« Facebook censors American Thinker | Running scared: Cuomo pulls out all stops to avoid responsibility on NY's massive COVID nursing home death count »
August 11, 2020

Trump’s approval rate among black likely voters hits 36% in Rasmussen poll

By Thomas Lifson

Could 2020 be the year that the Democrats’ lock on 90%-plus of the black vote is broken? Like you (in all probability), I keep thinking that I’ve had this hope for decades now, and it has always been dashed when the votes are counted.  Scott McKay, who, like me, is hopeful, cautions:

The chasing of the black vote by Republican candidates is akin to the famous Peanuts meme, in which Lucy pulls the football before Charlie Brown can kick it. Instead of knocking home a field goal, Charlie finds himself flying through the air and landing on his back wondering why he fell for the gag once again.

But there are more than a few reasons to hope that this year will different. Start with the data from Rasmussen, via CNS News:

According to the Rasmussen poll for July 2020, 36% of black American likely voters approve of the job President Trump is doing while 48% of white voters and 51% of non-white voters approve.

White House photo

That “other non-white” approval rate must reflect high Asian approval rates, lending a big clue for the Trump campaign about where to spend some resources on turnout.

McKay points out that

…15 percent ….is the percentage of the black vote Richard Nixon was able to pull in the 1968 election.

The 1968 race isn’t really the perfect analogy to the Trump–Biden race we’ll see play out over the next 80-odd days. In 1968 it was Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, and George Wallace in a three-way race. Wallace, obviously, didn’t appeal too much to black voters. But Humphrey did, and not that successfully.

What was Nixon’s secret? He didn’t chase all of the black vote. He went after the pieces of it that were gettable. Nixon’s appeal to black voters talked about black-owned businesses, black home ownership, better schools in black neighborhoods, and, most of all, a law-and-order message blaming bad Democrat governance for the lawlessness on the streets in black neighborhoods. People remember the summer of 1968 and the chaos in America’s streets, and they think of that year as an emergence of angry black radical politics — the Black Panthers and the Black Power movement and so on. But the idea that there was monolithic support in the black community for those things is one fostered by popular culture, not objective reality; most black people were not political radicals then, and most are not now. (snip)

[Trump is] the law-and-order candidate in the race because Biden can’t even condemn the rioters in the streets, as no one else in his party has done. And despite hot denials from his media lickspittles and party operatives, Biden’s platform absolutely calls for a drawdown in police funding. The platform says it’s for “redirecting” money from law enforcement to other things rather than defunding, but people aren’t stupid. And when more than four in five black voters say defunding the police is a bad idea, and the only people talking about defunding the police are Democrats, Joe Biden is now in a position to own that policy stupidity.

He’s also in a position to own the teachers’ unions and their idiotic refusal to go back to work, which makes Trump the education candidate in the race. Trump is talking about putting federal education dollars in the hands of parents where schools won’t reopen, which could well given educational freedom to millions of black parents who want badly to escape the failing government schools in their neighborhoods. The Democrats are talking about squashing that freedom once and for all — not just doing away with charter schools but even private schools. Black voters have been dissatisfied with Democrat educational politics for a long time, but haven’t made the Democrats pay for that dissatisfaction to date. Who’s to say that will continue forever?

There are more than enough members of the black middle class to get Trump to that 15 percent number, and another item in Biden’s platform could well be a deal-breaker for those people. Some 83 percent of Americans are with Trump, rather than Biden, on the latter’s idiotic idea to dismantle the suburbs through federal housing and zoning regulations

Wayne Root makes similar points in a heartfelt essay at Gateway Pundit:

I believe the black vote will be the key to President Trump’s coming electoral landslide. No, it’s not a “Black Silent Majority.” Trump and Republicans aren’t winning a majority of black votes in 2020. But we don’t need a majority. We just need a “Black Silent Minority” to clinch a Trump victory. (snip)

Who makes up this “Black Silent Minority?” Black business owners, black homeowners, black gun owners, black church-goers, black families with children attending charter or religious school.

These voters often live in dangerous, high-crime neighborhoods. Or they’ve escaped those dangerous neighborhoods for the suburbs. They understand, perhaps more than any other group, the police are “the Thin Blue Line.” Disband police, or defund police, and it’s black neighborhoods that will suffer the most.

The latest polls prove my gut instincts right. A new Gallop (sic) poll reports over 80% of black Americans do not support disbanding or defunding police. More significantly, about 20% want more police.

Two additional points may be a sleepers:

One is that President Trump's personality, that of a non-politician, may be able to reach blacks more effectively than other Republicans. He speaks his mind and doesn't weasel his way through tough isues the way that conventional poltiical figures do. I suspect this appeals to blacks, who have an understandable cynicism toward politicians and their promises. I believe that Trump's Celebrity Apprentice television series had a very large black viewership, roughlu double their perentage of the population.   

The other sleeper issue the role of white radicals operating under the banners of Antifa and Black Lives Matter in the arson attacks that have trashed black neighborhoods in major cities.  Starting with the first riots in Minneapolis, where the nation’s TV screens were filled with images of whites throwing firebombs into stores serving minority communities, including supermarkets and a Target store, urban blacks have been forced to live among ruins and go far out of their way to buy basic necessities.

If I were running a PAC supporting Trump, I would do commercials featuring black residents complaining that they have nowhere to buy the necessities of life now that outsiders have firebombed the stores where they formerly shopped, and saying that Biden won’t utter a word of criticism about them. They are being used as pawns and I suspect that a lot of them know it and are deeply resentful.

If you experience technical problems, please write to helpdesk@americanthinker.com