In 2016, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump asked Black Americans a simple question: “What do you have to lose?”
Trump initially posed the question during a campaign stop in North Carolina. At his next speech in Michigan, Trump wanted Black voters to consider how much African-American communities have suffered under Democratic control.
Trump cited poverty, high unemployment, failing educational institutions, and violent crime. Trump reiterated that, “If you keep voting for the same people, you will keep getting exactly the same result.” He cautioned that Democrats would choose to hire refugees over unemployed Black youths who had become refugees in their own country.
Democrats condemned Trump for presuming that all Black communities were impoverished and claimed that Trump was hopelessly out of touch with Black voters.
According to Pew Research, during the 2016 presidential election, Black voter turnout fell for the first time in 20 years. The 7-point drop from prior presidential elections was the most significant on record. Despite the dip in Black votes, Trump received 8% of the Black vote—the highest level of support for a Republican candidate since George W. Bush in 2000.
Evidently, a few Black people, primarily men, accepted Trump’s challenge.
During Trump’s administration, inflation was at 2%, wages adjusted for inflation were rising, Black unemployment was at its lowest point in American history, and the economy as a whole thrived.
Trump lost reelection to Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
In defeat, Trump received more Black votes than expected. Democrats denied that Trump’s Black support increased significantly. According to the AP VoteCast survey, Trump had gained only 2 percentage points from 2016, while Edison Research’s 2020 surveys show that 87 percent of Black votes went to Biden, 12 percent to Trump, with 18 percent of Black men and 8 percent of Black women voting for Trump.
Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters openly chastised the 18 percent of Black men who did not vote for the Democratic candidate. She said, “For those Black young men who think they can align themselves with Trump, not only are they terribly mistaken, but I will never, ever forgive them for undermining the possibility to help their own people and their own community.”
The Biden administration failed to meet the economic aspirations of their own constituents. Surprisingly, President Biden decided not to run for reelection, and Vice President Kamala Harris emerged as the Democratic presidential nominee, but at this point in time, 73 percent of Americans believed the country was heading in the wrong direction.
The Harris campaign turned Kamala into the candidate for change, as if she were running against Trump in 2020, and she was never a part of the Biden administration. If their campaign strategy was to distance Harris from Biden’s policies, she needed to explain Biden’s failures and how she would fix them.
Especially concerning the economy.
Harris’ campaign suffered a setback when she proposed a federal ban on price gouging in the food industry to lower grocery costs. Both liberal and conservative economists stated Harris’ idea amounts to government price fixing and will create more problems than it solves, potentially leading to food shortages. When asked about Harris’ proposal, Jason Furman, an economic advisor during the Obama administration, said, “This is not sensible policy, and I think the biggest hope is that it ends up being a lot of rhetoric and no reality.”
A recent Howard University study in swing states—Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia—found that the majority of Black voters favored Harris, but 18% of Black men supported former President Trump due to his economic policies.
Since Democrats don’t believe there are Black men who will vote for their own economic interests instead of voting for the candidate that looks like them, they have concluded that there must be a more nefarious reason for Black men not to support Harris. Former Democratic President Barack Obama believed that these Black men weren’t behind Harris because they exhibited the same toxic masculinity as Trump, and he felt it was his responsibility to expose it to the public.
Obama remarked that Black women have always had our back. They raised us, worked hard, and made sacrifices. When the system failed us, Black women marched and protested on our behalf. Now you (n-words) are thinking of not voting or even endorsing someone that has a history of disparaging you (n-words). Now you (n-words) believe that putting women down is a sign of being a man. That is not acceptable.
What wasn’t acceptable to the 18 percent of Black men who support Trump’s economic policies was when Harris was asked—what would she have done differently than President Biden during the past four years?
And Harris said, “There’s not a thing that comes to mind.”
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