There are commentators who take it as a given that Trump is going to lose the black vote by a larger margin than Republican Presidential candidates usually do.
I doubt it.
First and foremost, Obama is no longer on the ballot, and it is deeply unlikely that Hillary Clinton get as many black votes as the real first black president.
Second, if you consider Trump not as a standard Republican, but as a celebrity candidate (which he most obviously is), his chances among black voters begin to look a lot better. Take, for example, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“The former body-builder, former Kennedy-in-law, was up for re-election in 2006 in one of the bluest states in the country. He was re-elected by a huge 17-point margin and won 27% of the Black vote in California. Schwarzenegger also won 39% of the Hispanic vote and a huge 62% of the Asian vote and 63% of the White Vote.”
Trump may not get 27% of the black vote (though I think that’s far more likely than Clinton getting the 96% of the black vote Obama got in 2008), but he doesn’t have to. Getting somewhere between that and the 10% of the black vote Republicans have historically garnered in Presidential elections will be enough to doom Clinton in several swing states.
And there are some signs that might be happening:
Third, Trump seems to be putting some effort into wooing black voters.
There are also some signs that Trump’s economic message is resonating with at least some parts of the black community the same way it has blue collar white voters.
Chicago attorney Brunell Donald-Kyei, a former Bernie Sanders supporter and Barack Obama voter, believes that Donald Trump’s economic message is resonating in American’s urban centers and elsewhere as well.
Donald-Kyei is now the vice chair of the Trump campaign’s diversity outreach coalition and has been making media appearances on behalf of the Republican presidential nominee during the campaign season. The lifelong Democrat who once ran for Illinois lieutenant governor explained in a previous interview that “I was a Bernie Sanders girl. Once… I saw how we were treated at the Democratic National Convention, I knew that I would not vote for Hillary Clinton, and the Trump Train just kept calling my name.”
Anecdotal evidence suggests that there’s real enthusiasm for Trump in some quarters of the black community, enthusiasm that simply wasn’t there for previous Republican Presidential candidates.
While Hillary racked up overwhelming support among black Democratic primary voters, enthusiasm about her in the black community at large has been noticably lacking. “Clinton and her entire campaign don’t care about black people unless their bodies are lifeless and cold, donating to her foundation, or paying them to give speeches…Nothing about this woman is genuine. Nothing.” Indeed, Democrats themselves are fretting about an enthusiasm gap among black voters for Clinton, and talk that the Clinton campaign is in panic mode over lack of black voter enthusiasm in Florida.
The entirety of the George Soros-funded #BlackLivesMatter seems to be a desperate attempt to keep the black community riled up about an imaginary epidemic of police brutality in order to get them to vote for Hillary. Whether it will work, or whether it can more than offset the white voters and police officers turned off by the tactic remains to be seen.
Finally, Trump has garnered some black celebrity Support. Some of those might strike you as pretty crappy black celebrities (like Mike Tyson), but the fact that there are some willing to publicly support him despite the relentless demonization of Trump by the mainstream media, and that many of them (Tyson, Herschel Walker) have worked with Trump, have to be encouraging signs for Team Trump.
As has been proven many, many times in this campaign, Donald Trump is such an unusual candidate that many of the usual rules simply don’t apply to him. “Blacks never vote for Republicans in Presidential races” may be one of those rules.