By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Contributing Columnist
In a victory lap pep talk to his supporters at the Palm Beach Florida County Convention Center the night of his presidential election triumph, Donald Trump crowed, “This campaign has been so historic in so many ways. They came from all quarters, union, non-union, African American, Hispanic American, Asian American, Arab American, Muslim American.”
The eye catcher in his checklist of purported backers were African Americans. A year ago, when Trump formally announced his presidential bid, if he had claimed that African Americans would be an important part of his support base, it would have drawn hearty laughter. No one was laughing about that claim on the night of his victory.
His boast of Black voters’ support magically transformed into numbers that had real significance for the election, and maybe beyond. Depending on which poll one believes, Trump got between 12% and 20% of the overall Black vote.
Numbers wise that translates out to more than half a million votes. That topped the total that other Republican presidential contenders in the past few presidential elections received.
The drop off in the Black vote for Vice President Kamala Harris is easy to explain. One, she was not Barack Obama. He was Black and his campaign became a virtual holy crusade by Blacks to make history and put one of their own in the White House.
Harris would have made history as the first woman president. But as the exit polls showed that was of only marginal importance to Blacks.
The brutal reality was that thousands of Blacks did vote for Trump. Their reasons were just as easy to explain.
He touched a tiny nerve with his shout that poor, underserved Black neighborhoods are a mess with lousy public schools, high crime and violence, and chronic joblessness and poverty. He dumped the blame for that squarely on the Democrats who run and have run most of these cities for decades.
Trump doubled down on that slam with a handful of carefully choreographed appearances with high-profile Black celebrities. It was just enough to take the hard and sharp edge for some Blacks off the almost-set-in-stone image of Trump as a guy with a white sheet under his suit.
There was more. As far back as the 2004 presidential election, there was a sign that more than a few Blacks, most notably Black conservative evangelicals, were deeply susceptible to conservative Republican pitches on some issues. A considerable number of them voted for George W. Bush that year and that was enough to give him the cushion he needed to win Ohio and the White House.
The same polls that election that showed Blacks’ prime concern was with bread-and-butter issues — and that Bush’s Democratic rival John Kerry was viewed as the candidate who could deliver on those issues —also revealed that a sizable number of Blacks ranked abortion, gay marriage and school prayer as priority issues. Their concern for those issues didn’t come anywhere close to that of white evangelicals, but it was still higher than that of the general voting public.
In every presidential election going back to the Bush campaign in 2000, Black Republican advocacy groups ran ads hammering the Democrats for their alleged indifference to and outright aid and abet of Black suffering in the inner cities, and touting the GOP’s emphasis on small business, school choice and family values as the best path to Black advancement.
Trump hammered on the notion that he would bring a nirvana of prosperity back to America. Many Blacks bought that pitch, a pitch that has always had some appeal to many Blacks.
It would never trigger any kind of stampede to the GOP by even most of these conservative-leaning Blacks. Harris still got more than 80% of the Black vote. Still, it was enough to take some of the sting out of the GOP’s naked history of racial abuse.
Trump understood enough of that history. He tailored the few pitches he made to Blacks for their votes to reflect the stock GOP pro-business, free enterprise and the healthy economy line as something that Blacks also could and should embrace.
The double-digit percent of Blacks who voted for Trump, combined with the numbers who didn’t vote at all, or didn’t vote for Harris, did not help elect Trump. He won with a diabolically brilliant crusade among less educated white male and female, blue collar and rural voters, and legions of disaffected Americans feeling the pain of high prices on everything and blaming Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for it.
However, enough Blacks did buy his pitch that a conservative, Republican businessman, with a horrific tainted racial history was a better bet in the Oval Office than a Democrat. That makes Trump’s victory even more of a peril to Democrats, who for decades have relied on Blacks as their most dependable and loyal backers. Trump showed that may no longer be the case.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is the author of “Day 1: How Trump will Rule” (Middle Passage Press). He also is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on Facebook Livestream.
