The Trump campaign is investing more money and resources in an attempt to attract African-American voters than any Republican presidential campaign in recent memory.
The drive includes highly visible television advertising, including an $11 million Super Bowl commercial, along with ad purchases in local black newspapers and on radio stations; “Black Voices for Trump”; storefronts in key battleground states; and a sustained social media campaign directed at black voters whose consumer, religious and demographic profiles suggest potential support, including on such issues as immigration, abortion, gender roles and gay rights.
For Trump, the effort became all the more crucial as the Super Tuesday primaries demonstrated Joe Biden’s strong appeal to black voters. Exit polls showed Biden winning 57 percent of the votes cast by African-Americans on Tuesday, 40 points higher than his closest competitor, Bernie Sanders, at 17 percent.
Adrianne Shropshire, executive director of the pro-Democratic BlackPAC and the affiliated nonpartisan Black Progressive Action Coalition, wrote in an email that Trump has already communicated with a large segment of the African-American electorate, although she disputes the effectiveness of Trump’s bid to win black support:
We’ve had a significant number of black voters tell us that they have gotten Trump ads on their social media platforms. That tracks with our recent poll where nearly 30 percent of those surveyed said that they had been contacted by the campaign.
Many Democrats and their liberal allies downplay the president’s efforts, arguing that not only is black support for the Democratic Party rock solid, but that animosity to Trump among minority voters has reached record highs. Democratic politicians and strategists who act on these assumptions do so at their own risk.
Robert Jones, founder and C.E.O. of the Public Religion Research Institute, wrote in an email that
just ahead of the 2016 election, only 5 percent of African Americans said they thought Trump “understands the problems of people like them,” and 75 percent of African- Americans said they did not know a single person among their friends and family who was supporting Trump; moreover, Trump’s favorability in PRRI polling in 2016 was 7 percent among African Americans.
PRRI’s most recent series of weekly surveys, conducted from late March through December 2019 with a total of 40,000 interviews, show that Trump’s positive numbers among African- Americans, although still low, have more than doubled. Jones pointed out by email that Trump’s favorability rating among black voters overall increased from 7 percent in 2016 to 18 percent in 2019, with a large gender gap; Trump’s favorability rating among black men in 2019 was 23 percent and 14 percent among black women.
Despite this shift, Jones argues that he sees little evidence “that the Trump campaign should expect significant defections among African-American voters in 2020,” noting that
Nearly 8 in 10 (77 percent) of African Americans continue to hold an unfavorable view of the president, including a majority (56 percent) who hold a VERY unfavorable view. Our fall 2019 American Values Survey showed his job approval among African Americans was 15 percent approve, 86 percent disapprove; and among those who disapproved of his job performance, about 8 in 10 (79 percent) say there is virtually nothing Trump could do to win their approval. Perhaps most notably, more than three quarters (77 percent) of African Americans report that they believe that President Trump has encouraged white supremacist groups.
Jones agreed that “the absolute numbers are up a bit” and argued that
the gender gap, and particularly the 23 percent support for Trump among African- American men, is something Democrats would want to keep a discerning eye on, but at this point I would not classify it as an issue about which Democrats should sound an alarm. In my opinion, the issue of turnout and enthusiasm among AAs is a much larger concern than losing voters to the other side of the ledger.
Looking back to 2016, there is data that suggests — although it certainly does not prove — that Trump’s efforts to demonize Hillary Clinton among African-American voters helped to suppress black turnout.
That year, Trump ran ads in battleground states and on Facebook quoting Clinton’s 1996 reference to minorities in organized gangs as “superpredators”:
They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators — no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel.
Trump’s superpredator ads were designed as much to suppress black turnout as they were to actually persuade African-American voters to cast ballots for Trump. One of the more effective ways to suppress turnout is to cross-pressure voters, to make them more ambivalent and less likely to go to the trouble of actually voting.
At a postelection Pennsylvania rally in December 2016, Trump acknowledged the crucial role turnout suppression played in his victory:
We did great with the African-American community. I talk about crime, I talk about lack of education, I talk about no jobs. And I’d say, what the hell do you have to lose? Right? It’s true. And they’re smart and they picked up on it like you wouldn’t believe. And you know what else? They didn’t come out to vote for Hillary. They didn’t come out. And that was a big — so thank you to the African-American community.
There is no question that black turnout suffered in 2016. Take a look at voting in Detroit, a city that is 78.6 percent black.
In 2012, Barack Obama won the city with 281,743 votes to Mitt Romney’s 6,019. Four years later, Hillary Clinton won Detroit, 234,871 to Trump’s 7,682. Trump modestly improved on Romney by 1,663 voters, but Clinton saw a 46,872-vote drop from 2012.
While Clinton would not be expected to match Obama in an overwhelmingly black city, consider the pattern in Ohio’s Cuyahoga County, which encompasses Cleveland. Unlike Detroit, where digital election records go back to 2008, Cuyahoga records go back to 2000, making it possible to compare the vote for Hillary to another losing white Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry.
