Donald Trump and Black Voters

I think that this article at RealClearPolitics by Vernon Robinson III and Bruce Eberleis is far-fetched but interesting:

Just as Roosevelt overwhelmingly lost the black vote in 1932, doing worse than Al Smith in 1928, Trump lost the black vote in 2016. But, again like Roosevelt in 1932, Trump did reach out to the black electorate in 2016. Both FDR in ’32 and Trump in ’16 had some limited but encouraging success in winning over these voters: Roosevelt in New York where he had been governor, and Trump in Pennsylvania where his outreach helped provide his margin of victory in that key state.

The groundwork laid in 1932 was crucial to FDR’s success with black voters in 1936. In fact, in that first election, a wealthy oilman and key supporter of the Democrat, Frank Benedum, “saw the conversion of the black vote as a potential means of swinging Pennsylvania into the Roosevelt column,” Nancy J. Weiss wrote in “Farewell to the Party of Lincoln.” Benedum knew the key was longtime Republican supporter Robert L. Vann, editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the biggest and most influential black newspapers in America. By 1932 Vann was fed up with the GOP. In his view, all the Republicans seemingly cared about was black votes, not the goals and aspirations of black Americans.

Sound familiar? It should, as it presciently echoes what would be the frustrations of black Democrats almost 90 years in the future.

It’s interesting for a number of reasons. Democrats are, indeed, ignoring “the goals and aspirations of black Americans”, taking them for granted. That’s something I’ve been warning about for a long time. And Trump is, indeed, courting black voters. That’s typical Trump political strategy—impelling the enemy to expend resources on defending territory that should and must be secured.

The Democrats’ divide et impera interest group-based political strategy has not yet reached its limit point, when black voters contend with Mexican-American voters for the crumbs that fall from the governmental table but that time is coming and it will not be a happy one.