Trump has been courting the “Black” vote, and the mainstream media is rather mindlessly playing along.
Trump went to Michigan over the weekend, and the headlines were abuzz. The New York Times heralded Trump’s “Pitch to Black Voters in Detroit” noting he met with voters at a Black Church and cast Biden as “Anti-Black.”
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Trump believes the polls, but they’re likely off
Trump is famously obsessed with polls, and he is apt to take them at face value, even when they are potentially rife with bad data and could lead the campaign to bad decisions about where to focus.
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The “poll of record” from the New York Times / Siena, as well as other big polling outfits, have shown some wild numbers in Black support for Trump, with recent surveys showing some 23 percent favoring him over Joe Biden in a two-way match up. If that seems low, it would actually represent a historic realignment and comprise a devastating blow to the traditional Democratic base, where the Republican typically has received less than 10 percent.
But from where I sit, it’s probably a big overstatement of actual Trump support among Blacks. Modern polling suffers from embarrassingly low response rates, and minority voters are especially unlikely to respond to pollsters (my emphasis - b). As former pollster Adam Carlson noted in a recent podcast appearance (my link - b), the “historical weirdness” in recent polls—which rather noncredibly have Trump winning a greater share of Black voters since the Civil Rights Era—could be better explained by the tendency to “overweight” certain of these respondents.
Here’s how that happens. Pollsters reach certain groups of voters far more easily, including the college-educated, whites, the elderly, liberals and women. They have quotas for these types of respondents, and those get filled up quickly. But then, according to Carlson, the callers are left scrambling to find other types of voters to meet their goals, including Black, Hispanic, conservative and younger voters. These groups are generally far harder to reach. Those that the callers do finally reach tend to be fewer in number, especially among young and minority voters, so they often have to be weighted more heavily to be “representative” of their share of the population.
The problem is, by this process you could wind up weighting very atypical voters: the young, conservative, minority and infrequent voters. And that quite possibly could be what is going on here.
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Trump’s campaign stop at a “Black church” this weekend produced a crowd with many white faces, and Black influencers apparently needed to be brought in from afar. These included Michaelah Montgomery, the woman who supposedly without prompting cried out at a Chick-fil-A appearance in Atlanta “We support you!” and even got a unstaged hug from the ex-president—only to be unmasked as the head of a conservative group that works with professional troll Candace Owens.
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Will this effort succeed?
Big, historic shifts in voter sentiment are possible. But they aren’t very likely to be so gigantic after four years, absent some major event or development.
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Zooming out helps make this clear. When larger-sized samples of Black respondents are included in surveys, the numbers from these voters simply don’t look as favorable to Trump. As the Brookings Institute reported, a recent, in-depth survey of African Americans by the Pew Research Group indicated that Trump scored five points lower than the New York Times battleground poll indicated, at 18 percent rather than 23 percent, with 78 percent indicating support for Biden. That is close to the normal range of between 8 and 15 percent for the Republican candidate, according to Howard University political science professor Marcus Board, Jr.
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Recent, larger scale surveys of Black voters by USA Today / Suffolk University in the critical swing states of Pennsylvania and Michigan show that Trump has not made many gains with voters there.
Kuo concludes:
If Trump truly wants to play in this field and woo larger numbers of Black voters, he’ll have to do better than endorsements from Black felons he pardoned and 200 largely non-Black people in a Black Church with Ben Carson as the featured speaker.
Thinking African Americans would vote Trump over Biden or even stay home was a Republican pipe-dream and probably racist thinking at that; that collectively they’re too stupid to see through such a dumb ploys.
Trump did perform stronger among black voters in the 2020 election than any Republican since 1980. He captured 12 percent of the black vote. Anything above single digits is a strong performance for a Republican candidate. IIRC, he also got the highest percentage of the Hispanic vote for any Republican candidate since 2004.
READING, Pa. (AP) — The pastor opened with a prayer in Spanish, asking that the Lord’s spirit and guidance direct the proceedings without offering an English translation. Most of the around 50 attendees were white and weren’t appearing to follow along, though they knew enough to sing out “Amen!” at the end.
Thus began former President Donald Trump ‘s campaign teaming up with the Republican National Committee and Pennsylvania GOP to open a “Latino Americans for Trump” office Wednesday in the town of Reading.
Trump laid out three foundational principles that would guide his deal with African-American voters: safe communities, great education and higher paying jobs. In order to accomplish these goals, Trump promised more police on the streets, proposed designating “blighted communities” with “disaster designation” in order to spur their rebuilding and swore to stop illegal immigration
So the Trump campaign has designated three principles to assist the black community…
Safer communities
His solution is more police in Black communities. I see an issue with this.
Better education
On its surface this seems like a good idea. But we all know the MAGA cult hate education of any sort on principal. So this will be strangled in it’s crib it’s even really a thing.
Higher paying jobs
Trump solution is to stop illegal immigration. From my reading, what he’s essentially saying to the black community is this…
“Hey you know all those s***** backbreaking jobs illegal immigrants have to take? Those should all be yours! You guys like working in fields right?”
Yeah, I think it’s whistling past the graveyard to assume that Trump’s support among Black and Hispanic voters is an illusion. And he doesn’t need to win these groups – just improving his performance in 2020 by a couple points among Black voters in key states like Michigan and Pennsylvania could have an outsized impact.
