Photo: Then-President Donald Trump meets with African American leaders in 2020. Credit: Flickr/Trump White House Archived (public domain)
In the final months before the presidential election, much media ink has been spilled over Black voters “turning away from Biden”, “abandoning the Democratic Party” and “backing Trump in record numbers.” In fact, a recent NAACP poll found that 26% of Black men under the age of 50 said they supported Donald Trump over Kamala Harris in the election. But what is behind the phenomenon of Trump gaining support among some sectors of the Black community? And does he really offer any solutions for the crises facing Black America?
When Harris first replaced Joe Biden as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, there was jubilation in the liberal corporate media. Harris’ ascendance injected new energy into the Democratic Party and its affiliates, as she replaced an unprecedentedly unpopular and incapable candidate. Two months later, the dust has settled and concerns have reemerged for the Democratic Party about their ability to defeat Trump in November. Harris and Trump appear to be in a dead heat among likely voters.
Black voter turnout is of particular concern to the Democrats. The Democratic Party has long relied on support from a supermajority of support from Black voters to win a presidential election. In 2020, roughly 87% of Black voters cast their ballots for Biden. Every Democratic presidential nominee since 2000 has received an even higher share of the Black vote.
Recent polling data indicates that only 82% of likely Black voters in key swing states support Harris, and she is struggling in particular with Black voters under the age of 50 and Black men. Polling data should be taken with a grain of salt, but Harris will need high turnout and support from Black voters in order to win the election, and there is enough smoke to indicate that this may be a problem for her campaign. Why is it that Harris, who would be the country’s first Black woman president if elected, is struggling to garner support among Black voters despite facing a candidate as vile and racist as Trump?
A party of broken promises
Harris’ challenges with Black voters are reflective of a broader challenge facing the Democrats. Another recent poll of Black voters found that nearly half of people surveyed believe that we “need a viable third party to compete with the Democrats and Republicans.” The majority of people surveyed said they feel anxious about the country’s current economic situation and expressed support for reparations, emergency rental assistance programs, and policies to address police brutality.
The Democratic Party has paid lip service to each of these issues in recent years, but has failed to back up their rhetoric with action. The party is a political chameleon, expressing support for the most popular progressive causes of the day while campaigning, only to reverse course once elected or when the political winds change. Harris herself personifies this general trend. For example, Harris has built her political career on the foundation of her 15 years working as a prosecutor. In that time, she worked to needlessly keep thousands of people imprisoned (defying a Supreme Court order to reduce overcrowding in California prisons), prosecuted working class parents whose children had low school attendance, and mocked people who call for our society to build more schools and less jails.
Despite her “tough on crime” roots, Harris expressed support for the movement to defund the police in 2020. Yet, in the past four years, the Biden-Harris administration has done the opposite. Instead, they have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into expanding the country’s police forces. In her current campaign, Harris has said nothing about defunding the police or addressing mass incarceration. On the contrary, she is leaning into her history as California’s “top cop” in an effort to peel away some of Trump’s support base. Harris has similarly flip-flopped on the issues of reparations, immigration, fracking, and healthcare. Harris and the Democrats’ empty and inconsistent rhetoric on key issues is a weakness that Trump attacks them on.
Trump’s campaign is also bolstered by the fact that many Black people, and working class people in general, are economically worse off now at the end of Biden’s administration than they were at the end of Trump’s administration. This is not because Trump took any real interest in the needs of working people, but because the COVID-19 pandemic forced the federal government (both late in Trump’s administration and early in Biden’s) to implement an expanded social safety net in 2020 and 2021 in order to avoid a complete social crisis. This included a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures, expanded unemployment benefits, and a child tax credit to provide financial relief for families with children. The expiration of these policies led to, for example, the largest increase in child poverty in the country’s history in 2022. This combined with extreme inflation over the past several years has created a deep economic crisis for many working families.
Trump is attempting to opportunistically use this economic crisis to his advantage as he campaigns. He places the blame at the feet of the Democratic Party and uses classic divide and conquer tactics to pit oppressed people against each other — most notably arguing that Black communities are struggling because the Democrats have allowed immigrants to take “Black jobs.”
But what program does Trump really offer for Black America?
