Trump’s toughest sales job yet
Donald Trump’s recent interest in attracting black voters has two goals, both of which seem like extreme long shots at this late stage of the campaign season. First and foremost, Trump seeks to prove to appalled white voters — including many conservatives — that he isn’t a horrible, divisive bigot. That’s smart politics: Republicans long ago gave up on winning any significant percentage of black voters, but recent credible polls that show Trump logging 1% or even 0% of the black vote signals a level of outright racial hostility that makes many whites uncomfortable.
Bombing with black voters is also a proven path to defeat. According to an analysis of the 2012 election by Amy Walter and David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, “African-American voters accounted for Obama’s entire margin of victory in seven states: Florida, Maryland, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia.”
Nobody in politics, including Trump’s new campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, thinks there’s a realistic Republican path to victory that includes writing off all seven of those states. At a minimum, the bombastic billionaire will need to try to match or exceed the anemic 6% of the black vote earned by GOP candidate Mitt Romney in 2012. He’s off to an awful start. Consider the key line of Trump’s recent speech in a suburb of Lansing, Mich., spoken to an all-white audience but aimed at black voters: “You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58% of your youth is unemployed — what the hell do you have to lose?”
That’s some pitch. Trump’s oft-repeated claim that 58% of black youth are unemployed is an outright falsehood, a number ginned up by lumping in high school and college students who aren’t seeking work and therefore aren’t counted in unemployment statistics. (Using Trump’s madeup definition, the comparable “white youth” rate is 48%, according to PolitiFact.)
Using the actual definition of unemployment, the rate for blacks 16 to 24 years old was 18.7% as of May — still too high, and double the 9.1% rate for whites in that age group. But Trump’s credibility as an economic savior ought to start with accurate numbers.
He also should break with the longstanding myth in Republican circles that the Democratic Party simply uses “free stuff” — welfare and other other government programs — to hoodwink, hijack and lock black voters into long-term dependency.
The truth is much simpler: Republicans began losing black voters in 1964 when the party’s standard-bearer, Barry Goldwater, opposed passage of the Civil Right Act, the crowning political achievement of the movement led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. That law, and the companion Voting Rights Act of 1965, are the modern building blocks of full citizenship for black Americans, and Republicans of the Nixon era and beyond made a fateful error by opposing those rights and welcoming into its ranks the Southern segregationists who, until then, controlled much of the Democratic Party.
Today, there are more than 10,000 black elected officials at every level of government, including the White House. Virtually all of them are Democrats, reflecting a great blown GOP opportunity.
Trump — like Sen. John McCain and Romney before him — could be making inroads with black voters with a simple promise to uphold and strengthen the Voting Rights Act. Even better would be a promise to oppose a shameful, long-running legal and legislative effort taking place in GOP-controlled statehouses around the country to make it harder for blacks to get registered and vote.
That might start to move the needle for Trump. What the hell does he have to lose?
An ineffective appeal to black voters