By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Contributing Columnist
Two issues occurred throughout the area of 48 hours that elevate a crimson flag for Democratic presidential contender Kamala Harris.
The primary was the strict dressing down by former President Barack Obama of Blacks at a Harris marketing campaign rally in Pittsburgh for even considering doing what he termed the unacceptable. That isn’t voting. Obama has learn the information clippings and heard the chatter from many Blacks, particularly some Black males, who profess both apathy towards the election or, to Obama’s horror, an affinity for Donald Trump.
The second potential crimson flag was a New York Instances ballot that reiterated what numerous different polls have discovered. Black assist for Harris is comfortable. How comfortable? It discovered {that a} gorgeous 15% of Blacks mentioned they’d again Trump and that Black assist for the Democrats had plunged for the reason that 2020 presidential election.
Whereas the Instances ballot could also be questionable, even overblown, Obama’s public reprimand of attainable non-voting Blacks or these Blacks enamored of Trump isn’t. Trump, after all, takes particular enjoyment of claiming that Blacks love him as a result of, as he fraudulently and insultingly places it, he’s achieved extra for them than any president since Abraham Lincoln.
Nonetheless, there’s purpose to fret about this deeply troubling chance of measurable Black voter defection from the Democrats.
In Trump’s presidential victory in 2016 and loss in 2020, he did marginally higher with Black voters than earlier Republican presidential candidates. That alone was not a lot trigger for concern, not to mention trigger to get out the fear beads that Trump, and the GOP had made any type of actual breakthrough in prying Blacks away from the Democrats.
Regardless of all of the supposed grousing amongst Blacks about Joe Biden in 2020, there was no break within the stable Democratic ranks by Blacks. Focus teams of Black voters through the election that yr confirmed that whereas various Blacks continued to voice criticism and concern about a few of Biden’s insurance policies, and even dredged up his enthusiastic assist of the punitive Clinton Crime Invoice, nearly none mentioned that they had any love, like of, or want to throw their lot in with Trump.
But, the cruel actuality was that hundreds of Blacks did vote for Trump in 2020. Their causes had been simple to elucidate. Trump touched a tiny nerve along with his shout that poor, underserved Black neighborhoods are supposedly a large number with awful public faculties, excessive crime and violence, and persistent joblessness and poverty.
He dumped the blame for that squarely on the Democrats who run and have run most of those cities for many years. Trump doubled down on that slam with a handful of rigorously choreographed appearances with high-profile Black preachers at title Black church buildings.
That was simply sufficient to take the onerous and sharp edge for some Blacks off the almost-set-in-stone picture of Trump as a man with a white sheet underneath his go well with.
There was extra. Way back to the 2004 presidential election, there was an indication that various Blacks, most notably Black conservative evangelicals, had been deeply vulnerable to conservative pitches on some points. A substantial variety of them voted for George W. Bush that yr and that was sufficient to present him the cushion he wanted to bag Ohio and win the White Home.
The identical polls that election that confirmed Black’s prime concern was with bread-and-butter points — and that Bush’s rival Democrat rival John Kerry was considered because the candidate who may ship on these points — additionally revealed {that a} sizable variety of Blacks ranked abortion, homosexual marriage and faculty prayer as precedence points. Their concern for these points didn’t come anyplace near that of white evangelicals, however it was nonetheless larger than that of the final voting public.
In 2008 and 2012, Black Republican advocacy teams ran advertisements hammering the Democrats once more for his or her alleged indifference to and outright aiding and abetting Black struggling within the inside cities, and touting the GOP’s emphasis on small enterprise, faculty alternative and household values as the perfect path to Black development. That pitch has at all times had some attraction to many Blacks. And although it could by no means set off any type of stampede to the Republican Occasion by even most of those conservative-leaning Blacks, it was sufficient to take a few of the sting out of the GOP’s bare historical past of racial abuse.
Trump understood sufficient of that historical past. He tailor-made the few pitches he made to Blacks for his or her votes to replicate the inventory Republican pro-business, free enterprise and the wholesome financial system line as one thing that Blacks additionally may and will embrace. He’s utilizing the identical template in 2024 with the added twist that he’s supposedly a sufferer of a horribly racially skewed prison justice system, simply as Blacks are.
The overwhelming majority of Blacks will stay dutifully loyal Democrats and can again Kamala Harris to the hilt. They acknowledge the hazard a second Trump presidency represents to civil rights and social justice progress in America.
Nonetheless Obama was proper to fret. Even a marginal enhance in Black Trump backing may damage. We pray that it received’t occur.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an writer and political analyst. He’s the writer of a number of books on race and politics in America. His weekly The Hutchinson Report is streamed on Fb Livestream.
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