Why do some Black voters support Trump?

Mary Ellen Klas, Tribune News Service

A September poll from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found Vice President Kamala Harris was 10 percentage points behind President Joe Biden’s 2020 performance with the state’s largest and most reliable Democratic voting bloc — Black Georgians. The news was followed by handwringing among Democrats and chest-thumping by Republicans as national polls showed up to 6% more Black voters were willing to consider Trump this election. It’s hard to imagine these voters embracing a man who rode into politics on a birther lie about Barack Obama, paid for a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, defended white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville, and suggested police should shoot Black Lives Matter protesters. But the Black Trump supporters I spoke with, all college graduates living in the Atlanta suburbs, were able to minimise Trump’s behaviour and rationalise their endorsement of the former president. “I grew up in the hip-hop culture and Donald Trump is a hero to my generation,” said John Carter, an Atlanta software salesman and a member of the Georgia Black Republican Council. “Donald Trump represents machismo. He reminds me of my father and grandfather.”

Carter said he isn’t bothered by Trump’s rhetoric, or even the threats he’s made against his opponents because Trump’s positions align with his priorities as a conservative, including education reform and opposition to abortion. “Pushing an abortion agenda as reproductive health concerns me far more than Donald Trump saying any of those things,” said Carter, the father of three children. The narratives some Black voters use to support Trump are nothing new to Chris Towler, head of the National Black Voters Project, a longitudinal study of Black public opinion. But his polling and focus groups have led him to conclude that many of the headlines about Black voters’ shifting support are “based on really bad polling.”

Black voters who support Trump “may be really loud,” but when you consider the polls with significantly large samples and an intentional approach to collectively representing voters based on age, education, region and gender, he said, “then you don’t see any enormous amount of support for Trump beyond what was going on in 2020.” For lifelong Black Republicans, however, there is often something else at play, Towler explained. “A lot of the literature around Black conservatives suggests that in order to be staunchly conservative, you have to de-prioritize your racial identity because so much of conservative politics works to conserve discriminatory institutions of the past.”

When Harris entered the race, the only group of Black voters that did not think more favorably of her were Black Republicans, according to the study. But 22% of all Black Republicans polled said they planned to vote for Harris, Towler said, primarily because “they feel represented with a Black candidate.” The die-hard Black Trump supporters I spoke to describe a world under a second Trump administration that’s hard not to like: Families would have more money in their pockets and their children would attend top-notch schools. Abortion would be banned. The nation would be energy-independent. Illegal immigration would be rare because of tougher enforcement. And, yes, there would still be racism, White supremacists, and bad cops, but those are problems they’re used to dealing with, they said.

It’s a wonderfully wistful vision of the future that I’d love to believe. But it’s fantasy. The Trump these voters talk about is far from the erratic, hateful and often incoherent 78-year-old running for the nation’s top job. The Trump in their minds is a hologram of the celebrity businessman from the last century, and the policies they seek are from a vanishing version of the Republican Party. “I’ve been stopped nine times by cops in six different states,” said Keesha Kennings, a Navy veteran from Duluth. “I don’t fault it. You know why? I wasn’t stopped because of my race. I was stopped because I speed a lot in my car.” Camilla Moore, chair of the Georgia Black Republican Council, thinks the reason more Black men are supporting Trump is what she describes as the left’s “woke agenda.”

“They have stripped away the patriarchal system of men” by forcing them into “secondary roles” behind women in households and business, she said. Moore couldn’t point to anything that Trump would do to change what she said has men “feeling castrated,” except that Trump “values traditional values more so than what they’re seeing today.” It’s unlikely that a man whose moral depravity has led to him being found liable for sexual abuse, 34 felony convictions in a case involving hush-money payments to a porn star, and multiple divorces could lead the nation preaching conservative family values. But, then again, Trump is selling T-shirts that say “Daddy’s home” and has promised women he’ll “be your protector.”

Gordon Rolle Jr., a former high school social studies teacher who is the state director for MAGA Black Georgia, believes Trump is appealing to young Black men because of his reputation as a businessman. “Trump was popular as I was growing up,’’ Rolle said, noting how rappers exalted Trump and his wealth. “I know he had a lot of failures, but he continued having success. People see what’s going on globally and think he would help the country be strong.” Andrea Smith, a Republican candidate for the Georgia House of Representatives, said she isn’t bothered by Trump’s record of housing discrimination or his skill at manipulating racial and xenophobic resentments. “That racist thing to me is just overdone,” she said. “I think that people have all kinds of prejudices. I know Black people who don’t like being around other Black people.” Smith dismissed the warnings from the lengthy list of former Trump officials, including former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair and retired General Mark Milley, who called Trump “a fascist to the core.”

“That’s just normal human behaviour that when you leave a place or you have a disagreement with your boss man, you come out and say negative things about the boss man,” she said.

Of course, it’s not “normal” for a four-star general who held one of the most important positions in government to call his president “the most dangerous person ever.” And Trump himself has demonstrated that his behaviour is far from ordinary. Almost daily, he shows that he has neither the discipline, the political skills, nor desire to deliver what these voters want. Instead, he seeks to become an authoritarian leader, accountable to no one, while the conservative, low-taxes, family-values Republican Party they long for has disappeared. Towler notes that Black voter support for the Republican ticket has been between 12% and 17% since the 1970s — except for the Obama years when it was in the single digits. But those aren’t the numbers to watch, he said. “It’s never really been a story about who Black folk are going to support,” he said. “It’s always been a story about how much Black people are going to turn out.”