Newsweek is reporting on June 26, 2020 that 92% of black voters prefer Biden over Trump.
This is NOT news. I’ve said this before. Republicans consistently receive 8% of the Black vote in National elections. That’s it. No more and sadly, no less.
And this doesn’t mean that there aren’t A LOT of conservative black Americans out there, because there are.
Truth be told, generally speaking, the Black community is not all that liberal. At least in the policy sense of not being particularly pro-gender equality, pro-Immigration, Pro-Gun control or Pro-separation of Church and State.
So why does Republican support among Black voters seemingly cap at 8%?
The problem is most Black voters just can’t reconcile (nor should they) how they can be enthusiastic for the same candidate that White Nationalists are enthusiastic about.
That isn’t to say that all Republicans are White Nationalist or that there aren’t any White Nationalists that are in the Democratic Party but only that White Nationalist voters don’t vote for Democrats.
If I am in the voting booth next to a guy with a Deplorable Lives Matter t-shirt on and Confederate Flag socks with a Don’t Tread on Me tattoo on his bicep, we should not be voting for the same dude.
Period.
How could a candidate please both of us; one that wants the same opportunity and rights as any White person expects and the other person who feels entitled to having more opportunity, rights and privilege, at my expense??
Yet amazingly, every four years, 8% of Black Americans find a way to do just that.
As long as the Republican Party continues to pander to that White Nationalist “base”, Black voters in overwhelming numbers (over 9 out of 10) will continue to stay away.
But historically speaking this has been a double-edged sword.
Democrats know that we will turn out for them in these numbers. And far too often the ONLY reason Democrats get Blacks to vote for them is something along the line of “Well, we are the only thing standing in the way of Republicans really screwing you over.”
I feel things are changing.
I am encouraged by Progressives who continue to win upsets, such as the recent shakeups in NY, and remove these old Democratic moderates like Eliot “If I didn’t have a primary, I wouldn’t care” Engel. If this continues in 2020 then I see a bright future for the party. But if Party leadership continues to refuse to change and instead continues to take our support for granted while delivering very little in return, I will have to lead by example. With the Republican Party not being an option, I will leave the Democratic Party and register as an Independent after the 2020 Presidential election.
And if you are wondering what the Democratic Party can do to keep my support, NYTimes published an opinion article just yesterday citing that in 2020, the wage gap between White and Black men in the United States is as big now as it was in 1950!
They can start with this.
I would challenge the Republican Party to address this as well, but I’m sure they are already working on it, working to widen the gap from where it was in the 1950s to the 1930s.
If I could bend the ear of an influential Republican strategist it would be just drop the race baiting, stop the dog whistling, drop the White Nationalism, and just focus on your core conservative values that aren’t based on black subjugation and I promise that they would, eventually, win over a lot of Black voters.
Far more than most Democrats would be comfortable to admit, that’s for sure.
Like I said, the typical Black American isn’t particularly liberal, but they are profoundly sensitive to White Nationalism and White Supremacy.
If Republicans had any political will to cut those ties to White Nationalism dog whistling to White Supremacists, at least in Michigan, they wouldn’t have to rely on apparently legal but highly unethical gerrymandering to stay in power.
They could do it legitimately.
Ever wonder why Michigan has a Republican majority in both the State House and Senate yet has had only one Republican U.S. Senator since 1979?
This is because when the entire state votes, they can’t win.
They know this.
Which is why they gerrymandered the @#$% out of the state.
No one ever said that they were stupid.