Kamala Harris has revealed a plan to give Black men more economic opportunities, as anxiety mounts among her supporters that some in the Black community are less enthused by the Democratic presidential ticket than in recent elections, and may sit this one out – or support Donald Trump.
The vice-president’s plan includes forgivable business loans for Black entrepreneurs, creating more apprenticeships, and studying sickle cell and other diseases that disproportionately affect African American men. It also includes ensuring that Black men have more access to shaping a national cannabis industry and to invest in cryptocurrency.
Harris presented the so-called “opportunity agenda for Black men” on Monday, before speaking in the north-west corner of Erie, Pennsylvania, the country’s largest battleground state. It will be Harris’s 10th visit to Pennsylvania this election season.
Political support among Black men for the Harris-Walz campaign has been wavering somewhat. Last week, Barack Obama suggested that some Black men “aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president”.
The former president’s comments were later condemned by the Florida Republican representative Byron Donalds and Texas’s Wesley Hunt, members of Black Men for Trump, which posted a letter accusing Obama of being “insulting” and “demeaning”.
“President Obama’s recent call for Black men to support Kamala Harris based solely on her skin color, rather than her policies, is deeply insulting,” the letter states. “Black Americans are not a monolith, and we don’t owe our votes to any candidate just because they ‘look like us’.”
Over the weekend, the former president Bill Clinton was drafted in to speak to worshippers at a Zion Baptist church in Albany, Georgia, in support of Harris.
“Uniting people and building, being repairers of the breach, as Isaiah says, those are the things that work,” Clinton said. “Blaming, dividing, demeaning – they get you a bunch of votes at election time, but they don’t work.”
A poll in the New York Times placed Harris slightly behind Joe Biden among Black likely voters and showed one in five Black men support Trump. Despite alarm at the poll, the figures still show strong Black support for Democrats – but while the president won 87% of the Black vote in 2020, Harris’s numbers are lower. Seventy-eight per cent of Black voters in key battleground states polled in September said they would support the Democrat.
Raphael Warnock, a Democratic senator from Georgia, warned against overestimating the shift. “Black men are not going to vote for Donald Trump in any significant numbers,” he told CNN on Sunday. “There will be some. We’re not a monolith.”
Warnock predicted Black voters would remember that Trump had personally taken out a full-page ad in the New York Times in 1989 calling for the state to bring back the death penalty and to strengthen policing after the brutal beating and rape of a female jogger in Central Park.
The so-called “Central Park Five” – five Black teenagers – were falsely accused of the crime and imprisoned for several years, before finally being exonerated in 2002. “Donald Trump has shown no deal of concern about what they went through, no deal, no bit of contrition about it,” Warnock added.
But the South Carolina representative Jim Clyburn, who helped secure Biden’s Democratic nomination in 2020, told the network he is “concerned about the Black men staying home or voting for Trump”.
“Black men, like everybody else, want to know exactly what I can expect from a Harris administration. And I have been very direct with them. And I have also contrasted that with what they can expect from a Trump administration,” Clyburn said.
Democrats have previously been accused of taking the Black vote for granted. In 2020, Biden was forced to apologize for telling the popular radio host Charlamagne Tha God that if African Americans “have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black”.
Trump has sought to capitalize on wavering Black male support for Democrats who may sympathize with his “America First” policies around employment and immigration.
As well as Harris’s new policy outreach to Black men, she is also reaching out to Hispanic men who might also be cool to her candidacy, via an “Hombres con Harris” outreach featuring ad buys and Hispanic celebrity events in battleground states.
Three weeks out from polling day, there is some Democratic concern that Harris’s support among men broadly needs attention. Polls have found that there is roughly a 60-40 split between men and women, with men favoring Republicans and women Democrats.
A Pew Research Center study released last year asked Americans how important it is to them that a woman be elected president in their lifetime. It found that only 18% of US adults said this is extremely or very important to them, with some 64% saying it was not too important or not at all, or that the president’s gender did not matter.
