Trump Isn’t Giving Up on Long-Shot Efforts to Woo Black Voters

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Earlier this year, President Trump bet that his reelection hopes would be powered by a group that’s so far given him scant support: black voters. To entice them, his campaign bought a Super Bowl ad touting his work on criminal justice reform and announced grand plans to open “Black Voices for Trump” centers in battleground-state shopping areas to hand out buttons, hats, and sweatshirts that say “Woke.” At the time, a senior Trump official called them places “where the black community can come in and learn about what the president has done and help push forward his agenda.”

The coronavirus has dashed those plans—possibly for good. With retail stores in much of the country still shuttered, a Trump campaign official says the plan for community centers is “on hold.”

Courting black voters was never going to be an easy task. Exit polls showed Trump carried only 8% of them in the 2016 presidential election, though that was a slight improvement on Mitt Romney’s 6% in 2012. The coronavirus has made it even harder for the president. Before the pandemic hit, the centerpiece of his pitch was that he’d driven black unemployment to historic lows. But the April U.S. jobs report showed that black unemployment has skyrocketed to almost 17%. It’s likely headed higher.

At the same time, African Americans are dying of Covid-19 at an alarmingly high rate: An analysis of available state data by APM Research Lab put the black death rate at 2.6 times the rate for whites, while a different study found that heavily black counties accounted for 58% of all Covid-19 deaths as of mid-April. Black families will also suffer more economic pain in a recession. Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis say they’re about 29% likelier than white families to fall seriously behind on their debt. A May 6 YouGov poll found that black respondents were less likely than whites or Hispanics to report having received a stimulus check.

At least publicly, the Trump campaign isn’t backing off its push for black voters. “Whether it be record employment numbers, pushing criminal justice reform across the finish line, or increasing funding for HBCUs [historically black colleges and universities], President Trump has been laser focused on growing opportunity for Black Americans,” campaign spokesman Ken Farnaso said in an emailed statement. “While COVID-19 has hit our economy and the Black community with an unexpected blow, President Trump’s proven record of success has prioritized the needs of Black America and should give every American the confidence that they will bounce back once we defeat this invisible enemy.”

The idea that Trump could move his margins with black voters took shape last year, as the economy boomed and unemployment reached new lows. Some Trump strategists decided African Americans represented a target of opportunity. Although pre-pandemic surveys hardly painted a rosy picture—a Jan. 17 Washington Post/Ipsos poll found that 83% of black voters think the president is a racist—several of his strategists noted that black men had a more positive view of Trump than did black women, and they thought that outreach and celebrity surrogates could persuade more of them to support the president. While Trump has no hope of winning the black vote outright, “a few points of African Americans moving in our direction is detrimental to the Democratic Party,” says a Republican strategist close to the campaign.

Democrats generally agree that Trump’s ability to improve his margins with black voters could be decisive in close-fought swing states in November. “Winning an election is a game of inches,” says Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster who’s been gauging political sentiment among black millennials in swing states. “With enough attention and resources and the right messaging, could Trump win 2 percentage points more of support among African Americans? I think it would be malpractice for Democrats to think he can’t.”

With that goal in mind, the Trump campaign told reporters in February that it planned to open the Black Voices for Trump storefronts in seven states: Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Even though those retail outlets never opened, the campaign has maintained its online outreach efforts. On May 7 a Black Voices for Trump livestream featured a celebrity surrogate, former New York Mets slugger Darryl Strawberry, part of a weekly BVFT broadcast that’s so far received more than 6 million views.

But the black population in several of the battleground states where Trump’s campaign is wooing black voters has been hit particularly hard by the virus—especially in Michigan and Georgia. One Trump strategist says this is becoming a source of growing concern inside the campaign.

The crashing economy has alarmed the president and his allies into pushing to end state lockdowns. This will force black workers to bear additional risk, since they hold a disproportionate share of jobs that can’t be done remotely: Nearly a quarter work in the service industry, with an additional 16% in transportation, delivery, and production, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. But some Democrats worry that the toll the pandemic is wreaking on the finances of younger African Americans could make them more susceptible to Trump’s entreaties.

Belcher, who recently conducted focus groups of black millennials in Detroit, Charlotte, and Atlanta, emphasizes that many of them eschew traditional news platforms and don’t have a detailed understanding of candidates’ policy positions. In a world where the virus didn’t intervene, they’re the sort of people who might’ve wandered into a Black Voices for Trump store at the local mall.

If Democrats don’t take special care to reach out to them, Belcher says, Trump could still lure some away. “If African Americans are the ones hurting the most economically in the Covid crisis and Republicans are the only ones saying, ‘We’ve got to get the economy back open,’ I’m not so sure how that plays out,” he says. “There’s not been any significant movement among black voters in our own internal research. But that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be.”

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