While the president’s team touts its efforts to court a community that Republicans have long ignored, critics describe them as part of a cynical “depression strategy” designed to minimize Black American turnout.
Viewers who watch the Trump campaign’s online programming aimed at Black audiences are encouraged to tweet the hashtag #Woke when announcing their support for the president. Viewers are also asked to text the word to a number that will sign them up for updates and allow the campaign to harvest their data.
“That’s a scary thing for a Joe Biden campaign,” Paris Dennard, the Republican National Committee’s senior communications adviser for Black media affairs, told Yahoo News. “In fact, Donald Trump does not care about the Black vote. While he is actively trying to suppress turnout rather than genuinely engage African American voters, our campaign is working hard to earn their support.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s support among Black voters remains mired at around 10 percent, which is roughly in keeping with the share of the Black vote he won in 2016. Trump’s allies argue that he’s poised to win over more minority voters. Among other things, they point to his work passing bipartisan criminal justice reform legislation, providing funding for historically Black colleges, and presiding over the lowest African-American unemployment rate in history.
“President Trump looks at the community and says ... ‘We want to protect suburban areas,’” Pierson said. “I thought, that’s great. I’m Black. I own a home. I live in suburbia. ... Thank you, Mr. President.” But progressives argue that Trump’s team is more interested in discouraging Black people from voting than winning them over.
Hatch says this strategy is a mistake. “Those things don’t meet the demands of the current Black civil rights movement and are not in concert with what Black voters want to hear right now,” she said. “I believe that Black men specifically and Black people generally should be treated like swing voters. The swing might not necessarily be between voting for the right or voting for the left; the swing is between voting for the left or not voting at all,” Hatch said.
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