Recent polling shows President Joe Biden losing support from Black voters; Democrats appear genuinely shocked. Their confusion reflects a reprehensible and dated view of American minorities. New York Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, recently said at the Milken Institute Conference in California, "we have young Black kids growing up in the Bronx who don’t even know what the word computer is," a statement so out of touch with reality and so condescending that she had to subsequently apologize.
Democrats are so dug in on the narrative that Blacks in America are condemned by what Biden calls "systemic racism" to poverty and ignorance that they are oblivious to the needs and attitudes of successful middle class African Americans. As it happens, according to Pew research, in 2021, 47% of Blacks were in the middle class, the same as Asians and only slightly less than other ethnic groups.
This group, like all Americans, is concerned about the cost of living and jobs and crime in their neighborhoods. And, like much of the country, they find themselves thinking fondly of the Trump years, when inflation was less than 2%, unemployment was low, prosecutors were doing their jobs and income inequality, according to the Federal Reserve, was narrowing.
TIM SCOTT: TRUMP GETTING 20% OF THE BLACK VOTE WOULD 'DECIMATE' THE DEMOCRAT PARTY
A devastating new New York Times/Siena poll of critical swing states found 76% of Black voters rate the economy today as "fair" or "poor," while only 22% judged it "excellent" or "good." Like other groups, Blacks rank the economy their No. 1 issue.
New York Times opinion writer Charles Blow noted in a March column that Black business owners are nostalgic for the Trump era; he quotes the owner of a barber shop saying, "I think Mr. Trump did a lot for the business community and ensuring that the entrepreneurs maintain stability to keep our community employed."
Echoing those remarks, the New York Times recently published an article detailing the concerns of Black small business owners in Georgia, mostly long-time Democrats, who are considering switching their support to the GOP nominee.
They describe the entrepreneurs as frustrated with high interest rates and drawn to former President Donald Trump because of his pro-business bias. As the Times reports, Black Americans are "disproportionately affected by higher interest rates on mortgages, credit cards, student loans and business debts."
Because Biden and his Democrat colleagues blew out the federal budget early in his presidency, spending $1.9 trillion on the American Rescue Act, and then followed that nakedly political power grab with other hefty spending measures, inflation soared to 9.1% from 1.4% when Biden took office.
The Federal Reserve stepped in to control inflation by jacking up interest rates, inflating the cost of buying a home, a car or borrowing to start a business. Even as Biden continues to argue that the economy is doing great and that inflation is coming under control, many – including in the Black community – disagree.
Democrats are terrified that they can no longer count on overwhelming support from the African American community as they gradually move up the income ladder. As Blow wrote recently: "For Democrats, the fear isn’t that Black voters will begin to vote differently from other voters, but that they’ll begin to vote like other voters."
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How significant is the shift in support? That same New York Times poll referenced earlier showed that only 63% of Blacks in six battleground states would pick Biden over Trump in a head-to-head match-up (with 15% saying they didn’t know or refusing to answer), though 87% of those who voted in 2020 went for Biden. Also worrisome for Democrats: only 58% said they considered themselves Democrats, while 30% listed themselves as Independents.
A Wall Street Journal poll conducted in April found nearly one third of Black men were considering or were definitely planning to vote for Trump over Biden. Shockingly, some 42% of Black women in that survey are described by pollsters as "up for grabs" in the election. This is a huge turnaround from 2020 when Biden captured 92% of the Black vote.
At a rally held over the past weekend in New Jersey, former Giants football Hall of Famer and lifelong Democrat Lawrence Taylor declared his support for Donald Trump saying, "He will not have to worry, nobody in my family ever voting for a Democrat again."
Taylor is not alone. Republican South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, another Black Trump backer, recently responded to comments from "The View" hosts about Biden’s lock on Black voters saying, "Four out of 10 Black men are wanting to vote for the Republican Party, doubling the number of Black women interested in voting for the Republican Party. What they’re afraid of is the monopoly is over."
While the majority of Black voters will almost certainly support Biden in November, there does appear to be some erosion in that "monopoly." It’s high time. Democrats have taken African Americans for granted for decades. When Biden told radio host Charlamagne tha God in 2020 that Blacks considering voting for Donald Trump "ain’t Black," it signaled his conviction that Democrats "own" the Black vote. Maybe that is changing. To paraphrase Donald Trump, what do they have to lose?
