In the 2016 presidential election, there was a 1.1 percent decrease in the total number of votes cast by African Americans and a 4.5 percent decrease in black turnout as compared to 2012. Seems trivial, doesn’t it? Just 1.1? 4.5? Hardly.
Those numbers were a cataclysmic drop-off in African American voters and cost Hillary Clinton the election. Hillary won 88 percent of the African American vote compared to Barack Obama’s 93 percent. In a counterfactual alternate history of our times, if major African American population centers in Milwaukee, Detroit, and Philadelphia had turned out for Hillary even at 90 percent, she may well have offset Trump’s Electoral College edge.
It didn’t help that Hillary Clinton is the whitest, most schoolmarmish person in America, and that African Americans were never going to peg the needle for her as they did for two terms of Obama. Her campaign still, fatally, assumed both in their top-level political calculus and their voter models that Clinton would enjoy the same support.
As with many things in the Clinton 2016 campaign, the only response is “What the fuck?”
At this writing, it’s unlikely that the nominee will be an African American, though Senator Kamala Harris ran a campaign that’s kept her in the top tier of Democratic candidates, but she couldn’t quite close the deal in a field with Biden, Warren, and Sanders. She may well be on the ticket in the second spot. Having her as president or VP would—probably—have an effect on black turnout similar to Obama’s in 2008.
The raw, real politics of 2020 demand that the Democrats get their shit together when it comes to their most loyal and vital constituency. African Americans have given the Democrats their votes with stunning regularity and consistency for decades. The only differences come with turnout rate. They may not be voting for Trump, but the key question is whether Democrats are turning them out to vote at all.
One African American operative who worked for Obama shook his head when I asked if the Clinton campaign’s African American outreach was effective. “Well, some people got paid,” he said, “if that’s what you’re asking.”
You may have noticed by now that Donald Trump’s support with African Americans is…what’s the word? Oh, yes: abysmal. Racism will do that.
The struggle of the GOP to play the “Look at my black friend” game in the era of Trump is a monumental lift, and largely results in merely nervous laughter. Those great voices of the civil rights struggle like Diamond and Silk, Candace Owens, and Sheriff David Clarke haven’t exactly altered the political chemistry for a presidency that reeks of racism from stem to stern.
The profound and fundamental question is how Democrats move African American voter performance into the region they need to secure victory in the Electoral College target states.
For black voters, the referendum on Trump is in one dimension: racism, not race. With the rising tide of racial violence inspired by Donald Trump’s rhetoric, and the large presence of covert and overt racists in his base of support, I’d argue that the path to activating African American voters leads through Charlottesville.
While some Democrats have adopted the idea that reparations is an issue sufficient to drive African American turnout, I’d argue as a guy sensitive to the politics of race (after an upbringing in both the Deep and New South—the Venn diagram is complicated) that the idea that Trump is bending the arc of history in the wrong direction is more compelling than a reparations plan. It was a momentarily hot issue in the Democratic debates, but in a Democratic primary Fox News will turn it into THE BLACK LIVES MATTER–ISIS CONNECTION! CAN PRESIDENT TRUMP SAVE US? It’s an issue with little growth potential in the general voting pool; just 26 percent overall favor reparations.15 Perhaps surprisingly, only 58 percent of African Americans favor them.
Winning the African American vote likely comes down to the two people who stand as political superheroes in the black community: Barack and Michelle Obama. Both of them have sky-high popularity across the board, and the Obamas’ unique ability to move, motivate, and turn out African Americans cannot be underestimated. The nominee needs to put any ego aside, make the ask, and do whatever it takes for the Obamas to come out and hit the road for the last six months of the 2020 campaign.
The only reasonable answer from the first African American First Couple is “Yes, we can.”