My entire adult life—much of which I’ve spent covering politics—I’ve wondered what it must feel like to be one of those voters candidates try desperately to win over. As a Black woman I’ve never experienced this, because both major parties just assume I’m voting for a Democrat. After this election, however, that may no longer be the case. And that’s thanks to Black men.
Before liberal Twitter melts down, yes, I know Democrats have spent billions of dollars targeting Black voters over the years. But those dollars are usually focused on “turnout.” The thinking goes: everyone knows who Black Americans vote for; the only question mark is how many of them will show up at the polls. No one treats the white working class that way. Political operatives spend countless hours trying to find ways to appeal to “Reagan Democrats” and their heir apparent, “Obama-turned-Trump voters.” Then there’s always those “soccer moms” in the burbs who we’re told can sway an election.
But guess who can sway an election too?
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Black Americans. We’ve just rarely been treated that way—until now. After this election, we should be, thanks to polling and predictions that Donald Trump will win more Black votes than previous GOP candidates, and more Black men’s votes in particular.
For all of the outrage directed at Barack Obama over his comments chastising lackluster Black male support for Kamala Harris, more should be directed at the Democratic Party as a whole. Democrats would never have the audacity to say to any other group, “I don’t have to tell you what we’ll do for you. All I have to tell you is that I’m not the other guy and that should be enough. Okay?” And yet this has long been considered an acceptable strategy for Black voter outreach—particularly if Black candidates are running.
That strategy has hit a speed bump this election cycle for a few reasons. The most obvious one is that, despite dire warnings about Donald Trump’s racist past—whether in his treatment of Black tenants, his campaign against the Central Park Five or even his non-plussed, “lovefest” response to the rhetoric at this past weekend‘s rally in New York City’s Madison Square Garden—it turned out his first term as president was not the second coming of Reconstruction. Trump nominated conservative Supreme Court justices hostile to civil rights measures, but we also know that any Republican president have done the same. He continued to make racially offensive comments, but the truth is if you’re a minority, you know some powerful people say horrible things about people like you. They just usually have the decorum and intelligence to hide it.
In essence, Trump turned out not to be the Klan hood-wearing bogeyman that I and many others had feared—rather, just a regular conservative bogeyman.
So while many voters—and many Black voters—will look at Trump and see a bad man, the fact is that if no one voted for bad, or women, the halls of Congress would be sparse.
What seems to be unnerving Democrats is that Black Americans are beginning to focus on issues that matter to them as individuals, not simply issues they have been told should matter to everyone who looks like them. Democrats know this is bad because a number of the issues Harris and her running-mate Tim Walz are struggling to connect with voters on are ones that impact Black people more than others.
It’s hard to channel rage about someone’s rhetoric, no matter how crass, if you are having trouble putting food on the table or gas in the car due to inflation. Illegal immigration strains resources in cities with large Black communities; furor over trans athletes’ inclusion in collegiate sports (and the silencing by liberals of even reasonable queries on this issue) has the potential to impact Black Americans who rely on athletic scholarships as a pathway to higher education—and the middle class. People already struggling to hang on to a lower rung of the economic ladder don’t implicitly hate others trying to get on the ladder themselves. They simply fear that at some point the ladder will break—because it will.
Black Americans have a complicated history with political labels. For decades, many identified as Republicans since that was the party of Lincoln, and his role in ending slavery was a pretty solid reason to inspire loyalty. But Southern Democrats who broke ranks in the Civil Rights era and joined the GOP establishment resulted in a seismic shift in Black Americans’ party allegiance. People like my parents, who grew up under segregation, had good reason to trust the party of LBJ over what became the party of Strom Thurmond.
Decades later, research on younger Black voters conducted with famed pollster (and my former professor) David Paleologos, for my 2008 book, Party Crashing, found nearly a third of younger Black voters identified as Independents. But then Obama ran for President. So it’s possible we are not seeing a shift inspired by Trump, but one that has been brewing for a long time—Obama just slowed it. Why wouldn’t he? You’d be hard-pressed to find a more perfect presidential candidate. He’s one of the most gifted speakers, and speechwriters, to grace the Oval Office. He had a compelling personal narrative that connected with Black elites and the white working class. Most of all, he had his wife. Michelle Obama is who many Black women want to be—and who many Black men want by their side, because she’s the kind of woman whose own greatness can inspire a community organizer to become President.
Kamala Harris does not have the above going for her. She’s an adequate candidate, but no Obama—nor is she Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is on the Supreme Court because she’s practically perfect. And as far as we have come as a society, we are not far enough that imperfect women and racial minorities get the same benefit of the doubt that men like Trump and Bill Clinton do.
All of this brings me to why we should be applauding Black men this election cycle instead of condemning them. They are voting on what matters to them—not simply out of fear, like a lot of Black Americans, myself included, have been conditioned to. In my opinion, this is what true freedom looks like.
