Vice President Kamala Harris has lost the party’s standing among black voters since President Biden withdrew from the presidential race, according to a poll of prospective black voters conducted by The New York Times and Siena College. Although the number has improved, it remains far behind Biden’s 2020 share in key Democratic constituencies. .
Polls show that nearly eight in 10 black voters nationwide say they will vote for Harris, and 74 black voters said they would support Biden before he withdrew from the race in July. % increased significantly. However, Biden won the White House by a narrow margin in 2020, winning 90% of black voters, and if this trend continues, Harris’ decline will be enough to jeopardize her chances of winning in key battleground states. big.
Democrats are banking on the chance to elect their first black female president and a tsunami of support from black voters drawn by their distaste for former President Donald J. Trump, who questioned Harris’ racial identity. are. ” and demonizing Haitian immigrants pushed his long history of racist attacks to the forefront of the campaign.
While Ms. Harris is undoubtedly on track to win over the overwhelming majority of black voters, Mr. Trump appears to have significantly chipped away at the Democratic Party’s long-standing advantage. His campaign has relied on targeted advertising and sporadic advocacy events to attract African American voters, especially black men, and his approval ratings have been rising. About 15% of likely black voters say they plan to vote for the former president, a 6-point increase from four years ago, according to a new poll.
Polls show that much of the decline in support for Harris is due to a widespread belief that the Democratic Party, which has long praised black voters as the party’s “backbone,” is not living up to its promises. 40% of African American voters under 30 say Republicans are more likely than Democrats to follow through on their campaign promises.
“They swept table scraps off the table and told us, ‘This is yours,’ as if we were trained dogs,” said LaPage Drake, 63, of Cedar Hill, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. I say that,” he said of the Democratic Party. “And we applaud like trained seals.”
Mr. Drake, who owns a tree-trimming service, said he supports Mr. Trump.
“No matter what people call him a racist or whatever, he’s for the country of America,” Drake said.
Black women’s support for the vice president is strong at approximately 83%. Twelve percent of black women said they supported Trump, while 5% were undecided. However, the divergence from Biden’s 2020 numbers for black men is striking. In November, 70% said they would vote for Harris, down from 85% for Biden in 2020. This is consistent with a broader gender gap, but one that is relatively recent among black voters.
Still, even as Trump continued to convince African-American voters that their lives were better while he was president, the number of black voters who said the Biden-Harris administration’s policies helped them declined in February. It has increased from the point in time.
Far fewer people now say Trump’s policies helped them.
In Pittsburgh on Thursday night, former President Barack Obama appealed directly to black men who are undecided about supporting Harris, suggesting that many are “not at all comfortable with the idea of a woman as president,” and said: It reminded me of. “The women in our lives have always had our backs.”
Harris’ supporters credit her efforts as vice president to lowering black unemployment, stabilizing health care costs, and increasing funding for historically black colleges and universities to serve the black community. It points to an example of a concerted and measurable effort to In a recent interview, Harris said she knows African American voters will flock to her campaign.
To appeal to these voters, Ms. Harris’ campaign has begun a tour of historically black colleges and universities and plans to launch a weekend effort to engage voters of black faith in battleground states. Harris also promotes black men through representation events and non-traditional media interviews, including a recent appearance on the podcast “All the Smoke,” hosted by former professional basketball players Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson. We have been trying to build a relationship with
The vice president is scheduled to attend a town hall-style event hosted by the morning radio show The Breakfast Club in Detroit on Tuesday, said Charlamagne tha God, one of the show’s hosts. It was revealed on Friday. The nationally broadcast show is popular with black millennials.
African-American voters have far more favorable views of Harris personally than of Trump. 75% said Harris would do a better job of addressing issues that are personally important to them. Only 17% said Trump would do that.
“I think she can do a better job than him. She’s more supportive of making my family better,” said William Cox, 47, a truck driver from Greensboro, North Carolina.
But black voters were divided on certain issues. Fifty-six percent said the U.S. should pay less attention to foreign issues and focus more on domestic issues, a position that more closely reflects Trump’s views than Harris’s. Forty percent of black voters support Trump’s border wall, and 41% support deporting immigrants in the country, something Trump has vowed to do en masse. That’s less than the 52% who oppose the proposal, but still a significant portion of black voters.
Mr. Trump has wrapped up his campaign with increasingly xenophobic rhetoric and intimidation tactics, frequently touting the false image that illegal immigrants are infesting the nation’s cities with crime. In fact, violent crime in U.S. cities is decreasing.
But 47% of African American voters (a majority) say crime in big cities is out of control, seeming to support Trump’s portrayal. 42% agreed with a more moderate representation of the problem: Crime is a big problem in big cities, but it’s not out of control.
In fact, statistics show that crime rates, especially homicide rates, have improved in most major cities after the coronavirus pandemic spiked in the final year of Trump’s term.
But black voters are softening their view of Biden’s time in office. In February, 25 percentage points more African-American voters said Biden’s policies had hurt them than said they had helped them. The tables have now turned, with black voters 23 points more likely to say Biden’s policies have helped them, potentially giving Harris an advantage in making her case.
At the same time, views of Trump’s time in office have worsened since February. Black voters are now twice as likely to say that Trump’s policies have hurt them than to say that they have helped them. Black voters were divided on this question in February.
Still, Harris’ problems with African American voters hinge on the same issue as her battles with other races: the economy. Nearly three-quarters of black voters rated the economy as “fair” or “poor,” with the economy and abortion their most pressing concerns. More than 7 in 10 black voters say they have refrained from buying groceries because of cost. 56% said they cut back frequently.
Seventy-eight percent of black voters say race remains a major barrier to career advancement, and 21% of them say Democrats don’t have solutions to address the obstacles.
But a potential saving grace for Ms. Harris is the party’s strong reputation for supporting low-income people of color, which remains strong among a wide range of black voters.
“Things will get better with a Democratic president,” said Knesia Baldwin, 34, a home health worker in Norwood, North Carolina, adding that she would vote for Harris. “I think the problem is on the Republican side.”
Christine Zhang contributed to the report.
Here’s what’s important to know about this poll:
Interviewers spoke to 589 Black voters from September 29 to October 6, 2024, as part of a national poll of 3,385 voters.
The survey uses a research technique known as oversampling and includes responses from more than three times as many Black voters as a typical national survey. The purpose of oversampling is to ensure that subgroups such as black men and young black voters can be analyzed. This method does not affect the top-level results of the final vote. National polls are weighted to ensure that Black respondents represent an appropriate percentage of the overall electorate, ensuring that Black opinions are not overrepresented in poll results.
The Times/Siena poll is conducted by phone using live interviewers in both English and Spanish. Overall, approximately 98 percent of respondents in these polls were contacted by cell phone. Here you can see the exact questions asked and their order.
Voters for the survey are selected from a list of registered voters. This list includes information about the demographic characteristics of all registered voters, ensuring that you have the right number of voters for each party, race, and region.
To further ensure that the results reflect the electorate as a whole, not just those willing to participate in the poll, we looked at underrepresented groups among survey respondents, such as those without a college degree. give more weight to respondents from certain demographic groups. Further information about respondent characteristics and weighted samples can be found under ‘Sample Composition’ at the bottom of the Results and Methodology page.
The margin of sampling error for likely black voters is plus or minus 5.6 points. In theory, this means that the results should most often reflect the opinions of the entire population, but many other challenges create additional sources of error. When the difference between two values is calculated, such as a candidate’s lead in a race, the margin of error is doubled.
Complete results and detailed methodology can be found here. If you’d like to learn more about how and why we conduct surveys, you can find answers to frequently asked questions or submit your own question here.
