African-American Voters Won't Abandon President Biden
Despite the journalistic chatter and speculation...
The latest media freakout involves, of all things, the utterly ludicrous claim that Donald Trump is cracking 20% of the African-American vote en route to winning the Presidency. Cracking, please. This is the man that calls the African-American vote “the black people.” But then, when has Trump ever been comfortable among African-American people — unless, of course, they are hot, biracial models (and even then, he couldn’t help but make racist comments about it). Of late Donald, in an attempt to bolster his miniscule African-American vote to offset the losses he will undoubtedly suffer from suburban women post-Roe v Wade, made this racist tell in comparing his own legal issues — federal election obstruction, tax fraud, etc — to the historical legal struggles of African-Americans. Incidentally, Trump’s upcoming election obstruction trial includes as a co-conspirator the disgraced former “America’s Mayor” Rudy Giuliani, who incarcerated hundreds of thousands of people of color during the years of “stop-and-friskiness.”
But here we are in a moment of exigency where Trump getting 20 percent of the African-American vote is considered a not implausible notion. And we wonder why journalism has fallen out of the public favor and trust. “Across a range of media this month you can read about President Joe Biden’s declining support among Black and Hispanic voters,” is how Francis Wilkinson of data-driven Bloomberg sees it. But sometimes common sense should prevail. We will not entertain the possibility that these sadistic thought-experiments and distortions of polling are committed by journalists to provoke “chatter” and thus engagement on social media?
Heaven forfend! “Four recent polls — Quinnipiac, Economist-YouGov, New York Times/Siena and Marquette University Law School, however, have shown Trump with at least 20 percent support among Black adults,” Dan Balz, Chief correspondent of the Washington Post tells us. “Now a new Fox News survey shows him with the support of 26 percent of Black voters.” Never mind the strangeness of that polling number, or even the polling organization — Fox? — supplying that data. “If accurate and if the numbers held until November, Trump would receive the highest share of the Black vote for any Republican presidential candidate since Richard M. Nixon in 1960.”
OK, Boomer.
As Trump’s legal “challenges” threaten to undermine his already anemic numbers, particularly with suburban women (where he has never been that popular), the former President is pivoting, awkwardly, towards the African-American vote. Like when, in 1997, Giuliani, in political trouble abandoned by Al D’amato, tried to mend fences by speaking at a Harlem church (that went well …). It was then taken — as it should be with Trump — as a sign of deep desperation. Immediately below is a Table from the Center for American Politics — very reputable — compiling polls, 221 days out from the general election:
These numbers, to be sure, can only be properly construed under the category of Felliniesque. Does anyone out there, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, believe the New York Times/Siena poll (above) saying that Trump has 23% of the black vote? These numbers can only be properly construed under the category of funky. What, pray tell, does a hard-right Republican having 23% percent of the African-American vote 220-something days before a general election even mean?
Further — are these numbers being viewed in light of the fact that Trump is running against a Democratic candidate with an actual African-American running mate? One that is a May regular on the speaker’s circuit at HBCU graduations? Sidebar — Can you even imagine Trump at an HBCU graduation? Borborygmous would be the the boos from the crowd. And he, supposedly, is capable of getting a fifth of the black vote? (Averted Gaze) It is hard to come up with a better example of the misuse of polls, which, at their finest, are signposts for campaigns and, at their worst, this thusness.
Cornell Belcher, an African-American pollster, has been no less than exquisite in explaining just how the journalistic class has misused polling in their horserace coverage in order to gain eyeballs and clicks. The misuse of polls by media organizations can, at best, lead to anxiety and despair among voters and, at worst, lead potential voters to stay home in November out of a sense that the election is already over. And yet every week it seems that some journo somewhere is taking a provocative data point — hundreds of days before the election — and turning it into a post that gains traction across social media Belcher writes in Daily Camera about what he calls “the horse race number”:
Working on campaigns, I often tell my clients that the horse race number — the one that shows how one candidate is faring versus another — is the least important one in a poll. That number is what campaign researchers are spending time and resources to understand how to change, and we do change it. Indeed, a presidential campaign will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to change that number. So as a pollster, I am not fixated on where my candidate is in the head-to-head number; I’m focused on the issues and messaging that will allow me to move that number.
