In his regular Wall Street Journal column, Jason L. Riley offers President Trump some advice on wooing black voters. After pointing out that the Trump campaign’s messaging in 2020 is better than it was in 2016 he observes:
If he wants to improve on his performance among blacks four years ago, it’s not impossible but he’ll have to pick his spots. Exit polls show that he did better among black men than black women, for instance. We also know that, historically, black immigrants are less wedded to the Democrats, as are younger black voters as opposed to the older blacks who played such a key role in Joe Biden winning the Democratic nomination.
What we’ve witnessed this week during the Republican National Convention is certainly an improvement over Mr. Trump’s 2016 version of black outreach: “What the hell do you have to lose?†Still, much of it amounts to using Democratic tactics to win minority votes, appealing to blacks as blacks rather than as Americans who share the same concerns—job opportunities, good schools, safe neighborhoods—as other groups. Those minority voters who are open to overt appeals based on race, gender, sexual orientation and so forth are probably lost to the GOP because the Democrats are much better at identity politics.
To that end, Kim Klacik’s convention promise to be more responsive to the working-class needs of blacks was probably more effective than Herschel Walker’s reassurances that Mr. Trump isn’t a racist. Ms. Klacik, a long-shot candidate for a Maryland congressional seat, highlighted the lengthy and disastrous record of liberal governance in Baltimore and offered a new approach.
By contrast, people who think Mr. Trump is a white supremacist aren’t voting for him, no matter what a former football star says. The president’s challenge isn’t to convince black voters that he’s a good person because he has black friends. It’s to convince them that he’s the best candidate to lead the country back to the record-low rates of unemployment and poverty among minorities that we enjoyed before the pandemic.
I remain unconvinced that defections of black voters from the Democratic ticket to the Republican will make a difference in states carried anywhere although I’m willing to be persuaded on that subject. Where I think it will make a difference is in the popular vote.
That isn’t insignificant. A Trump victory in which in 2020 Trump carries the popular vote as well as the Electoral College would be significantly different than one in which as in 2016 he prevails in the Electoral College but loses the popular vote.
“carries the popular vote as well as the Electoral College would be significantly different than one in which as in 2016 he prevails in the Electoral College but loses the popular vote.”
It would be very good if the norm again was that POTUS won both the electoral and popular vote. It is not a healthy form of government when the office holder had fewer votes than their opponent.
Steve
“It would be very good if the norm again was that POTUS won both the electoral and popular vote. It is not a healthy form of government when the office holder had fewer votes than their opponent.”
Completely false, and totally lacking any sense of why the founders set up the college and the House/Senate structure. The Civil War would not have been the only Civil War without this construction.
Maybe it’s just me but I don’t think it’s a healthy form of government when successive administrations act largely through executive orders that go beyond the president’s actual powers.
I agree, but that’s a separate issue. The voters have to demand their representatives actually legislate.
We are lazy. People on this blog care. Others, who, say, watch the View, or just the latest sitcom are really to blame. Politicians, being who they are, understand this. Promise anything, deliver nothing.
“Completely false, and totally lacking any sense of why the founders set up the college and the House/Senate structure. ”
Go read your history. They set it up so that the small states would not be totally dominated buy the large ones. They did NOT set it up with the intention that small states and rural areas would dominate. Besides, the founders were not gods. Whatever their intentions you will not keep a functioning democracy if the group getting fewer votes rules the country often.
Steve
There is a constitutional remedy for undesired emergent effects of the constitutional order: amendment. But amending the Constitution requires some combination of persuasion and compromise and when those are off the table it presents a serious problem.