Is Kamala Harris losing support among Black voters?

Michael Lindell’s first vote for US president was for a man who, like him, is Black. Four years later he cast another ballot for Barack Obama. But then he became a Donald Trump supporter.

“The first time I voted for Trump, I was a little bit reluctant because I was conditioned to just vote Democratic,” said Lindell, wearing a red Make America Great Again hat at a Trump rally outside Atlanta this week. “This time I’m voting un-reluctantly. Trump opened my eyes to lots of things.”

Other Black voters, who make up 33 per cent of the electorate in the key swing state of Georgia, appear to be following Lindell’s lead, creating a new problem for Kamala Harris’s bid to win the White House.

Polls show Trump with a slight edge over Harris in Georgia, helped by the former president’s success this year in siphoning off some African-American voters — particularly Black men — from the Democratic candidate.

Harris’s support among Black voters in Georgia trails the levels that Joe Biden secured in his narrow, 11,779-vote victory in 2020. According to polling data released this week from Insider Advantage, Trump’s share of the Black vote in Georgia has reached 14 per cent, compared with 11 per cent in 2020. Harris’s share is 86 per cent, shy of Biden’s 88 per cent.

A survey by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution this week showed a similar trend, with Harris receiving 77 per cent of Black support, a commanding majority but still about 10 percentage points below the number Democrats usually need to win statewide. The poll found that 12 per cent were undecided.

Harris’s numbers have been improving recently, said Charles Bullock, political science professor at the University of Georgia, but they were still not strong enough. “She doesn’t have the level of Black support that she would need to win” the state, he said. However, “she’s getting closer to what she needs.”

Both campaigns are aggressively courting Georgia’s Black voters. Harris was in Atlanta on Saturday, appearing before a racially mixed crowd with the R&B singer Usher and declaring: “We are the underdog, but we will win.”

Harris is touting her new “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men” — announced just this week — that includes proposals for loans to Black entrepreneurs starting a business. The move aims to counter one of Trump’s core strengths with voters: the economy and jobs.

Her appearance came just four days after Trump held a rally in Atlanta that prominently featured Black speakers, including Michaelah Montgomery, a fiery local conservative activist. She said under Biden, “Democrats haven’t given a damn about Black men unless they’re dead or gay”.

Trump, who told the Atlanta audience that illegal immigrants were “devastating our great African-American community”, is scheduled to return to Georgia for a rally on Wednesday.

Biden’s razor-thin victory in Georgia in 2020 was critical to his national victory. It also set off a chain of contentious events, starting with Trump’s phone call to Georgia’s top election official in which he declared: “I just want to find 11,780 votes.”

The call became a key fact in criminal investigations into his attempts to overturn the election. Georgia’s subsequent US senate elections included a victory for Raphael Warnock, a Black Democrat, giving the party a majority in the chamber.

Trump’s inroads with Black voters in Georgia and other battleground states this year mirror his success with other traditionally Democratic-leaning groups, including union workers, Latinos and blue-collar voters. Harris has been pushing back, including through new media. This week she appeared on influential radio host Charlamagne tha God’s show, which is popular among young Black Americans.

Black churches in Georgia have been promoting “souls to the polls” efforts to encourage their congregations to vote, with an emphasis on early voting. A record number of Georgians turned out to the polls on Tuesday when early voting began. The churches are also making special efforts to ensure members’ voter registration information is current.

“We are conducting a serious, massive get-out-the-vote campaign,” said Cole Knapper, a chaplain in Athens.

Knapper added that churches in Athens had been conducting a “strong outreach” programme to Black men, while Black-owned barber shops were sponsoring discussions to engage their customers in the election.  

The burning topic among Black men has been Obama’s recent comment in Pennsylvania that African-Americans were not putting enough energy behind Harris, a trend he described as “more pronounced with the brothers”.

“Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that,” Obama said.

The comment sparked an intense debate in the Black community. “It created a shitstorm,” said Omar Ali, who leads the Justice, Equality and Economics political action committee, an organisation that claims a membership of 50,000 Black men in Georgia. “Black men felt like he was chastising them.”

Ali’s group has endorsed Harris, a move that followed its backing of the state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, two years ago. He pointed to Harris’s new plan to increase economic opportunities for Black men, including “fully forgivable” loans to founders of start-ups and new mentorship programmes, as a reason for his enthusiasm.

“She would be the first president ever to target anything to Black men,” Ali said. “It is remarkable.”

Elaine Lucas, a veteran Democratic elected official in Macon, dismissed   polls showing Harris had lost support among Black men. “I don’t know who these Black men are that they’re talking to, but I think it’s good that that sentiment is out there,” she said. “The main thing is to cultivate an atmosphere of urgency. This election will mean the salvation of our country — or not.”

She said a coalition of Black women, white women with college degrees and young female voters were “gung ho” for Harris, in large part because of her support for abortion and reproductive health and her opposition to Project 2025, the conservative policy blueprint.

A strong showing from these women could make up for any weakness in support from Black men, she said. “Those numbers from women are going to overshadow and overcome any negatives there might be.”

Some Black people in Georgia said they found the race’s closeness shocking, given Trump’s history of making what they considered racist statements.

They pointed to the full-page advertisements he took out in New York newspapers in 1989 calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty for five young Black men who were falsely accused of raping a woman in Central Park. Trump’s questioning of Obama’s birth certificate also still rankles, as does his recent statement that Harris “happened to turn Black”.

“To me, those things should resonate with African-Americans,” said the Black owner of a small business in Macon.  

At the rally in Atlanta, Lindell dismissed the Trump remarks as just “politics”. Trump, he said, had the right policies on “everything that should matter to everyone — the economy, immigration, foreign affairs”.

He added that backing a Republican should not be seen as inconsistent with being a Black man in America. “Historically, Black men are conservative in their morals and values,” he said.