President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the race and endorse Kamala Harris makes Harris – the first black and female vice president – the heavy favorite to become the new Democrat nominee. While conventional wisdom suggests that Harris would be able to reverse Biden’s dramatic polling collapse with black voters over the past four years, polling data indicates that a Harris-led ticket might actually continue former President Donald Trump’s surging popularity with that demographic.
Throughout Biden’s presidency, Harris has remained consistently less popular with blacks than Biden. A 2021 poll showed that just 38 percent of blacks believe Harris cares “a lot” about black people – compared to 78 percent who said the same of Obama.
According to a CBS News poll out this week, Trump is performing about the same against Harris as he was against Biden among black voters, winning about 21 percent of the demographic group.
That’s bad news for Harris, as some polls have indicated that Trump’s support among black voters has more than doubled since 2020 (up from 9 percent) while Biden saw a stunning 12-point drop (81 percent to 69 percent). Among younger black voters (ages 18 to 49), Trump now enjoys a historically unprecedented 25 percent support. Even the far-left Washington Post was forced to admit that Trump is well on his way to setting “modern-day records” with black voters this fall.
“No Republican presidential candidate in the past 50 years has approached receiving 20 percent of the Black vote,” the Post reported last year. “Since Republicans took 18 percent in 1972 and 16 percent in 1976, according to exit polls, they haven’t taken more than 12 percent of Black voters. Their average share over the past 50 years is 9 percent—about half of where Trump currently sits in the polls.”
While no one expects for Trump to win the black vote outright, even a five to 10 percent bump from 2020 could propel him to a sweeping electoral victory.
Some of Trump’s strength with black voters can likely be attributed to his campaign’s aggressive outreach and presence at events specifically targeting black voters. In June, for instance, he hosted a community roundtable discussion at a black church in Detroit in which he condemned Biden for being the “worst president for black people”—specifically noting the extent to which the border invasion has harmed the African American community.
Harris, as Biden’s vice president and Border Czar, owns all of these failures as well.
Trump also addressed the Black Conservative Federation in February, where he promoted his first-term accomplishments and articulated the high stakes of the November election for black communities.
“I’m thrilled to be here tonight with Crooked Joe Biden’s absolute worst nightmare: hundreds of proud, black, conservative American patriots,” he said at the event. “If you want strong borders, safe neighborhoods, rising wages, good jobs, great education, and the return of the American Dream, then, congratulations, you are a Republican. It’s pretty simple.”
Notably, under the Biden-Harris administration, real wages for black Americans have fallen by nearly six percent. The overwhelming majority of new jobs created under Biden have also gone to foreign-born individuals, many of whom are almost certainly illegal aliens. Naturally, Trump has been hammering these points on the campaign trail.
The Republican nominee has also been regularly touting his impressive history of achievement for the black community, which includes record low African American unemployment and poverty rates, a record increase in black homeownership, and funding for historically black colleges and universities.
Why, then, are so many black Americans flocking to the Trump campaign now, as opposed to this time four years ago?
In reality, many signs point to the fact that Trump’s success with black voters did not occur in a vacuum, but has been long in the making.
In the early months of 2020—before COVID-19 reached America’s shores and the nation’s Democrat-run cities descended into anarchy—Trump might in fact have been well on his way to achieving a historic share of the black vote. Despite Democrat-induced racial division that caused many voters to retreat back into their familiar ideological camps following the death of George Floyd, Trump still increased his share of the African American vote by 50 percent compared to 2016 (going from 8 percent to 12 percent)—an extraordinary feat given the context in which it occurred.
If it had not been for the so-called “summer of love” and the “fiery but mostly peaceful” protests that wrought havoc on American cities and communities for months on end, it is not unreasonable to speculate that Trump might have even more significantly outperformed his 2016 performance with black voters. As such, black voters’ recent movement away from Biden could reflect a more permanent shift toward Trump’s populist Republican Party that has been long in the making.
Barring another violence-fueled stunt by the left in the final stretch of this year’s campaign, Donald Trump could very well be on the verge not only of winning a historically large share of the black vote, but also of ushering in a political realignment that could shatter the entire Democrat coalition and transform American politics for decades to come.
“The Republican Party is bigger, stronger, more vibrant and more united than ever, ever, ever before,” Trump declared at a campaign rally in Doral, Florida, just days before he faced an attempted assassination. “Every day, we are welcoming more Americans to our ranks. African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, young people, old people, union members, non-union members—basically everyone is joining our movement because it’s a movement of common sense.”
If he manages to win a share of the black vote that even comes close to what current polling reflects, Trump’s words could be truer than anyone expects.
Aaron Flanigan is the pen name of a writer in Washington, D.C.