Former president Barack Obama said that Black men are “coming up with all kinds of reasons” to avoid turning out for Harris.
Things came to a head last week when a pretty heated Barack Obama attempted a bit of “tough love” at a Pittsburgh campaign office for Vice President Kamala Harris. The former president said that Black men are “coming up with all kinds of reasons” to avoid turning out for Harris because they “just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president.”
“You’re thinking about sitting out or supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you, because you think that’s a sign of strength, because that’s what being a man is? Putting women down? That’s not acceptable,” he added.
Many people raised an eyebrow on hearing Obama’s comments, asking whether the former president’s energy was misplaced on Black men and questioning whether it would mobilize voters.
The last time a woman led a major party ticket, Black men overwhelmingly voted for her. And Win With Black Men raised more than $1.3 million for Harris’ campaign back in July.
Recent New York Times/Siena College polls reflect broad Black voter frustration with the Democratic Party. But the party’s greatest challenge isn’t with Black men, who, if history holds, will be the second most pro-Harris voting bloc — after Black women. More than half of white voters chose Trump in 2020, and we could see a repeat in November.
“We’re not a monolith, but this idea that large numbers of Black men are going to vote for Donald Trump, it’s not going to happen,” U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia told CNN during an interview earlier this week.
His remarks echoed the results of some recent research. Political scientists found that “the decline in Democratic support among Black voters has occurred mainly among non-voters” and that “while pre-election polls indicate rising numbers of undecided Black voters, the vast majority of these voters ultimately vote for the Democratic candidate.
W. Mondale Robinson, the mayor of the rural North Carolina town of Enfield and the founder of the Black Male Voter Project told Capital B that both major parties struggle to articulate the issues afflicting Black voters, and particularly Black men, because the U.S. has a “high tolerance” for Black pain.
“All [Black men] see are Democrats coming to my door during an election, which means that they want my vote, but they’ve not done anything or they’ve not been here to address everything that’s keeping me from being a full citizen,” he explained. “I’m struggling with the economy. I’m struggling with health care. I’m struggling with housing, and I’m being told that this is the most important thing to do, even though I can’t really afford to [miss work] to vote.”
On Monday, Harris unveiled her “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men,” a slew of proposals that she said are aimed at “equipping Black men with the tools to achieve financial freedom, lower costs to better provide for themselves and their families, and protect their rights,” according to a campaign release.
Among other things, the agenda calls for granting 1 million fully-forgivable loans to Black entrepreneurs to start a business, increasing the number of Black male educators, and launching a National Health Equity Initiative that would address prostate cancer, sickle cell disease, diabetes, and other health conditions that disproportionately burden Black men. This came just days after she released a plan that would create the first major expansion of Medicare in more than two decades, a move that would especially help Black communities.
And on Tuesday, the vice president joined Charlamagne tha God for a town hall-style event organized by his radio program, The Breakfast Club. It was a wide-ranging conversation, but one position Harris emphasized was her goal to legalize marijuana because she knows “exactly how those laws have been used to disproportionately impact certain populations and specifically Black men.”
Democrats are seeking to boost Black voter turnout in battleground states, where more than a third of Black eligible voters live and where elections are decided by wafer-thin margins.
Theodore R. Johnson, a senior adviser at the public policy think tank New America and a scholar of Black political behavior, told Capital B earlier this year, that dips in turnout in swing states will have a greater impact on the outcome of the election than a defection of Black Democrats to the Republican Party.
He said that if Black voters don’t feel confident that Harris can triumph, or if they don’t really believe that they’re represented in the vision of America she’s painting, they’re more likely to stay home than to cast a ballot for Trump.
During an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists in September, Harris said “it’s very important to not operate from the assumption that Black men are in anybody’s pocket.”
Black men, she stressed, “are like any other voting group: You gotta earn their vote.”
Staff writer Aallyah Wright contributed to this report.
This story has been updated.