When election returns start coming in Tuesday evening, one group is certain to be in the spotlight: Black men.
For the past year, pollsters, pundits and political operatives have been hard at work spinning a narrative about Black voters, and younger men in particular. Those voters, many have warned, are increasingly turning away from the Democratic Party, which has enjoyed a massive advantage among Black voters for decades.
“Black men are rapidly abandoning the Democratic Party”, a triumphant headline declared on the website of the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) earlier this year. That assertion was backed up by a poll from the NAACP in August, which found that as many as one in four young black male voters were considering voting for Donald Trump.
Many Democrats were scared by the headlines. Former President Barack Obama was among them; he delivered remarks at a campaign office for Vice President Kamala Harris in early October and quipped: “Part of it makes me think — and I’m speaking to men directly — part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president.”
Trump has sought to push that narrative as well. In late June, his campaign organized an event in a Black barbershop in Atlanta billed as a “Black American Business Leaders Barbershop Roundtable”. In October, he visited a second Black-owned barbershop in the Bronx.
How’s that working out? Well, the owner of the barbershop in Atlanta later said that he felt misled and used by the Trump campaign for a political event, as he’d hoped it would be a chance for him to voice the concerns of his community members. As for winning the Bronx after that comment at Trump’s Madison Square Garden about Puerto Rico being an “island of garbage” — good luck.
As Election Day draws near, more and more experts are coming forward to tamp down on the notion that this supposed drop in support for Democrats is a real trend, or that Harris will see any kind of significant drop in Black support from previous election cycles in 2020, 2016 or 2012.
One of those experts is Tom Ogorzalek, a pollster with the 2040 Strategy Group commissioned to look at the issue by the Alliance for Black Equality, a Democratic-aligned super PAC. A poll he conducted in mid-October found Harris on track to clear the 90 percent threshold with Black voters — a benchmark that roundly refutes the idea that this group is “abandoning” the vice president or her party.
He credited the movement in Black support in the NAACP poll and other surveys to the typical self-journey of political investigation that many Americans go through during an election season; one that ended with a predictable result.
“One thing we see in the data is that young Black men, if anything else, have kind of shifted to the left, if you ask them ideology questions; not shifted to the right,” Ogorzalek said in an interview.
“All the stuff in these headlines now [saying] ‘young people are Trump curious,’ or ‘Black men are Trump curious or more conservative’ — we didn't see any evidence of that, basically.”
The poll conducted by his group illustrated the “ideological sorting” he said many voters, particularly younger ones, were undergoing in the last two months of the election, when many less politically engaged Americans typically begin paying attention to the election in earnest. Between Oct 4 to 19, Harris saw a 10-point jump in support with Black Gen Z voters, according to the survey.
Ogorzalek would go on to characterize the Black support that conservatives have tried to cultivate in support of Trump as having “a small sliver of a marginal effect in a big group that's overwhelmingly Democratic.”
For their part, Harris and other Democratic candidates running in 2024 have pushed back against the notion that they are having any trouble convincing Black men to vote for them. The vice president, in an interview with The Breakfast Club last week, told the show’s co-hosts: “The Black men in particular who are at the rallies have recently been saying to me, ‘don’t you listen to that. And they got to stop with all that noise. We got you.’”
Those same arguments are being spoken aloud by Black men in Philadelphia.
Vanessa Field co-hosts the Black Women’s Leadership Council radio show on WURD, the sole Black-owned and operated talk radio station in the state of Pennsylvania. Fields, speaking in an interview in the final full week of the 2024 campaign, said that her show’s callers — including men — have been pushing back against the idea that their demographic as a whole is “Trump-curious”.
“I'm gonna tell you, I'm not hearing a whole lot like what I'm seeing in the media…this whole focus about ‘illegals’, and ‘Black men don't want to support Harris,’ and ‘it's about groceries.’ No, that's not what I'm hearing,” she said.
Fields, who is also phone-banking and volunteering for the Harris campaign with AFSCME, her union, added that the narrative “was definitely suspect.”
She roundly dismissed the argument from Obama and others that Black men were somehow not used to seeing women in positions of power, or were uncomfortable with it.
“The feedback I'm getting from Black men is that they don't know where that's coming from, because they're saying that they're used to a woman being in charge in the Black household…Often times it's the matriarch in black families who really is the one who's controlling things,” said Fields.
Philadelphia and its Black and Latino populations will be a key part of Harris’s coalition on Tuesday; polls indicate she is in a dead heat with the former president in the state, one of two where both campaigns are drawing their primary focus in the final days.
The Independent also spoke to Angela Alsobrooks, the Democratic candidate leading in Maryland’s pivotal Senate race, on the campaign trail on Tuesday as early voting continues across the state. She said that younger men were some of the most enthusiastic volunteers on her campaign.
“As I'm talking to college students and younger voters and male voters, I'm speaking to the issues that they care about because I know what they care about,” she said. “They have said to me, in no uncertain terms, they are very concerned about growing economic opportunity. They want us to be focused on them, to focus on attracting jobs and opportunity, about making housing more affordable, investing in transportation.”