It has been pointed out that Trump carries around printouts of things favorable to him like a security blanket. He even has an aide whose job it is to provide them to him. I’m sure that polls favorable to him are included in that.
Note that this has to be seen through a lens of what is “better” to the right wing, particularly the Christian nationalists. It’s going to be a lot of revisionist, heavily-censored, and politically-motivated stuff that will dumb down and indoctrinate kids. (Remember folks, if a Republican accuses Democrats of something bad, it’s probably because the Republicans are the ones actually doing it, and that includes teachers brainwashing kids into political ideologies.)
You can guarantee that such “education” isn’t going to paint minorities in a very favorable light, if it even acknowledges their existence.
That said, there’s no doubting that Trump’s support among minority voters has been higher than it was for, say, Romney and McCain. The exaggeration is that there’s been significant recent increase … that some kind of watershed becoming apparent.
Just 44,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin kept Trump from winning reelection. That was less than half a football stadium’s worth of voters. As you point out, just a couple extra percent among any racial group might have pushed him over the finish line.
To respond to the OP, yes, there’s probably no indication of any major recent uptick in minority support for Trump. But he’s already polling dangerously high among such groups to begin with.
There is evidence, and the sources you cite show that Trump is displaying a pretty significant increase in support among Black voters from his actual 2020 performance. The NYT poll has him at 23% and Brookings at 18%, both of which would be solid increases. Also, I don’t understand how you can say USA Today/Suffolk show that he has not made gains in MI and PA, when the article itself says Trump is polling 15% in Michigan and 11% in Pennsylvania compared to single-digits in 2020. The counter to the poll results seems to be that polling is broken and anecdotal evidence regarding attendance at black churches.
I wouldn’t characterize these gains as a “watershed,” but in battleground states that could come down to a few thousand votes that increase in support among Black voters could make all the difference.
The other thing I think Democrats often miss is that for many people, the big R word isn’t race, but religion.
The plural of anecdotes is not data, but I attended a Christian conference in Corpus Christi three years ago (at the behest of a family member) and the audience was perhaps 70% Hispanic/other minorities. It was heavily MAGA/Trump. Almost all of the speakers were Hispanic. It was the most right-wing event I’ve ever seen in person. The consensus of almost every single person there, apparently, was that religion trumps race. Nobody mentioned a thing about race or Trump’s racism or anything. It was all about how the evil liberals were the opponents of God’s holy kingdom and standing in the way of righteousness.
What progressives often overlook is that a fanatically-religious Hispanic, black or Asian voter thinks that they have more in common with a similarly-religious-fanatic white voter than they have with someone of their same minority race who is an atheist or un-religious.
Kuo concedes that Trump has made gains, but apparently considers them exaggerated in popular media narratives about current state of the general election. Kuo instead characterizes it as having not made “many gains”.
The narrative I’ve heard about Black support for Republicans (not necessarily Trump) is that they’re tired of shitty public schools and agree with GOP efforts to divert state funding to private schools they believe will offer better education.
There’s no question Republicans want to do that. Whether it would actually benefit Black families is another question entirely.
Except that can’t be it, either, because Donald Trump claims no religion, and fits perfectly the standards of the most common religions of being who you shouldn’t vote for. The only religion involved here is the Cult of Trump-Worship, which just pushes the same question back one level, to why people join that cult.
California’s “Proposition 8” (essentially a ban on same-sex marriage) had significant support in Hispanic and African-American communities.
The conventional wisdom was that it was religiously-fueled social conservatism at play.
Trump need not be religious to sing from the hymnal of – not the faithful, per se – but the social conservatives.
Their faith may be the shibboleth used to get their attention, but the fundamental ‘intolerance’ seems to win out.
I’m also reminded of a great exchange from “West Wing:”
Trump’s exhortation to the African-American community (“What the hell do you have to lose?”) was, to me, as shocking an example of white privilege as the very essence of his campaign – Make America Great Again.
How far do you think Obama would have gotten implying that the USA isn’t great?
The media is desperate to try to find daily happenings upon which to peg horse race articles. Trump is normally very obliging in providing these, even if he sometimes has to be dragged there. (Hint: trial.) He’s a showman; he vastly prefers show to politics.
How little this matters we found out in 2020. Biden “campaigning from a basement” as he put it, drove him crazy. How can one win an election on mere policies? They’re not what’s important to him. He will always see a fake show, like the one in Detroit, as 1000 times better than a real event. He might get talked back to at a real event, as happened at the Libertarian Party Convention and at the business leaders roundtable.
Either way, the media will file a landfill’s worth of articles. They assiduously read each other’s. Nobody else does. And they don’t swing voters. Voters ask themselves if they were better four years ago. It became a cliche because of its truth. Somehow voters believe that Trump will do better on the economy than Biden. That’s reflected in the polls.
Polls this early do not predict elections; they indicate where time and attention and money needs to be put. Biden needs to get his achievements into peoples’ memories. His teams are going out into states and doing the low-level contacts that receive a tenth of a percent of the attention of stunts. If he and they are successful they will bring out a larger committed vote. And in November not even the people who did articles on it will remember Detroit.
