Trump Campaign Reaches Out to African-American Voters

Surely, it’s a good thing that the Trump campaign is aggressively reaching out to African-American voters. It would be singularly  unintelligent for the Republican Party to write off a large segment of the population. And besides, the Trump administration has a record to run on, and it ought to promote that record in the African-American community.

After all, if minority voters become a less reliable Democratic voting bloc, that party is in some serious electoral trouble.

For the record, if you want to measure how much trouble they are in, simply count the number of times that they call Republicans racists. Haven’t you suspected that Democrats routinely accuse Republicans of bigotry because they want to produce higher voter turnout in oppressed minority and majority communities? 

John Hinderaker quotes a story from The Washington Examiner (all via Maggie’s Farm.)

President Trump is opening 15 urban campaign field offices in an aggressive bid to improve his performance with black voters, who for decades have been an overwhelmingly Democratic constituency.

Sleek and situated in retail shopping districts to generate foot traffic, this unique collection of regional “community centers” is a critical component of the Trump campaign’s multimillion-dollar strategy to double in 2020 the 8% support the president received from black voters nearly four years ago.

Five offices are slated for Florida: Tallahassee, Jacksonville, Orlando, Tampa, and Miami. In North Carolina, branches are opening in Charlotte, Raleigh, and Greensboro. Others will be located in Atlanta, Detroit, Columbus, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Milwaukee.

Or else, examine what Jared Kushner has to say:

“You’re never going to get the votes you don’t ask for,” said Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and close adviser. “Last time, it was, ‘What the hell do you have to lose?’ Now, we’re going to show them what they’ve gained from President Trump and what more they can gain if they get four more years.”

If you have a long memory you might recall that I praised the Trump message: “What the hell do you have to lose?” in 2016. It was an invitation to rethink the African-American loyalty to the Democratic Party.

Now, the Trump administration can claim with some justification that African-Americans are doing better now than they were under the Obama presidency. At the least, they are not doing measurably worse.

Hinderaker adds that the president is now polling at around 20% among blacks. Surely, this is a positive development. It’s about time that a Republican president reach out to voters it had largely ignored. 

He concludes:

In my opinion, the most important single thing the Trump campaign can do between now and November is to campaign aggressively for black votes.

Ditto… and not just because it might break the Democratic electoral coalition. The other reason is that many white Americans are seriously uncomfortable at the notion that the Republican Party foments racism or any other kind of bigotry.