Former President Donald Trump and his supporters are dramatically overselling the extent to which they have improved their numbers with Black voters, a long solidly Democratic bloc of the electorate, wrote Philip Bump in an analysis for the Washington Post on Monday.
Trump held a campaign stop at a Black church in Detroit, widely touted by MAGA supporters, where the attendees of the event turned out to be almost exclusively white, Bump wrote.
"The style of Donald Trump and of Trump supporters is to always present his support as mind-boggling and exceptional, and so this support was," Bump wrote.
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"It is true that current polling shows Trump faring better than he did with Black voters in 2020 and that the gap between his support and support for President Biden is far narrower than it was four years ago. But — as is the case with other apparent shifts since 2020 — that’s more a function of apathy about Biden than enthusiasm about Trump," wrote Bump.
For instance, "In Michigan, only about half of Black Biden supporters say they’re very motivated to vote for him. In Pennsylvania, it’s about 60 percent. In both of those states, only about two-thirds of those who say they voted for him in 2020 indicate that they plan to again this year."
A lot of this comes from younger Black voters, who are less committed to Biden, or to vote at all, than older Black voters, Bump argued. A small amount are backing Trump in polls — but even in this category, "Biden gets more support than Trump by a wide margin," he wrote.
This matters, Bump noted, because in order to actually sway Black voters to his camp, or not commit to Biden in the final stretch of the campaign, Trump has to engage in substantial Black outreach — and there's little evidence his campaign is doing that effectively.
One of the most revealing developments about this, wrote Bump, is that "Suffolk University asked Black voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania if they agreed that Trump’s having been indicted made him a more appealing figure to Black people; the percentage who said it did matched Trump’s support overall. Most respondents said that the suggesting was offensive. That pattern held for Black men and younger Black respondents, too."
Bump concludes that Trump trumps up his numbers for two key reasons.
"The first is that it pushes back against the idea that his candidacy and rhetoric should be unacceptable to non-White voters, creating space for more Black and Hispanic voters to express their support," he writes. "The other is that it serves as a rebuttal to the idea that Trump himself espouses racist ideas: How could that be true, when he has so many Black friends supporters?"