In a two-person race, no candidate with less than 50% support is really safe. If you don’t have a majority, there are enough voters out there who can be persuaded and determine the outcome. So while the headlines scream that Trump leads Biden and the chattering progressive class panics, it really doesn’t matter much that Trump leads right now. The lead at this point, when the arguments and contrasts of the campaign have yet to be made, does not predict the ultimate winner.
That’s particularly true in a presidential contest. Ronald Reagan trailed early on in the public polling before his reelection, as did Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama. But in the end, those national campaigns found compelling contrasts, effective attacks on their opponents, a story about their accomplishments in office and a vision for the future that moved voters toward them over time.
Thank you, Mr. Belcher. Further, if I had Bitcoin for every time a cable talking head lamented that Trump is making “big gains” among African-Americans, especially African-American men. Who are exactly these African-American Trumpists? And, are these talking heads actually going out to communities of color? “I’m not panicked that he is down 15 points from where he should be with these voters,” Belcher told AP. “Because I’ve seen this play before. I’ve seen it with Barack Obama.”
A little history here about the African-American vote. African-Americans were originally with the Republican Party so long as it was the party of Lincoln, who favored extending voting rights and declared Emancipation from slavery. But that changed around 1924, when the advent of the New Deal shifted alignments and the Great Migration North — to cities like New York, Chicago and Detroit — were taking place. Nixon’s Southern Strategy once and for all concentrated the African-American vote in the Democrat party,
American history, as has often been said, moves in waves — of progress and of backlash. Reconstruction; backlash; civil rights; backlash, for example. Most recently the electorate is getting more — not less — diverse, which probably contributed somewhat to the backlash of the Trump election in 2016.
Jump to 2000, when Bush the Younger lost 9 to 1 among African-Americans. Four years later, against Kerry, Bush showed modest gains. “In a black turnout that surged about 25 percent from 2000 to 13.2 million voters, 11 percent of it went to Bush, compared to a paltry 8 percent in 2000,” wrote Clarence Page in The Chicago Tribune. The black vote has been, over time, increasing.
Then, in earnest, voter registration went into overdrive with the advent of the Obama campaign in 2007-8. “The levels of participation by black, Hispanic and Asian eligible voters all increased from 2004 to 2008, reducing the voter participation gap between themselves and white eligible voters,” the Pew Research Center wrote in 2009. “This was particularly true for black eligible voters. Their voter turnout rate increased 4.9 percentage points, from 60.3% in 2004 to 65.2% in 2008, nearly matching the voter turnout rate of white eligible voters (66.1%).” By Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012, 66.2 percent of eligible black voters cast a ballot for the then-President, more than 9 to 1. In 2016, against Hillary Clinton, Trump got 9 percent of the African-American vote. And, to conclude this brief recent historical tour of the African-American vote, Black voters in 2020, voted 92%-8% for Biden.
So there is — and lets be clear here — no giant sucking sound of African-American voters sprinting to register for the Grand Old Party. And why would there be? More or less the percentage of the African-American vote has been increasing throughout American history, despite the willful obstructions placed in our way. Trump is not, rest assured, going to get 20% of the black vote. How can someone that has been so willfully dismissive of the Civil Rights division at the Justice Department do so? How can the guy who played both-sides with Nazis in Charlottesville expect to reach 20 percent? In what metaverse does that even happen? The best that the Republican party under Trump can do is to build greater obstacles to black voter enrollment and turnout in order to suppress and depress it by legal, though shameful means.
This is Trump speaking at something called the Black Conservative Federation gala in South Carolina last month:
“Unlike racist Joe Biden, I have spent my entire life working hand in hand with Black Americans to create jobs, build buildings, invest in our communities and expand opportunities and freedom for citizens of every race, religion, color. I built a lot of buildings. I want to tell you, a Black worker is a great worker. You’ve done an incredible job.”
You can tell Trump is desperate here. Because The Great Liar has not only not worked hand in hand with Black Americans, he was actually sued by the Justice Department in 1973 for housing discrimination. From Jonathan Mahler and Steve Eder of the New York Times:
“His father was his idol,” (Stanley Leibowitz, the rental agent) recalled. “Anytime he would come into the building, Donald would be by his side.”
Over the next decade, as Donald J. Trump assumed an increasingly prominent role in the business, the company’s practice of turning away potential black tenants was painstakingly documented by activists and organizations that viewed equal housing as the next frontier in the civil rights struggle.