Trump’s actual record with Black America
Even before his political career, Trump’s racism was well-documented. In 1973, his company, Trump Management, was sued by the Justice Department for systematically discriminating against prospective Black tenants in New York City. In 1989, he took out an ad in the New York Times calling on the death penalty to be used against the Central Park Five — five Black and Latino teenage boys who were falsely accused and convicted of rape in New York City. He has publicly said a litany of racist things since launching his first presidential campaign in 2015.
But Trump’s racism is not simply about his personal attitudes. His political program has nothing to offer Black America. In 2017, Trump and the Republican Party nearly succeeded in repealing the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The ACA is deeply flawed because it allows healthcare to be treated as a commodity (something to be sold by private companies to make a profit) rather than as a human right that the government has an obligation to provide. But the ACA is an improvement over the healthcare system that existed in the United States prior to its passage. If it were repealed, an estimated 3.1 million Black Americans would become uninsured. In the presidential debate on Sept. 10, Trump revealed that he has no plan to replace the ACA if it is successfully repealed — just “concepts of a plan.”
And while some may argue that Black unemployment decreased under Trump — dropping from 7.5% when he took office to 5.4% in August of 2019 — whatever gains made were completely wiped out by the arrival of COVID-19. The Trump administration’s gutting of the Center for Disease Control and overruling of its public health measures and testing guidelines completely undermined pandemic response, leaving frontline workers — the majority of whom are Black — without protection, facing even greater risk of exposure. In fact, according to census data, Black people were disproportionately affected by the pandemic compared to their white counterparts and more likely to lose employment income and fall into debt to pay for household expenses due to COVID-19.
Trump also spearheaded the repression against the uprising against racism and police brutality that occurred in 2020 after George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis. Protesters in Washington, D.C. were violently removed by police from Lafayette Park so that Trump could do an infamous photoshoot in front of a nearby church. He organized a meeting with governors all across the country and demanded that they “dominate” protesters, and he threatened to deploy the military to repress protests.
Trump’s political program is essentially to help the rich get richer while stoking culture wars between different groups of working class people so that we blame each other for the struggles we face in life, rather than blaming the capitalist system. The biggest accomplishment of his presidency was the passage of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Those tax cuts for the capitalist class are a significant factor in why so much more wealth has flowed up to the wealthiest Americans since 2017. The vast majority of Black Americans are working class, and Trump has no solutions for us.
The real path to Black Liberation
The fact that Trump’s appeals have succeeded in garnering him some limited support among Black Americans is a serious indictment of the Democratic Party. And for the millions of Black people who will vote for Trump in November, many millions more will not vote at all because they do not have faith in either the Democrats or Republicans to deliver on their promises. This is all an indication that people know that things in our society must change.
The long-standing Black support for the Democratic Party is rooted in the Democrats’ reputation as the party of the New Deal, workers rights and labor unions, and civil rights. In reality, each of those things were products of struggles organized by Black workers, and working people of all races. In all of these cases, both the Democrats and Republicans were obstacles to progress until the strength of the movements and instability within U.S. society forced them to make concessions.
The Black Liberation struggle has faced some of its most significant defeats when trying to integrate itself within one of the capitalist parties. Reconstruction, the attempt by Black people to economically and politically reorganize the South after the Civil War, was housed within the Republican Party. That effort was ultimately crushed in 1877 when the capitalist interests that control the Republican Party betrayed Reconstruction. In the 1960s, Black organizers in Mississippi tried to make the Democratic Party more aligned with the Civil Rights Movement by organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. That effort exposed the racist nature of the party’s elite and advanced the struggle, but was ultimately crushed by the Democratic Party establishment.
The Black Liberation struggle has made the most progress when Black people have organized independently of the Democrats, Republicans, and the capitalist class that those parties represent. As referenced above, over half of Black people recognize the need for a viable third party. In addition to having strong community groups and labor unions, we need a party as a vehicle to fight for political power. In contrast to the capitalist Republicans and Democrats, that party must be socialist. Black America is primarily a working class community, and socialists organize to put political and economic power in the hands of the working class.
In 2024, Claudia de La Cruz and Karina Garcia are running a socialist campaign for president and vice president of the United States. In the leadup to November and beyond, we must fight the misleadership of both the Republicans and Democrats and build a movement that not only identifies the problems that Black America faces, but proposes real solutions.
