Democrats picked up early that the party has lost ground with Black voters since 2020.
Full-scale efforts to appeal to Black voters, Kamala Harris’ candidacy and the newfound momentum around it appear to have helped to regain some support, but Black community leaders fear that Democrats’ messaging is still struggling to break through with young Black men.
“I’m meeting and talking with Black men and boys all the time all over the country and they’re telling me that politics isn’t for them,” Michael DeVaul, national executive director of Boys and Young Men of Color, told NOTUS. “I would say to the Democratic Party, you need to be going to pull these boys into the conversation.”
Weeks until Election Day, the urgency to do so has increased — especially in light of NAACP polling released Friday showing that over a quarter of younger Black men say they would support Donald Trump in November. Trump won 12% of Black men in 2020.
In conversation with reporters at the National Association of Black Journalists on Tuesday, Harris acknowledged the NAACP poll’s findings.
“It’s very important to not operate from the assumption that Black men are in anybody’s pocket,” Harris said. “Black men are like any other voting group. You’ve got to earn their vote. So I’m working to earn their vote, not assuming I’m going to have it because I’m Black.”
Democratic operatives have taken note of the GOP’s social media, mailing and radio advertising targeting Black voters, including from the Trump campaign and its related super PACs.
If Democrats don’t increase their volume of communication with skeptical young men, Republican efforts to court Black voters could continue to draw more support away from Democrats, BlackPAC Executive Director Adrianne Shropshire told NOTUS.
“We have to remember that the campaign, writ large, is a battle between two camps,” Shropshire said. “There is a question of what is the Harris-Walz campaign doing to reach these young men? And then there’s the other question of what has the Trump campaign done to undermine Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party?”
Shropshire said one solidly Democratic voter in Georgia told her she had received eight pieces of Trump mail in recent weeks attempting to persuade her to abandon her support of Harris’ campaign.
The Harris campaign launched an all-hands-on-deck youth voter mobilization effort for National Voter Registration Day, featuring appearances from Gov. Tim Walz and other campaign surrogates at college campuses, sporting events and more. They’ll focus on young Black voters at HBCUs and through paid advertising. The campaign has ads up on the homepage of Revolt.
Shropshire told NOTUS that within the next week, BlackPAC will also be increasing its digital and TV reservations in battleground states as well.
Trump and JD Vance’s appeals to the Black community have been colored in controversy. Trump doubled down on questioning whether Harris is actually Black or not in sit-down interviews. He and Vance also doubled down on debunked claims about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets, a claim which many Republican Party leaders echoed and defended.
“I love the Black population of this country,” Trump said in conversation with the NABJ in July. “I’ve done so much for the Black population of this country, including employment, including opportunity zones with Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina which was one of the greatest programs ever for Black workers and Black entrepreneurs.”
Trump’s campaign jumped on Harris’ comments Tuesday, putting out a statement that she “admitted today that she has failed Black Americans.”
“She told the NABJ that after three and half years of her failed policies, grocery prices are too high and the American Dream is unattainable for young Americans. We can’t afford four more years of Kamala Harris. It’s time to put President Trump back in the White House and restore economic prosperity,” Janiyah Thomas, the campaign’s Black media director, said.
The NAACP survey found that some young Black men give Trump the edge. The survey also found that 82% of Black men under 50 years of age listed the economy as their most important issue.
On Tuesday, Harris tailored her pitch to young Black men around her campaign’s “opportunity economy,” calling for increasing access to capital for small businesses and start-ups and expanding the current entrepreneur tax deduction from $5,000 to $50,000.
“When people have the opportunity to have the resources to get started, they’re going to put the good ideas, they’re going to put the hard work into it,” Harris said. “And what I know is that our young Black men, our small businesses are really the backbone of our economy overall, and when they do better, we all do better.”
In the seven weeks until Election Day, it will take more than Harris and Walz to sell young men on the stakes of the 2024 election as they see it, Democratic leaders say, noting that attempts to make it harder for people to vote typically have more impact on younger voters.
“The reality is that there are so many attempts to curtail the ability of young people to vote, especially our Black families,” Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, told NOTUS. “On top of that, the level of disinformation they hear often impacts how they make decisions in politics.”
“Black men need to be the ones out there telling younger Black men about the importance of this election,” Pringle said. “They are who really have the power right now to mobilize our young folks in a way that they never have before.”
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Calen Razor is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.