Blacks for Trump? Really?!

A closer look at the Trump Campaign’s efforts reveals flimsy support from African Americans.

Photos from the Roundtable panel in Detroit: Russ McNamara, Detroit

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.”

In its headlines, the Washington Post dutifully reported that “Trump portrays rampant crime in speech at Black church in Detroit.” 

But isn’t the real story that the “Black church” Trump went to was actually…filled with a lot of white people? Reporter Russ McNamara of WDET Detroit Public Radio noted of the crowd,

Best I could figure - given that the folks on either side of the stage were all Black - it was a 50-50 split at best. Of the 8 Black Trump voters I talked to, just one was from Detroit and zero were congregants.

Here is a video of Ben Carson speaking at the event, if you’d like to see the crowd make-up for yourself.

And if you’re going to report Trump’s claims about “rampant crime” in Detroit, shouldn’t you also point out that the claim is patently false? As Mark Jacob, a former editor of the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times noted, the city just hit a 53-year low in murder rates. Yet the Washington Post suggests “rampant crime” is a thing, when it’s just another Trump lie.

Today I want to talk about the awkward phenomenon of a racist like Trump courting the Black vote. Why does he believe the polls, and could they be right? How is he going about trying to woo Black voters? (Spoiler alert: It’s super cringe.) And in the end, is it at all likely to have any impact on the election?

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.

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. As former pollster Adam Carlson noted in a recent podcast appearance, 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.

Right or wrong, Trump and his campaign believe these numbers, and they appear to be doubling down on them. And they’re going about it in a super awkward—even dumbfounding—way.

Courting the Trumpy Black vote

Trump has launched an outreach effort called “Black Americans for Trump.” It features endorsements from Black politicians, former athletes, and Black entertainers. And like groups such as “Gays for Trump,” it has an outsized presence in traditional media and on social media, but it’s a paper tiger when it comes to actual numbers.

Trump’s racism runs so thick he believes he can gain younger Black male support by trotting out truly criminal elements. Recently, he’s appeared on stage with two Black rappers who are facing gang-related charges. He’s also touted the endorsement of former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who was convicted on 24 felony counts but whose sentence Trump commuted.

This effort dovetails other Trump Campaign “outreach” efforts to the Black community, which the Times in its usual soft-pedaling merely called “clumsy” instead of “offensive.” These included:

• Hawking gold “patriot” sneakers to young, minority men;

• Claiming people of color would relate more to him after his mugshot was taken;

• Saying Black people like him more now because he also has been unfairly targeted by the justice system; and

• Accusing high profile Black prosecutors of “reverse racism” by going after him because he’s white.

Trump has also glossed over his own clear record of racist behavior, including his infamous attack upon the Central Park 5, which included him taking out a full page ad in the Times calling for their execution. (They were later exonerated of all charges.) He is busy sanitizing his administration’s record of supporting white supremacists, backing brutal police behavior toward minority communities, and engaging in massive legal efforts in 2020 to throw out the largely Black vote in places like Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia.

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.

In political parlance, this is called “astroturfing”—making something appear grassroots when it is in fact all fake and manufactured. The press ought to be reporting how Trump can’t fill a Black church in Detroit even though he supposedly has 23 percent support, not repeating his lies about rampant crime and Biden being “anti-Black.”

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.

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.

Black approval ratings for Biden also measured far higher than the general population, with 55 percent giving the President positive marks compared to the high 30s for the rest of the public. In the Pew Survey, some 83 percent of Black registered voters identified as Democratic, with 12 percent Republican or lean Republican. As the Brookings Institute noted, this is “well within the level of party identification the majority of Black voters have felt toward the Democratic Party over the last 30 years,” where between 83 percent and 86 percent of all Black voters have identified as Democrats since 1994.

It added, “There is no evidence that these patterns have changed significantly since the 2020 election and, absent some major historical event not currently on the horizon, they aren’t about to in 2024.”

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. A poll of 500 registered Black voters—far more than you’d see in a typical national poll—revealed support for Trump remains at levels consistent with historical patterns: around 10.8 percent in Pennsylvania and around 15.2 percent in Michigan. It’s important to note that this poll was of “registered voters,” but among “likely voters” these numbers will look far worse for Trump. 

Where Biden has work to do is with possible defections to third party candidates, including Robert Kennedy, Jr. and Cornel West, who are each averaging around seven percent. Further, a large number of voters—13.8 percent—remain undecided. This may indicate a general sense of dissatisfaction with voter choices, rather than a focus on the truly binary question between Biden and Trump that the country will face in November.

Historically, Democrats have “come home” to the party as the election nears, and third parties have wound up registering in the low percentiles. If Black voters truly dislike Trump and want their votes to count, they will cast ballots for Biden, even if reluctantly.

Here are the results from Pennsylvania:

And here are the results from Michigan:

These surveys, which only polled registered Black voters, eliminated the problem Adam Carlson identified with “upweighted” minority respondents, who are more difficult to survey than white respondents.

In sum, the Trump Campaign aiming for low turnout, young Black male voters is a curious tactic that’s unlikely to pay high dividends. It does indicate that they may be worried that they simply cannot find more non-college educated, white MAGA voters in these critical states, and that they need to grow Trump’s base of support from other groups. Still, courting the voters of people least likely to participate in the election and break your way in the end seems a waste of time and energy.

We of course shouldn’t discount the fact that young, Black males do feel disaffected and disinterested in the election and presently fairly sour on Joe Biden. But we should also remember that the Biden Campaign has incredible support from powerful Black allies, including former President Barack Obama, that it has yet to fully deploy. It has built a powerful ground game in the battleground to get out the vote, while Trump still has a fairly nonexistent ground operation.

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.

And the media? They’ll have to do a much better job of reporting on the absurdity of Trump’s efforts to win Black votes. It’s an obvious astroturf operation, and it is a failure not to report it as such in the headlines.