Why more and more black voters are putting their faith in Trump

Like a growing number of black American voters, Roboma Johnson is ending a decades-long family tradition of faithfully supporting the Democratic Party.

His vote in the vital swing state of Michigan, where he works for Detroit’s Veterans’ Affairs office, will go to Donald Trump this November.

Black Americans are often called the backbone of the Democratic Party — 92 per cent of those who voted in 2020 backed Joe Biden, according to Pew Research Center — but polls are finding that some are drifting away, especially black men. A polling average since the start of April puts black support for Biden on 69 per cent and Trump on 18 per cent. In close states like Michigan this could be decisive — in Trump’s favour.

“First of all I’m a [military] vet — the Afghanistan thing was a debacle, it was so messed up,” Johnson said, referring to the chaotic US withdrawal from the country in 2021 under Biden’s leadership.

“Then there’s the [petrol] prices, the food prices, everything’s up. The Democrats are full of it. I’m trying to convince everybody to come out of the old way of thinking — they gotta stop voting Democrat because their momma voted Democrat.”

He was shopping at the Food Pride Market just across the road from the Charles H Wright Museum of African American History in Midtown, Detroit, where Kamala Harris, the first black female vice-president, spoke to an invited audience of black party leaders and entrepreneurs in America’s biggest black-majority city.

“I’m proud to announce we are investing $100 million in small and medium-sized auto supply companies, many of which are black-owned and based right here in Michigan,” said Harris, as she roadtested a message to black voters based around the economy, a marked change from her recent campaigning on abortion rights.

Polls consistently show Trump a long way ahead on stewardship of the economy but Biden’s team remain convinced they can win the argument after avoiding recession, partially taming inflation and achieving record employment. Harris’s speech was peppered with handouts.

“Black Americans are 40 per cent less likely to own a home … So, to help address these disparities in our budget, President Biden and I outlined a blueprint to provide folks who are first in their family to buy a home with $25,000 toward a down payment [and] to give families up to $400 a month to help with a mortgage,” she said, to applause.

Detroit is where the Democrats need to rack up the votes to carry Michigan, a state won narrowly by Trump in 2016 but flipped back by Biden in 2020. Black community activists are worried that the Democratic Party elite are not doing enough to fire up the grassroots organisers who actually put in the legwork convincing their neighbours to vote.

“Right now, I’m going to be honest, I’ve travelled the whole state of Michigan and there’s Trump signs everywhere, outside of Detroit and the suburban areas,” Tashawna Gill, head of the Michigan Democratic Party Grassroots Caucus, said.

“The way Biden wins is getting out the vote in Detroit, and in Detroit, there’s over 260,000 people who are registered to vote that just don’t vote. So we need to wake up that voter and do the groundwork,” she said.

Gill said it was Harris’s second Michigan event of the year after a speech in Grand Rapids in February, again mainly to the elite of the party. Biden is due to make his first Detroit speech of the year next weekend at the city’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) annual dinner, with tickets starting at $150 each.

“We all in that room [where Harris spoke], we’re on board. But it’s the lost people. How do we connect to them?” Gill said. “They need to reach the grassroots, the person that knocks doors needs motivation. If they get to meet the president or vice-president, guess what they’re going to do out there on those doors.”

Keith Williams, chairman of the Michigan Democratic Black Caucus, called Harris’s speech a “good first step” but said party leaders had to improve their messaging to compete with Trump.

Williams said that black voters he spoke to were still talking about the stimulus cheque they received during the pandemic that Trump insisted had his signature on. Some also appeared receptive to Trump’s message that he was being unfairly targeted by the legal authorities just like many black Americans.

“One issue that they have always been talking about is that Donald Trump gave them a thousand dollars,” Williams said. “Donald Trump is so clever with the King’s English. He knows brothers have been incarcerated, and that’s who he’s trying to appeal to. He is saying ‘I’m just like y’all’.”

Trump’s appeal to some black voters should not come as too much of a surprise, according to Steven Greene, professor of political science at North Carolina State University.

“The thing that a lot of people tend to forget is this idea that, because they are reliable Democrats, black voters must be very liberal. But the truth is, white Democrats are more liberal than black Democrats,” Greene said. “So it’s probably easier [for Trump] to pick off minority voters on some of the issues where the Democratic Party has moved further to the left, where there is a lot of attention — immigration, abortion, culture wars.”

Mildred Gaddis, a Detroit talk radio host with a mainly black audience, sees black women sticking with the Democrats even as some men desert them. “We saw black women and some white women take Joe Biden over the finish line in 2020 and I think those women are probably going to stay where they are,” she said.

“Some black men have taken a temporary leave of their senses — black people as a whole have found little or nothing to be excited about Donald Trump. We’ve never had in contemporary history a president who has been so divisive, who talks about people from various parts of the world as if they were subhuman, who’s been disrespectful to women. It’s just so un-American.”

Harris has become the target of negative Republican campaigning, not least with warnings that a vote for 81-year-old Biden is really a vote for Harris to be president because he will either die during a second term or retire because of failing health.

“That is the concern that many white Americans have,” Gaddis said. “Some people are choosing not to say it publicly because they think it’s impolite but I think that there is a real concern about this country getting a black woman as president.”

She said the answer, at least in Michigan, lay with a huge push to get out the vote in Detroit. “It means that the Democrats must better their best,” Gaddis said. “The energy that they demonstrated to get people out to the polls before doesn’t come close to the energy they’re going to need to win this one. They’ve got to get the numbers up.”

A Washington Post/Ipsos poll of voting intentions by age showed older black Americans were more likely to stick with Biden than younger generations. Asked who they would definitely or probably support, 86 per cent of those over 65 said Biden and 5 per cent Trump, with support falling for Biden to 78 per cent for ages 50 to 64 and rising for Trump to 12 per cent. In the 18 to 29 age range, 46 per cent backed Biden and 18 per cent Trump.

Kharri, a young black man shopping at the Food Pride Market, said: “I know some of my friends who will vote for Trump, a lot of people say Trump got us stimulus money. Other people say it’s because of war, when Trump was in the presidency certain people wouldn’t mess with us.”

While young voters generally appear turned off by Biden’s age and inability to communicate with them, another explanation for the age disparity among black voters was given by Adolphus Belk, political scientist at Winthrop University, who told Al Jazeera: “I think a certain generation of black voters don’t have the direct experience with the civil rights movement or the knowledge of those things, because to them that’s not memory, it’s history.”

At the Food Pride Market, customers watched the vice-president’s 30-vehicle motorcade speed away from the museum where she spoke. Johnson, the former Democrat voter, was sceptical about the historic choice of a black woman as vice-president. “I think they’re just using her to get black votes,” he said.