tirelessly to get the law passed. Many of those tens of thousands of people released from prison — and their friends, family, and neighbors — have quietly spread the word that Trump, for all his many faults, did for many Black men what no Democratic president ever managed to pull off.
“All these Black celebrities that lived in the White House for eight years under Obama saying they cared about you, cared about your children, cared about your neighborhood — the minute Trump went in there, not one would go in,” Jones said. “You have a problem with your party. You’re not doing anything to help Black men. And your answer is to tell us to shut up and vote and criticize us. But we’re not stupid enough to fail to notice that there’s no heart for us.”
The Trump team has built on its opening by holding inner-city cookouts, visiting barbershops, and rolling out celebrity endorsements. Harris has countered by doing talks with Black media personalities like Roland Martin and Charlamagne Tha God and has hastily released a skimpy document titled “Vice President Harris Will Deliver for Black Men” that lists policies like small-business loans, national legalization of marijuana, and a promise to take another crack at passing police reform and voting-rights legislation.
That’s not good enough from Democrats. Four years ago, Biden vowed to name a Black woman to the Supreme Court. There’s no comparably bold promise to Black men this year from Harris or Trump, and Jones says that’s likely to result in Black men simply choosing to sit the election out. “You need us to vote in 87 percent, 88 percent for Kamala to win, and we’re going to vote at about 82 percent,” he predicts. “But it’s not what you need. And that gap is not the gap of a deficiency in us. There’s a deficiency in this party. And trying to paper over it and pretend that what people are feeling isn’t right is driving more men to the couch.”
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