Here is how many votes Democratic candidates received in the presidential elections from 2004 to 2016: Kerry 2004, 448,503; Obama 2008, 458,422; Obama 2012, 447,254; and Clinton 2016, 398,276. In other words, compared with the three previous elections, the Democratic vote in Cuyahoga County fell in 2016 by roughly 50,000.
There is another, even earlier, warning signal for Democrats concerning Trump’s courtship of black voters: the 2004 Bush campaign.
That year, Bush operatives realized they needed to win every possible vote in battleground states, including winning over socially conservative black voters. To do that, they sent black voters who subscribe to conservative Christian magazines and attend socially conservative churches a barrage of messages, through direct mail, contending that Democrats were intent on legalizing same-sex marriage.
It is hard to gauge from poll data how effective these messages were, but in the key battleground state of Ohio, Bush’s margin among black voters rose from 9 percent in 2000 to 16 percent in 2004; in Florida, by 6 points, 7 to 13 percent; in Pennsylvania by 9 points, from 7 to 16 percent; and in Illinois, by 3 points, from 7 to 10 percent.
None of this data proves that Trump will make significant inroads among black voters this year, but the record suggests that Democrats should be prepared for a tougher fight than expected, both in turning out African-American voters and in winning by strong enough margins to give their nominee crucial backing.
Shropshire, the executive director of BlackPAC, argues that “Trump’s disapproval numbers are extremely high among black voters across the board.” She added that “Black voters are triggered by Trump, and messaging and imagery about him or his campaign has a negative impact.”
Nonetheless, Shropshire cautioned,
eight months of continuous advertising, coupled with the opening of field offices in black communities, could have the intended effect of peeling off enough voters to improve his standing by a couple of points, while raising enough doubt about the Democratic nominee that other voters simply stay home, à la 2016.
The prospect of such a setback, Shropshire noted, shifts the burden back onto Democratic donors and allied organizations to mount a full-court press on those “who voted 3rd party or did not vote in 2016,” in order to avoid a repeat of the election results that year.
Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird, political scientists at Duke and Bowdoin and the authors of a new book “Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior,” argue that Trump’s efforts to win black support will be futile. In a February Atlantic essay, they write:
Political solidarity has been a crucial political asset of black Americans during a long struggle against racial injustice, and a few symbolic gestures or policy initiatives won’t win significant black support for Republicans.
They make an intriguing — and eminently reasonable — case for the strategy Republicans should adopt if they are in fact serious about winning over African-American voters:
If Republicans want black votes, their strategy should be simple: End racial segregation — which not only leads to societal inequities that most African Americans strongly deplore, but also reinforces the social structures and conventions by which black adults encourage one another to vote Democratic.
Continued segregation, they write, plays a crucial role in maintaining black loyalty to the Democratic Party:
Racial segregation — the very phenomenon that created a need for African-American political unity — also allows the group to censure defectors. Because of spatial segregation, many African Americans have social relationships almost exclusively with other black people. As a result, these black individuals then find themselves compelled to either accept the dominant political beliefs of the racial group or risk loss of status within these largely black social networks.
Vincent L. Hutchings, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, noted that the Trump campaign “recognizes that no Democratic presidential candidate can win the White House without near unanimous support from blacks, coupled with relatively high turnout.” As a result, “the real issue is whether he can peel off enough to make a difference, or if he can diminish support for the Democratic nominee.”
While there are “some things that the Trump administration can tout to potentially appeal to a critical slice of black voters, e.g., criminal justice reforms, low unemployment, etc.,” Hutchings argued these issues will not “make much of a dent.” Group loyalties, both partisan and racial, “are far more important. And, these group loyalties — particularly in a general election campaign — are likely to encourage considerable, and enthusiastic, opposition to the Trump campaign.”
Pearl K. Dowe, professor of political science and African-American studies at Emory University, shares Hutchings’s doubts.
“Trump’s outreach is not about picking up a significant number of African-American voters but to message to black voters that Trump may not be as bad as they believe,” Dowe wrote by email.
The Trump campaign could succeed in influencing “a few black voters who might decide to stay home if they feel there isn’t a real option that could positively impact their lives.” But, Dowe argued, “the strong disdain black voters have for Trump” will produce a “higher turnout rate for African-American voters and an overwhelming support for the Democratic candidate regardless of who it is.”
Sekou Franklin, a political scientist at Middle Tennessee State University, is optimistic about Democratic prospects with black voters, but he added some significant caveats in his email:
Blacks believe that this is a do or die election with high stakes, and many see Trump as threat to their long-term livelihood. This message will be reinforced by black leaders, civil rights groups, and opinion makers — and these social pressures matter in terms of consolidating the black vote.
However, Franklin noted, if
Trump were to make inroads among black voters — and this is a big IF — it will be among black men versus black women. Black men voted for Trump at a higher rate than black women in 2016, and black women are the most committed Democratic Party voters.
