It’s hard to imagine a much worse pitch Donald Trump could have made for the black vote
By Philip Bump August 20 at 8:00 AM
washingtonpost.com
At a rally Friday night in Dimondale, Mich., Donald Trump repeated a version of a plea to black voters that he'd offered 24 hours earlier in Charlotte, N.C."No group in America has been more harmed by Hillary Clinton's policies than African-Americans," he said, apparently pointing to individuals in the crowd. "No group. No group. If Hillary Clinton's goal was to inflict pain to the African-American community, she could not have done a better job. It is a disgrace."
"Detroit tops the list of most dangerous cities in terms of violent crime, number one," he said from a city 90 minutes away from Detroit with a population that is 93 percent white. "This is the legacy of the Democratic politicians who have run this city. This is the result of the policy agenda embraced by crooked Hillary Clinton."
He went on.
"The only way to change results is to change leadership. We can never fix our problems by relying on the same politicians who created our problems in the first place. A new future requires brand new leadership," he said.
"Look at how much African-American communities are suffering from Democratic control. To those I say the following: What do you have to lose by trying something new like Trump? What do you have to lose?" he asked. "You live in your poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed, what the hell do you have to lose?"
This was not the Teleprompter Trump that we saw in Charlotte, interlacing his prepared remarks with occasional asides. This was Traditional Trump, riffing a bit more on what he wanted to say in a manner that probably didn't do him much good.
Consider: Black Americans are not "living in poverty" as a general rule. A quarter of the black population is, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, about the same as the percentage of Hispanics. In Michigan, the figure is slightly higher. Most black Americans don't live in poverty, just as most white Americans don't.
Consider: The unemployment rate in the black community is higher than that in the white community, as it has been since the Department of Labor started keeping track. Among young blacks, though, the figure is not 59 percent -- unless (as Politifact noted) you consider not the labor force but every young black American, including high school students. Many young black high school students are unemployed. This isn't a metric that Labor typically uses, for obvious reasons, but calculating the rates for young whites gives you about 50 percent, too.
When Barack Obama won reelection in 2012, 93 percent of black Americans thought he was doing a good job as president. That's also the percentage of the vote he received, according to exit polls, beating Mitt Romney by 87 points.
And yet, somehow, Trump is doing worse.
In the battle between Trump and Hillary Clinton, Trump consistently lands in the low-single-digits of support from black Americans. In some polls, he has received 0 percent support, a negligible amount. In our most recent survey, he got 2 percent support.
Why? Because nonwhite voters view Trump very unfavorably. We wrote about this in June, but can now update the numbers. Four-in-5 blacks have a very unfavorable view of Trump, with a slightly higher percentage, 83 percent, agreeing with the idea that he is biased against women and minorities. Eighty-seven percent of black voters we surveyed indicated that they would be anxious if he were elected president and only 6 percent "comfortable." The numbers for Clinton -- who very quickly tweeted that Trump's Michigan comments were "so ignorant it's staggering" -- were nearly completely flipped.
</snip> Read the rest here: washingtonpost.com |
