Democrats Have a Real Problem, Part II
Black voters.
It is no secret the Democratic Party enjoys overwhelming support from black Americans.
Al Gore landed 90 percent of black voters in 2000. John Kerry got 88 percent. Barack Obama raked in 95 percent of the black vote, then 93. Hillary Clinton couldn’t match our 44th President or Gore, but she did match Kerry’s 88 percent. On the Republican side, only an incumbent George W. Bush saw double-digit support from black voters and he checked in with a modest 11 percent in 2004. It’s been reported to death that Donald Trump only managed to sell himself to eight percent of said voters.
The problem, obviously, is that Trump won and is now President of the United States.
It’s a problem because 88 is a very big number. It would be difficult for any politician not named Obama or Oprah to capture more than 88 percent of the black vote. It’s going to be extremely difficult for anyone from this batch of Dem candidates to pull off the trick. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Pete Buttigieg have all had well-publicized struggles appealing to the “black community” whereas Joe Biden’s verbal gaffes spare no identity group. As recently as June, the man was semi-boasting about working with vicious segregationists so, yeah, not wonderful.
It’s a bigger problem because eight is a very small number.
Trump being Trump, it’s not impossible for his support amongst black voters to crater below its 2016 depths. But it’s unlikely, even for Donald. However you characterize his racial brinksmanship in office, from Charlottesville to his immigration rhetoric, it’s hard to argue we’ve seen anything new from Trump in this arena. If you were OK with his behavior before Donnie ascended to the Oval Office, you’re probably still OK with it. Maybe there is a significant chunk of black voters who hoped Trump would clean up his act once in office and will hit eject now that he hasn’t. This seems overly optimistic, though (and the implicit naivete is a bit insulting).
Meanwhile, to build on that little number, all it would really take is a movable message, some sincere outreach, and enough voters sufficiently disillusioned with the donkey party to ignore substantial warts on the GOP.
Well, don’t look now.
Polls are not the end-all-be-all of political indicators, especially in the era of Trump. If ’16 taught us anything, it’s that pollsters find the Orange Combover uniquely befuddling. Whether it’s because a voter’s approval or disapproval doesn’t necessarily correlate to a vote for or vote against, or whether people just refuse to answer honestly about the man, polls focusing on Donnie need to be taken with a grain of salt.
That said, it would be asinine to ignore two much-hyped polls from Rasmussen and Emerson, which show black support of Trump in excess of 30 percent, and a third poll from Marist showing non-white support of Trump spiking. You can slough all this off as statistical noise in polling or dismiss it as further evidence of pollsters’ inability to get a firm grip on Trump, and you may very well be right. Throw a rock and you’ll hit a poll showing embarrassingly little support for Trump amongst non-white voters.
But you may very well be wrong, too.
There are indicators that something real may be driving a surge in black support of the President. Many of them are plowed ground at this point. Trump and his surrogates in the media have made sure anyone willing to listen has heard how the economy is performing for historically underprivileged Americans, a group that includes many black voters. Likewise, they have been promoting the administration’s work on criminal justice reform and opportunity zones during outreach events at historically black colleges and universities as well as black churches.
Finally, a still-tiny-but-significant group of brash and unflinching black personalities has emerged to either openly advocate for the Republican Party or express skepticism regarding Democratic orthodoxy (e.g. Candace Owens, Kanye West, Diamond & Silk, Coleman Hughes, Isaiah Washington, etc.). These new voices often echo the arguments conservative academics like Thomas Sowell and Larry Elder have been making for years i.e. that the Democratic Party is either unable or unwilling to help black voters despite (or because of) enjoying their overwhelming support for decades. They do so, however, with more cultural influence behind the message.
To make their argument, these voices increasingly spotlight the plight of many urban black Americans who’ve seen their situations deteriorate or stagnate under decades of Democratic leadership. While the chorus is bad for Democrats, an objective assessment of the argument is worse because of the socioeconomic realities in cities like San Francisco, Detroit, Baltimore, Washington DC, Chicago, and Philadelphia. If you survey these cities, you cannot deny that:
- Black residents are massively under-represented in the higher-income, lower-crime neighborhoods.
- Black residents are massively over-represented in the lower-income, higher-crime neighborhoods.
- Neither Nos. 1 nor 2 is a recent phenomenon.
- Democrats have been firmly in control of the given city (and often its home state) for decades. For example, not a single city listed has had a non-Democrat as mayor since 1967. That’s over half a century.
Assuming you don’t believe there’s something wrong with urban black populations—and, spoiler alert, you shouldn’t—then the fourth point looms very large. Speaking from intimate knowledge of San Francisco, there is clearly something going very badly wrong there with income inequality along stark racial lines and it’s impossible to see anyone to blame other than Democratic leadership. Especially since the party has controlled California for at least the last 30 years, leaving no viable Republican scapegoat even in the state, let alone the City.
Taken as a whole, this political backdrop might not seem like much and, in truth, it probably isn’t. Millions upon millions of black voters aren’t going to suddenly overlook Trump’s recklessly vulgar (at best) rhetoric and abandon the Dems overnight.
Remember, though, we’re talking about 88 and eight; Trump doesn’t need much.
Dismissing the murmurings of black support for Trump will only work if they are a total mirage, which, to repeat, is certainly a possibility. On the other hand, if they’re real, the cost will be another four years of President Donald Trump.
Given those stakes, it seems prudent to take them seriously, but thus far, that’s not what is happening. This is a real problem.
