Some Democrats are worried that the Trump campaign’s outreach to black voters is working.
“It keeps me up at night,” HIT Strategies partner Terrance Woodbury told the Washington Post. “The Trump campaign recognizes that while the Democratic Party is spending a significant amount of resources and effort to persuade white, suburban women back into their coalition, the Trump campaign has found a very susceptible and very different swing voter in black men.”
President Trump won 13% of black male voters and 32% of Hispanic men but only 4% of black female and 25% of Hispanic female voters, according to 2016 exit polls, and campaign events in minority neighborhoods have brought in mostly men, Republican officials told the Washington Post.
Woodbury’s firm looks to mobilize hard-to-reach communities, including minorities, and said that recent focus groups in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Atlanta, Georgia; and Detroit, Michigan showed that minority men were most compelled by Trump’s message. In Milwaukee, where the campaign will hold a panel for black voters this weekend, Woodbury said black voters from a focus group he held recently were not inspired by the crop of Democratic contenders. It’s a threat that Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler said he is taking seriously.
Democrats and Trump are vying for states that delivered a slim victory for Trump in 2016 — including in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, where a small increase in black votes could ensure that the states back Trump again.
Still, more than 8 in 10 African Americans view Trump as racist, according to recent polling. Respondents pointed to his language and response to the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, as evidence. Working to dispel the notion that Trump is racist are black loyalists such as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson.
At the campaign’s Arlington, Virginia, headquarters Wednesday, senior adviser Jared Kushner, campaign manager Brad Parscale, and senior campaign adviser Katrina Pierson shared plans for 15 urban campaign field offices in battleground states, including Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
“You’re never going to get the votes you don’t ask for,” Jared Kushner told reporters at the event. “Last time, it was, ‘What the hell do you have to lose?’ Now, you show them what they’ve gained from President Trump and what more they can gain if they get four more years of President Trump.”
Kushner’s remarks echoed Trump’s pitch last year at the campaign’s Black Voices for Trump launch in Atlanta:
“We’re going to campaign for every last African American vote in 2020,” he told the crowd. “We’ve done more for African Americans in three years than the broken Washington establishment has done in more than 30 years.”
[Also read: Trump campaign lays claims to ‘woke’ for its black voter outreach]
