Donald Trump’s history of racism is breathtaking. His track record of prejudice is so prodigious that keeping all of the incidents straight is difficult: There’s the Central Park Five, the “Muslim ban,” his response to Charlottesville. “Shithole” countries and lamenting that Nigerian immigrants won’t “go back to their huts.” The fabrications about Haitians eating pets. There’s Sunday’s horrifying Madison Square Garden rally, where Trump surrogates made racist comments about Harris and Puerto Rico. The list goes on. And grows. You would be hard-pressed to find a more brazenly racist major American politician on this side of the Civil Rights Act.
Future historians will therefore marvel at the fact that Trump has increased his support among African Americans since he was elected to the presidency in 2016. No serious person expects Trump to win anything close to a majority of Black voters in this year’s election. But months upon months of polls—from a welter of different pollsters—predict Trump substantially growing his share of those voters, particularly young Black men. In a recent poll of Black voters, 58 percent of Black men said they’d support Vice President Kamala Harris if the election were held today, and 26 percent said they’d vote for Trump—a percentage that would represent record-setting support for a Republican candidate.
Other forms of evidence—shoe-leather reporting, first-person testimony, 16 years of declining Black male support for Democratic presidential candidates, the presence of the Black manosphere—suggest that we are in the midst of a substantial racial realignment. If Democratic candidates have long benefited from Black magic—the near-universal support of African Americans—the spell has been broken for a growing share of Black men. Now Democrats, including the Harris campaign, are trying to figure out how to cast a new one. But the chances of stopping the realignment appear slim, because Black voters are both more culturally conservative and more economically liberal than the current version of the Democratic Party.
[Read: Why do Black people vote for Democrats?]
Lauren Harper Pope, a political and communications strategist, told me politicians need to start thinking of Black men—in contrast to more reliably Democratic Black women—as politically independent. “I’ve been telling people for months: Black men, Hispanic men, minority men are independent voters,” she said. “People need to look past the concept that if you’re a Black man with a college degree, you’re going to vote for a Democrat. No. Absolutely not. I’ve got plenty of Black friends who have college degrees who are from the South, not from the South, whatever, who are genuinely concerned about things the Democratic Party is doing.”
Sharon Wright Austin, a political scientist at the University of Florida, also believes that some level of realignment is happening. “I do think we have to take the polls seriously, because they are showing that Donald Trump is getting more support among Black men,” she told me. “I don’t know if the numbers are going to be as high as the polls indicate. I do think there are going to be some African Americans who are going to vote for Trump because they find him to be a better candidate.” Austin noted that the strength of the economy under Trump, as well as some Black men’s discomfort with Democratic positions on cultural issues such as abortion, trans rights, and immigration, are likely driving some of this defection.
Other political scientists who specialize in Black politics contest the idea that Black voting habits are meaningfully changing. Justin Zimmerman, a political-science professor at the University of Albany, said that the kind of frustration Black men are exhibiting isn’t new. “It’s not so much that there’s no Black political disenchantment with the Democratic Party,” Zimmerman told me. “That’s always been there.” He said that most rankled African Americans will likely hold their nose and vote for a candidate they may not be enthusiastic about, something Black voters have had to do throughout American history.
Christopher Towler, who directs the Black Voter Project and is a partner at Black Insights Research, also dismissed the notion that African Americans are undergoing a meaningful transition away from the Democratic Party. He argues that polls frequently rely on small sample sizes of Black voters, which makes getting a representative cross-section of the Black community impossible.
“You have a sample that has [18 to19] percent support for Trump, but it has a nine-point margin of error,” Towler told me. “That means it could be as low as 10 or as high as 27 percent. That tells us absolutely nothing.”
Although this point about sample size is reasonable and was echoed by other political scientists I interviewed, it fails to explain why those sample-size errors would lead to polling consistently skewed in one direction. And, more important, it discounts historical trends: Democrats have been bleeding male Black voters for nearly two decades.
Some degree of realignment was probably inevitable, given the widening mismatch between the worldview of many Black men and that of the Democratic Party. Many Black voters are quite conservative, especially culturally, and they may hold views on issues like abortion and gender that are more at home in the Republican Party. In June, the Pew Research Center released what is perhaps the most comprehensive recent survey of American opinions about fraught cultural issues. Conducted when Joe Biden was still the Democrats’ presidential nominee, Pew’s polling illustrates notable contrasts between the views of Black and white supporters of the Democratic candidate. On an array of cultural questions, Black Biden supporters were not simply more conservative than their white peers; they were more conservative than any other demographic group in the Democratic coalition.
Pew found that Black Biden supporters were the least likely to answer questions about immigrants favorably, trailing white supporters by double digits. Similarly, Black Biden voters were about twice as likely to say that “an emphasis on marriage and family makes society better off” compared with their white counterparts. And whereas only 32 percent of white Biden supporters agreed that “gender is determined by a person’s sex assigned at birth,” 64 percent of Black Biden voters said they agreed. Black Biden voters were also much less likely than any other group of Biden voters to say they were comfortable with they/them pronouns. When the questions turned to religion, the differences were even more stark: 35 percent of Black Biden voters said “government should support religious values” and more than half—a higher percentage than among Trump supporters —said “belief in God is needed for morality.” Only 7 and 8 percent of white Biden supporters, respectively, said the same. A different Pew survey from the same period also found that majorities of Black men and Black women agreed that “the government [promotes] birth control and abortion to keep the Black population small.” Again, these polls were not conducted when Harris was the candidate, but there is little reason to believe that cultural attitudes among Black Democrats suddenly changed when she became the nominee.