The Justice Department undertook its own investigation and, in 1973, sued Trump Management for discriminating against blacks. Both Fred Trump, the company’s chairman, and Donald Trump, its president, were named as defendants.
It would not be the last time that the Trump family would serve as defendants. The Biden campaign at some point in the very near future will use their hearty campaign war chest to remind us of the “law-and-order” candidates troubled history with the Justice Department.
There is no actual evidence that the African-American vote is migrating to Trump. In fact, there is much evidence there to contradict the notion altogether. Look to the primaries, which, though concluded before they really began, offer rich in examples of the historic alignment of the Democrats and African-American voters. In Georgia’s March 10th primary, for example, about 95% of African-Americans voted for Democrats despite a new spate of restrictive voting laws. “The overwhelming support for Democrats either contradicts claims by former President Donald Trump that he is gaining support from Black voters or those voters failed to turn out to vote in the primary,” Phoebe Quinton of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution concluded.
Amen.
“Our main findings document the rise of the (Global) South in global finance since 2001. First, the South has increased its participation in global investments both as a share of the total and relative to world GDP. South-to-South investments have been the ones that grew the fastest throughout the sample, followed by North-to-South and South-to-North investments, outpacing North-to-North investments (Figure 1). Investments involving the South grew particularly fast after the 2007–08 global financial crisis. By 2018, South-to-South investments and those between the South and the North had risen to 8% and 26% of global investments, respectively. Links established since 2001, capturing the growth in the extensive margin, accounted for a sizable share of the South-to-South investments by 2018. Country-to-country regressions confirm that these trends are shared across a wide range of countries in the South.” (CEPR)
“Rep. Mike Gallagher’s (R, WI-8) surprising announcement late last week that he would resign on April 19 combined with an earlier and also surprising resignation announcement by now ex-Rep. Ken Buck (R, CO-4) is going to have the effect of further reducing the Republicans’ already-slim House majority. In the 2022 election, Republicans won a 222-213 majority. In any Congress, the actual membership will vary slightly, as vacancies will crop up for one reason or another.” (Sabatos Crystal Ball)
“Last September, when Bob Menendez, the senior senator from New Jersey, was indicted—along with his wife, Nadine—in a garish bribery scheme involving gold bars and a Mercedes-Benz, one of the first elected officials to call for his resignation was Andy Kim, a congressman who represents the state’s Third District. The next day, Kim announced that he was running to replace Menendez in the U.S. Senate, anticipating a head-to-head challenge in the Democratic primary. But then, several weeks later, Tammy Murphy, the wife of Governor Phil Murphy and the most powerful woman in the state, announced her own candidacy for Senate. Elected officials, Party bureaucrats, and labor unions endorsed her right away. ‘When the First Lady came into the race,’ Kim told me, ‘I had several senior Democratic leaders in the state call me and encourage me to drop out.’” (E Tammy Kim/THY)
“U.S. COMMANDOS HAVE shown a special interest in strengthening ties with one of the most corrupt, abusive, and repressive regimes on the planet. The delivery of aid by Special Operations forces to the coastal African nation of Equatorial Guinea last month followed pilgrimages to the country’s pariah president by top U.S. officials.The move came amid shifting West African geopolitics. A Pentagon report last year mentioned Equatorial Guinea as the potential site of a future Chinese military base. At the same time, U.S. relations with longtime allies in Central and West Africa have frayed, often in the aftermath of coups d’état by American-trained military officers. The aid to Equatorial Guinea appears to be the latest facet of a U.S. charm offensive to woo the country’s president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, a tyrant now in his sixth decade in power, as the U.S. has lost influence in the African Sahel. ‘We hope that this donation is the beginning of additional cooperation,’ said Commander Michael White, the defense attaché to the U.S. Embassy in Equatorial Guinea, after U.S. Special Operations Command Africa spearheaded a modest donation of humanitarian aid to the tiny, oil-rich central African nation … ‘This seems to run counter to every value that the Biden administration publicly espouses when it comes to democracy, human rights, and anticorruption,’ said Cameron Hudson, a former Africa analyst at the CIA, now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. ‘The administration is doing everything it can to maintain a military foothold on the continent. And if we don’t already have a foothold, to create one. So establishing or deepening relationships with particularly odious regimes like Equatorial Guinea are not off the table.’” (Nick Turse/The Intercept)