Trump's courtship of black voters is another reason for Democrat panic

Julie Kelly:

Democrats are panicking—and not just because their presidential candidate isn’t up to the task of running for president let alone running the country.

No, Democrats are fearful that Donald Trump’s four-year courtship of black voters will reap electoral dividends in November. “Both campaigns tell me that there is a chance that Donald Trump could overperform with African American men,” NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd admitted this week. “It’s a concern of the Biden campaign and it’s a focus of the Trump campaign.”

While Todd blamed Trump for “stoking racial tensions” in an attempt to win back suburban voters, the fact is that no other Republican president or candidate has worked harder to earn the long-elusive support of black Americans. “What have you got to lose?” Trump memorably asked black voters during a rally in August 2016. “You’re living in 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?”

Trump’s gauntlet was both a backhanded slap at the country’s first black president and a promise that he would do better. Turns out, it wasn’t empty campaign sloganeering; from negotiating a rare moment of bipartisanship to pass the First Step Act in 2018 to hosting the first-ever Young Black Leadership Summit at the White House, President Trump and his family have had some success in dismantling the partisan barrier between blacks and the Republican Party.
Progress Interrupted

Before the double-whammy of COVID-19 and a punishing lockdown, the economic picture for blacks had never been brighter. In December 2019, the unemployment rate for black workers reached its lowest level on record.

Wages were rising fastest among blacks; a provision in the president’s signature 2017 tax cut bill created “opportunity zones” for economically distressed areas, mostly in inner cities. “The trade policies that shuttered our factories, gutted our communities, and shipped millions and millions and millions of jobs overseas and to other places, they spend trillions of dollars in the Middle East, but they allowed our own cities to crumble in total disrepair,” the president said during a February speech touting the policy.

New voices are amplifying the president’s message. Thanks to outspoken black conservative leaders such as Candace Owens, the cofounder of Blexit, a nonprofit working at the grassroots level to encourage blacks to “liberate” themselves from the Democratic Party, minorities are giving the Republican Party a second—first?—look.

And there are indications the multipronged outreach might be working; recent polls show double-digit support for the president, albeit low double-digits. Trump won eight percent of the black vote in 2016, a slight improvement over Mitt Romney’s paltry six percent in 2012. But a Harris/Hill poll released Wednesday shows Trump with 16 percent of the black vote; the president is favored by 12 percent of blacks in a new Economist/YouGov poll. (Both polls also indicate roughly a quarter of Hispanic voters plan to vote for Trump.)

But there’s even worse news for Team Biden: According to a Zogby poll released this week, 36 percent of African Americans approve of Trump’s job performance.

If those figures hold, or likely rise after this week’s successful showcasing of black Republican candidates and supporters, it could make the difference in states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania and stop any hope of Democrats eeking out a surprise victory in North Carolina or Georgia, states with higher-than-average black populations.
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What was really smart was having so many black voices giving speeches at the convention and talking about How Trump was keeping his promises for them.  They also smartly reminded black voters that Biden ha said they were not black if they did not support him.  They also reminded them of Biden's lie about Republicans putting them back in chains.