Video Screengrab by the Daily Show / YouTube
CV NEWS FEED // A focus group of black voters featured on a recent episode of “The Daily Show” surprisingly split evenly between former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden when asked who they were supporting in November’s presidential election.
“Who will you be voting for in 2024?” Daily Show correspondent Josh Johnson asked the group of six voters.
Three of the focus group members said they were voting for or leaning toward voting for Trump, while the other three opted for Biden.
“Do I have to say his name? I don’t want to, but more than likely it’s going to be Trump,” one of the black voters stated. Two others joined him.
“We’re an even split,” Johnson observed. “I didn’t see that coming.”
In 2020, Biden overwhelmingly won African Americans – receiving 92% of the black vote compared to Trump’s 8%.
Recent polls have suggested that a seismic shift of black voters toward the political right may be underway.
>> ANALYST: WHY BLACK VOTERS WILL NOT TURN OUT FOR BIDEN <<
“Do you think there’s going to be a big shift, any sort of change?” Johnson asked the group.
“I think there’s going to be a big shift,” said the first voter. “I’ve always been a Democrat. For the most part with the Democratic Party they always make a bunch of promises that they can’t deliver.”
The other two voters who said they favored Trump agreed that there is going to be a “big shift” in November.
A woman in the group noted that the Democrats “use the issues of the African American community as a soapbox to stand on and make promises just to get us to come out and vote.”
“And then once we vote and everyone’s in place, it’s like ‘what happened,’” she added.
Comedian Eric Abbenate observed on X (formerly Twitter) that “How could you vote for Trump” is quickly shifting to “How could you vote for the senile guy?”
All of the voters in show’s focus group hailed from the state of New York, which is usually a reliably deep-blue state.
A poll last month showed that Biden leads Trump by only single digits in the Empire State.
Per the Siena College poll, Trump is buoyed by an unprecedented 29% of support by black New Yorkers – nearly five times the 6% of the New York black vote he received in 2020.
In a Tuesday Chicago Sun Times op-ed, Chicago community organizer David Cherry warned that Biden’s party is poised to suffer significant losses with black voters like himself.
In the op-ed, Cherry described himself as “neither a Democrat nor a Republican.”
“[T]he Democrats are severely underestimating the anger that is being expressed by the people who have been their most loyal voters and who feel locked out, left behind and abandoned,” Cherry wrote:
At exactly the time we need more debate, more competition and more ideas about how we can develop solutions and move forward as a nation, the Democratic Party’s message to Black voters in 2024 is that you have to vote for Biden.
According to some observers, Trump may be able to win more than 20% of the black vote in November. The last Republican presidential nominee to break this barrier was Richard Nixon in 1960.