In addition, Franklin cautioned,
If a civil war breaks out inside the Democratic Party between Bernie Sanders’s supporters and another candidate” the conflict “could cause chaos such that young blacks could choose to stay home and not vote on Election Day, which would give Trump an advantage.
Franklin predicted a replay of 2016 in the event that Joe Biden is the Democratic nominee, with the Trump campaign stressing Biden’s vote for the 1994 crime bill. Both Franklin and Dowe agreed this line of attack was effective against Clinton in 2016, and both argued that it received strong reinforcement via Russian interference:
In 2016, “Trump’s ads and Facebook posts were effective, but they were augmented by an even more effective foreign intervention according to the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report,” Franklin wrote. The Senate Intelligence Committee found that Russia engaged in a massive disinformation campaign, Franklin noted, and “it was extraordinarily important in misleading blacks in order to convince them that there was no difference between Clinton and Trump.”
The Senate Intelligence Committee “found that no single group of Americans was targeted” by Russian operatives associated with the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency “more than African-Americans. By far, race and related issues were the preferred target of the information warfare campaign designed to divide the country in 2016.”
Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California-San Jose, argued in an email that Trump “will have an uphill battle” actually winning over black voters, and the focus of Trump’s effort will
be more on discouraging blacks from voting at all (by trashing whichever Democrat gets the nomination) than on persuading them to show up and vote for Trump.
Not only are African-Americans’ assessments of Trump “overwhelmingly negative,” Jacobson writes, but “most blacks think he’s a racist, and the proportion expressing that opinion has if anything risen over time.” Jacobson cited a series of Quinnipiac surveys that asked black voters whether Trump is a racist. In February 2018,
74 percent of blacks said yes, 14 percent said no. In July 2018, it was 79 percent yes, 19 percent no. In July 2019, it was 80 percent yes, 11 percent no. In a Washington Post/IPSOS poll taken this January, it was 83 percent yes, 13 percent no. There is no sign that Trump has made any progress in persuading the large majority of blacks that he is not a racist.
John McWhorter, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, examined Trump’s prospects for winning black votes from an entirely different vantage point. In an email, McWhorter wrote:
Trump’s racism is less important to probably most black people than it is to the minority of black people in academia/the media/collegetownish circles. Beyond the contingent we today can roughly delineate as “Twitter people,” the idea that someone is immediately disqualified from moral worth by harboring any degree of bigotry is an abstraction. As such, there is a kind of black person — mostly male, I suspect — who connect with Trump’s Alpha Male routine, which has a lot in common with the rapper persona. It is, therefore, not remotely surprising that Kanye West likes him.
Despite this, McWhorter continued,
I do know this: if Biden is the nominee, no. Most voters, of whatever color, vote on the basis of certain gut instincts. Biden appeals to black people partly because of a certain vernacular glint in his eye and partly now because of his connection with Obama. Wielding that will “trump” all but about seven black voters’ affection for Trump’s “swagger.”
In the case of Sanders, McWhorter wrote, it’s “hard to say. Most black people are not leftists” and “my gut tells me” that “most of those unmoved by Sanders would simply stay home rather than go out and cast a vote for Trump.”
One problem facing Democrats and liberals is an overemphasis on what pollsters call the headline or top-line figures in polling reports, which unquestionably show deep hostility to the Trump administration, and inadequate attention to some less prominent details.
A survey of 804 registered African-American voters conducted last month for BlackPAC by Cornell Belcher’s firm, Brilliant Corners Research & Strategies, produced this bullet list of findings:
76 percent of Black voters disapprove of Donald Trump’s job performance, with 65 percent saying they strongly disapprove.
77 percent agree that Trump is a racist with 66 percent saying they strongly agree.
75 percent disapprove of Congressional Republicans with 59 percent strongly disapproving. Also, the majority of Black voters (61 percent) think the Republican Party is also racist.
Further on in the report on the poll, there are some numbers that are less comforting for Democrats. Nearly one out of five, 18 percent, either strongly (13 percent) or somewhat (5 percent) approve of Trump’s job performance.
Even more disconcerting to Democrats: according to the Belcher poll, their party “is underperforming in the generic ballot” among African-Americans. 70 percent of those interviewed said they plan to vote for the Democratic nominee, 12 percent said they plan to vote for Trump and another 12 percent said they will vote for a third-party candidate. Six percent said they were undecided. In comparison, Belcher noted, “Obama got 93 percent in 2012.” Clinton received 91 percent of the black vote in 2016.
In other words — despite Trump’s record in office, describing some white supremacists in Charlottesville as “very fine people”; referring to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries,” and calling Elijah Cummings’s majority black Seventh Congressional District “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” — the numbers in the BlackPAC survey warn that the loyalty of a quarter of black voters to the Democratic Party may be waning.
Assuming that the 2020 election is close, any increase in defections, or a repeat of the relatively low black turnout of 2016, could seriously endanger Democratic prospects. Clearly the Trump campaign understands this, but it remains uncertain whether the Democratic Party does.
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