As the 2020 presidential election fast approaches, President Donald Trump’s team keeps making a show of trying to attract black support, but the actual levels of that are remaining incredibly low — Gallup recently had the 2019 average of the portion of blacks who approve of the job Trump is doing at 10 percent. Just 10. Now, a new poll reveals that black voters across the country seem more energized to head to the polls in 2020 than they were ahead of 2016, and their chief motivating factor is removing Trump from office. With barely one out of ten black Americans even approving of the job Trump is doing, that’s not a good sign for his re-election chances!
In 2016, Trump only got about eight percent of the votes from black Americans, which provides some real world confirmation of that low approval, but overall, black voter turnout in 2016 was low, Axios notes. But now, the outlet adds, “a majority of black Americans are more interested in voting in the 2020 presidential election than they were in 2016, according to a national survey of 1200 black voters and non-voters conducted by Third Way and the Joint Center.” That majority includes 62 percent of black men. And their chief motivating factor is “an intense opposition to President Trump and a belief that he “has been a disaster for our country, and we need to do everything we can to vote him out,” according to the survey.”
One of the real world examples of the disaster of Trump that’s cited by poll respondents is his green light to racists to tout their hatred publicly. After all, with the literal president of the United States going on hate rally campaigns across the country, why should they keep their own hatred to themselves? Trump has mockingly demeaned immigrants, women of color, black Americans, and more, and Americans who are a part of these groups or are concerned about them have been watching.
In 2018, the Anti-Defamation League has reported that every single death at the hands of an ideological extremist had some kind of connection to white supremacy, which was often front and center in the incident like in the case of the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue shooting in which an avowed anti-immigrant attacker shot and killed 11 people.
More recently, in El Paso, Texas, an attacker spouting Trump’s exact anti-immigrant rhetoric murdered 22 people — and even after that gunman used Trump’s same line about supposed immigrant invasions, he refused to give up his completely false argument.
The Trump campaign has largely responded to concerns about their treatment of marginalized communities by pointing to the economy and figures like low unemployment among black Americans. But while they bask in their basic economic trends and booming stock market and dramatically lowered corporate taxes, reality tells a different story. Axios notes that just “22% of black Americans said their personal financial situation has gotten better over the last two years.” And top concerns for black voters reflect that. Black women’s top concern was affordable housing, while black men cited health care costs. And Trump is just sticking to his completely unnecessary southern border wall.