Since Trump’s rise, Democrats have seemed to assume that if they yell about his racism, misogyny, and authoritarian tendencies enough, African Americans will be scared or shamed into voting for Hillary Clinton, Biden, and now Harris. Eight years ago, the Clinton campaign dropped an ad tying Trump to Ku Klux Klan members; after she lost the election, she warned that Trump supporters wanted to take away the rights of Black Americans. For this year’s presidential race, the Harris campaign has commissioned former President Barack Obama to scold Black men for allegedly being too sexist to vote for the first Black woman president. Harris is hammering messages about fascism, racism, and democracy in the campaign’s final week even though polls have shown that these talking points are among the least popular with voters of all kinds—to say nothing of the fact that Black voters have been moving toward Trump despite nearly a decade of those messages being shouted from a bullhorn.
Democrats seem unwilling to believe that a small but significant portion of Black voters might be willing to overlook Trump’s racism, and are even drawn to aspects of his nationalism, xenophobia, and traditionalism. When Biden won in 2020, many liberal talking heads cheered that “Black voters saved democracy” and heaped praise on Black “superhero women” as part of an outpouring of awkward gratitude that several Black pundits noted was a little fetishistic and traded in “magical negro tropes.” Some progressives seem to imagine minority voters as mythical beings, electoral angels who radiate light and virtue. In their minds, the Democratic Party is a Marvel movie coalition of Nice Whites and Saintly Blacks and Browns who team up every four years to try to save the country from the Bad Whites: the hodgepodge of unsavory working-class whites and car-dealership-owning whites and Christian-nationalist whites who make up Trump’s coalition. But people of color are people, not saints or saintly monoliths, and the cost of this idealization has been a certain blindness in Democratic circles to the actual, rather than imagined, political landscape within minority communities. And it’s not just African Americans: Other male minority voters are also generally less liberal than white Democrats. Recent polls found that 44 percent of young Latino men back Trump and more than half of Hispanic men support deportations of undocumented immigrants (51 percent) and building the border wall (52 percent). These men are more than twice as likely to say Trump, compared with Biden, helped them personally.
The question, then, is what to do about these growing tensions between the cultural views of Black Americans and other minority voters and those of the Democratic Party. Despite their competing views on realignment, the experts I spoke with largely agreed that Democrats tend to take Black voters for granted, and that the Harris campaign should have started doing targeted outreach to Black voters much sooner. “What Black folks want is an identifiable, explicit agenda,” the political scientist Sekou Franklin told me, one that appeals to their unique needs and interests. He added, “That’s what they’re seeing with LGBTQ+ persons … That’s what they’re seeing with women, so they want the same thing.” Others said that some in the Black community think too much money is going to help foreign countries overseas, while Black Americans—especially Black men—struggle at home. Black Americans are among the least supportive of sending military aid to Ukraine and Israel.
[Daniel K. Williams: Democrats can’t rely on the Black Church anymore]
What Harris has offered to combat these perceptions has been less than inspiring. Trying to court young Black men with policy proposals on crypto, weed legalization, and mentorship programs—the focus of a recent policy rollout—is both confusing and condescending. One ambitious proposal, handing out loans to Black Americans on the basis of race, is very possibly illegal, and thus likely an empty promise. And although Harris has moved to the right explicitly and implicitly on a number of cultural and economic issues, there is approximately zero chance that she can outflank Donald Trump on problems such as immigration, no matter how much she wants to expand the border wall. Anyone whose primary concern is the southern border is almost certainly going to vote for the former president. So if shifting right on cultural and social issues is unlikely to move the needle, what will?
The answer is staring Democrats in the face. If Black voters are perhaps the most culturally conservative wing of the Democratic coalition, they also tend to be among the most progressive on economic issues. A survey this summer found that Black voters are almost twice as likely as other racial demographics to say that “the government should provide more assistance to people in need” and also more likely than any other group to say that Social Security benefits should be expanded. And roughly two-thirds of African Americans say that the government should have a more active hand in solving problems. Another survey found that a majority of African Americans have critical views of the country’s prison system (74 percent), courts (70 percent), policing (68 percent), big businesses (67 percent), economic system (65 percent), and health-care system (51 percent). These are issues that the Democratic Party can credibly claim to be better at addressing than Republicans.
Black voters’ realignment seems less like a sea change than something akin to coastal erosion: a grinding process that can be stopped with concerted collective effort. Democrats cannot out-Republican the Republicans on cultural issues, and it would be a fool’s errand to try. What they can do is spend the final days of the campaign playing to their strengths: loudly championing the kind of bold populist vision that is actually popular with voters, including African Americans.