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CV NEWS FEED // Recent polling shows that young black voters, particularly young black men, are rapidly trending to the right at a rate that may be enough to tip the scales of next month’s election in favor of former President Donald Trump.
A recently released New York Times (NYT) / Siena poll found that in a head-to-head matchup between Trump and Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, 78% of likely black voters prefer Harris compared to 15% who prefer Trump.
While this seems like a good margin for Harris, if these numbers were to hold come election day in three weeks, Trump would post the best performance among black voters of any Republican presidential candidate in nearly half a century.
The last Republican nominee to gain at least 15% of the black vote was Gerald Ford, who as an incumbent president won about 17% in 1976.
While sources disagree on the exact percentage of the black vote Trump won in 2020, the 15% share at which he is currently polling undoubtedly represents a marked improvement from four years ago.
Furthermore, Pew Research Center found that in Trump’s 2016 victory over failed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, he only won about 6% of the black vote.
Therefore, the former president has more than doubled his support among African Americans in just eight years. An in-depth examination of the NYT poll released this weekend shows precisely why.
Young black voters are the key
Per the poll, the age cohort of black voters that supported Trump the most was the youngest – ages 18 to 29. Twenty-one percent of this group indicated they supported Trump.
By comparison, 15% of black voters aged 30 to 44, 14% of black voters aged 45 to 64, and 13% aged 65 and older said they supported Trump.
While these latter percentages are all greater than the percentage of the black vote Trump received in the past two election cycles, they are still dwarfed by the polling results he is enjoying with black voters in the 18 to 29 age group.
Since many of the young black voters were not old enough to take part in previous election cycles, it is likely that their support is the key factor to why Trump is on track to win the greatest share of the black vote since 1976.
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Also, when age is not taken into consideration, the NYT poll found that Trump is polling at 20% among black men. Among black women he is polling 12% of support – still a historically significant percentage for a Republican candidate.
However, Trump’s share of the vote among black men across all age cohorts is still one point smaller than his share among black voters 29 and younger, regardless of sex.
While the poll’s results did not further specify what percentage Trump is polling at among black male voters between 18 and 29, it is reasonable to assume from the rest of the data that the number is greater than 25%, or perhaps even 30%.
During a Monday CNN broadcast, CNN senior writer and political analyst Harry Enten emphasized that Trump is making inroads with younger black voters at a level unknown for a Republican in recent memory.
“Sometimes there’s a trend line I never noticed before and it makes me go, ‘Woah!’” Enten said on the air. “This is one of them.”
The analyst pointed out that according to the “average of the most recent polls,” Harris’ current lead among black voters between the ages of 18 and 44 is by “about half the margin” then-President Barack Obama enjoyed among this group just 12 years ago.
Per the numbers Enten showed on screen, Harris currently leads Trump by about 41 points among black voters under 45. For comparison, the Biden-Harris ticket won this group by 53 points in 2020, Clinton by 63 points in 2016, and Obama by 81 points in 2012.
A Harris-specific problem?
Enten disagreed with Obama’s heavily scrutinized remarks in Pittsburgh last week. The 44th president had seemed to imply, in Enten’s words, that the drastic polling shift is “a Kamala Harris-specific problem.”
“This is part of a longstanding trend of young black men moving away from the Democratic Party and Kamala Harris is just the latest to face that magnitude of younger black men going toward the Republicans,” Enten indicated.
He added that the rightward movement of “black men overall” is “part of the same picture.”
Enten also said that while Harris is “doing better with black women than she is with black men,” she is still performing more than 20 points worse among black women compared to Clinton’s margin just eight years ago.
“The bottom line is,” Enten stated, “when you’re talking about the base of the Democratic Party, you would think that Kamala Harris would do very well with black women, based upon history and of course she would be the first black woman president.”
“But she’s actually doing the worst for a Democratic candidate among black women since 1960,” he stressed.
