Donald Trump Wooing The Black Electorate

The Republican billionaire, looking for a second four-year term, is launching Friday, from Atlanta, Georgia, a city steeped in history, the coalition of “Black Voices for Trump.”

“Black Americans have never had a better defender than President Trump,” said Katrina Pierson, a member of his campaign team. But the formula hardly convinces, even if the former businessman tirelessly puts forward unemployment figures at the lowest.

According to a July poll by Quinnipiac University, 80 percent of black voters say Donald Trump is racist.

In 2016, the real estate tycoon played the card of the disenchantment of a part of African-Americans vis-à-vis the party of Barack Obama, with a sentence-shock repeated at will: “What what you have to lose? ”

He got only 8% of the votes of the black electorate, against 88% for his rival Democratic Hillary Clinton.
But since coming to power, his repeated attacks on African-American leaders have only fueled tensions.

The latest? A series of tweets in the heart of the summer of incredible aggression against the elected Baltimore Elijah Cummings, iconic and charismatic figure of Congress, who has since passed away.
“A disgusting disorder, infested with rats and other rodents”, a “very dangerous and dirty place” where “no human being would want to live”: the American president had painted a dark and contemptuous picture of Baltimore, a largely black industrial city of Maryland.

Cliff Albright, the co-founder of Black Voters Matter, is indignant at the presidential initiative.
“It’s an imposture, it’s hypocritical, it’s insulting,” he says, denouncing the words, but also the actions of the tenant of the White House.

But what is Donald Trump’s strategy? Does he really hope to pick up a few percentages of points among African Americans accounting for about 13% of the US population?

“Create confusion”

“He’s not really trying to get African-American voices,” Albright told Nigeria News. “He seeks above all to minimize their participation”.

In 2016, the black electorate’s mobilization for Hillary Clinton had been notoriously weak in several key states such as Wisconsin, which had toppled, to general surprise, on Trump’s side.

In 2020, the Democrats hope to remobilize this part of the electorate to find levels close to the two elections of Barack Obama, in 2008 and in 2012.

Everything will also depend, to a certain extent, on the name of the democrat who will face the former businessman from New York.

Former Vice President Joe Biden has enjoyed strong popularity among African-American voters, not least because of his excellent relationship with Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States.
Its rivals, the young mayor Pete Buttigieg and the progressive Elizabeth Warren, for the moment, arouse less enthusiasm.