Presidential candidate Kamala Harris is facing significant challenges in maintaining support among black voters, a key demographic that the Democrat Party has taken for granted for far too long. This week, in a Philadelphia focus group segment on MSNBC, black voters told the network that they would be voting for Trump, citing how Harris doesn’t have what it takes to stand up to dictators such as Russian President Vladimir Putin. When MSNBC pressed the matter by asking if gender played a role in their resistance to her candidacy, the room erupted “no.” The group expressed a feeling that many across the black community share: Harris doesn’t understand our struggles.
This focus group is not an outlier. Poll after poll confirms that black voters are walking away from the Democrat Party at a rate we’ve never seen before. The latest New York Times/Siena poll reveals a major 12-point drop in support for Harris since 2020 among blacks. Her plummeting poll numbers are raising many questions within her party about her path forward, with The New York Times signaling that this drop in support is “large enough to imperil her chances of winning key battleground states.”
So what did Harris do to win the support of black voters like myself? Well, first, she brought out former President Barack Obama to scold black males into supporting her. When that didn’t move the needle, she rolled out a plan full of false promises and gimmicks. But we will not forget the decades of failed
