Black Voters Are Coming for Trump
They shouldn’t lose hope. They are at the heart of the fight to take back America.
June 3, 2020
Joe Biden would be retired if not for the black vote. Black voters made him the Democrats’ presidential nominee. I
n November, the number of black voters who turn out in the crucial swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin is likely to be the deciding factor in the election. That means black voters, 12 percent of the national electorate, are set to pick our next president.
First, he (Trump) wants to attract more than the 8 percent of the black vote he won in 2016. He likes to cite low unemployment statistics as evidence that he is a good president for black Americans. Of course,
black unemployment fell to 7.5 percent from 16.8 percent under President Obama; it fell two more points under Mr. Trump before skyrocketing in the course of the pandemic.
White women moved away from the Republican Party in the 2018 midterms in part in reaction to Mr. Trump’s bully-boy behavior and the racial division he encourages. They didn’t want to be seen as some of those “fine people,” as Mr. Trump described the white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va.
After three years of Mr. Trump as president, 65 percent of black people say it is a “bad time” to be black in America,
according to a January Washington Post-Ipsos poll.
The sense of racial isolation is fueled by the high incidence of hate crimes against black people — as well as against Latinos and Jews.
“The disproportionate impact of Covid-19 crisis is only having the effect of increasing people’s disdain and distrust of Trump and the entire administration,” Adrianne Shropshire, the executive director of BlackPAC, a super PAC focused on black Democrats,
told The New York Times.
After Mr. Arbery was stopped while jogging on a residential Georgia street and shot to death for no apparent reason, Mr. Trump said it was “very disturbing” but added that the gunmen might have reacted to “something that we didn’t see on the tape.”
The refusal to condemn the attack outright led black activists to complain that even in the face of what looked like murder, Mr. Trump felt the need to nod to his “largely white coalition,”
Black Americans have had enough. They have an explosive, personal investment in defeating Mr. Trump in 2020.
More than 80 percent of them say Mr. Trump is a racist. For them, defeating him is the civil rights movement of 2020.
If black voters returned to the polls at their 2012 levels, the Democratic presidential candidate “would win the Electoral College by 294-244,” according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress.
Polls show most independents have already decided they can’t support Mr. Trump. Now they have seen the tape of Mr. Floyd dying. Violent protests may make them anxious, but they have had their eyes opened to injustice.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/o...ote-trump.html