Will Trump End The Progressive Stranglehold on Blacks (& Their Votes)?

With blacks turning to Trump, the BLM movement may be meant, not just to terrorize Americans, but to send a clear warning message to blacks.

A decade ago, Thomas Sowell wrote, in How Republicans Can Win The Black Vote:

. . . One of the things that is long overdue is some Republican re-thinking — or perhaps thinking for the first time — about the approach that they have been using, with consistently disastrous results, for trying to get the black vote.

The black vote was once consistently Republican, from the time of Abraham Lincoln to Herbert Hoover. Even after Franklin D. Roosevelt won over the black vote to the Democrats, it was not considered remarkable when Eisenhower got a higher share of the black vote than any Republican president in recent times has.

It may be years before Republicans can again get a majority of the black vote. But Republicans don’t need to get a majority of the black vote. If they get 20 percent of the black vote, the Democrats are in trouble — and if they get 30 percent, the Democrats have had it in the general elections.

Despite this good advice, Romney didn’t make a sincere attempt for the black vote in 2012. Likewise, Trump in 2016 made only a nominal effort at reaching black voters.  Trump won only 8% of the black vote in the 2016 election.

The increasingly shrill narrative from progressives since 2016 has been that Trump is a stone-cold racist who would, to use a Biden race-hustling quote from 2012, “put y’all back in chains.”  In fact, as Jason Riley at the WSJ incisively observes, Democrats haven’t treated blacks well since the days of President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ):

Democrats focus their energies on keeping black people angry and paranoid, not on improving black lives. Democratic politicians typically don’t run on what they’ve done for blacks. They run on how much worse things will be if their Republican opponent wins.

The strategy has been extremely effective for Democrats over the past half-century, but it has left the black communities they represent with high unemployment, violent crime, homelessness, failing schools, and political leaders who are seldom held accountable for any of it . . .

But given Trump’s outreach to blacks over the past three years, it may well be that his actions will speak louder than progressive primal screams and BLM riots.  As Andrea Widburg writes at American Thinker, comparing Trump’s three years in office to Democrats generally:

Once elected, Trump didn’t do what Democrats have historically done, which is lots of lip service and no beneficial policies. Instead, Trump created opportunity zones that enticed businesses into black neighborhoods and funded Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Additionally, Trump, unlike Obama, passed the First Step Act, a prison reform bill, which is returning to the African American community many of the non-violent offenders that Joe Biden’s 1994 Crime Bill placed in prison. Yes, some of them will be recidivists, but I happen to be among those who believe that part of the pathology in many crime-ridden black neighborhoods is that Joe Biden sent fathers to prison. Trump let them out again.

Perhaps most importantly, the economy that Trump created was one that lifted all boats, something that had its most dramatic impact in the black community, achieving historically high levels of black employment.  Moreover, Trump used the Republican Convention as an infomercial for black outreach, sending in one major speaker after another to counter the narrative that Trump in particular, or Republicans in general, are racist, and to highlight all of the positive things Trump has done for the black community.  And as Trump said himself in his convention acceptance speech, “I have done more in three years for the black community than Joe Biden has done in 47 years—and when I’m reelected, the best is yet to come!”

So how is all of that playing in the black community?  Well, for anecdotal evidence.

As to the polls, they have been showing, over the past year, a significant rise in black support for President Trump.  And now, the most recent poll after the convention shows a huge bounce in the black approval:

President Trump’s approval rating from black and Hispanic voters rose amid the Republican National Convention.

Twenty-four percent of registered black voters approve of the job Trump is doing, a rise of 9 percentage points from a poll taken earlier in August, a Hill-HarrisX poll found.

The poll also showed positive movement for the president’s approval rating among Hispanic voters, 32% of whom approve of the job Trump is doing as president, a rise of 2 percentage points.

If these numbers are correct and they translate into votes for Trump in November, then, as Thomas Sowell forecast in 2010, “the Democrats are in trouble.”   Big trouble.  Thus it is no surprise that, while the majority of the mainstream media has tried to totally ignore Trump’s black outreach, those Democrats that directly address it are doing a primal scream, first that Trump is racist, and second that those blacks who support Trump are inauthentic.

For just a few examples, Politico said Alice Johnson, poster girl for the First Step Act, was used as a prop by Trump.  Dem. Rep. Steve Cohen said of Sen. Tim Scott, who is black, a Republican, and the author of opportunity zone legislation, that he “might as well be [White].”  MSNBC host Joy Reid stated that Republican convention organizers “trotted out” black speakers “to make white Americans feel good about white nationalism.”  After Herschel Walker spoke at the convention, he was called out on twitter as an Uncle Tom.  Rev. Jamal Bryant referred to all the blacks who spoke at the RNC convention as “slaves.”  A writer at the Daily Beast purports to explain “How Trump’s RNC Weaponized Blackness to Sell a Lie.”   And then, of course, there was the ultimate in demagoguery — Joe Biden’s reminder to a black audience that “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”

But what of the BLM and ANTIFA riots?  BLM is based on a series of lies, from systemic racism and critical race theory to the ludicrous notion that police use of force uniquely targets law-abiding blacks.  It’s obvious to everyone that, as a general matter, Democrats are using the BLM riots to scare people away from Trump. Because progressives and the MSM are now (and like Joe Biden today, laughably) blaming Trump for the riots, they imply — or sometimes state overtly — that, if Trump leaves office, the riots will end.

The opposite, of course, is true. Moreover, as Jason Whitlock said, the rioters “advance goals that have nothing to do with black people.”

I think, though, that the left has used BLM has its chosen vehicle for domestic terrorism for another, more specific, reason and that is to deter blacks from supporting Trump. As I showed, above, blacks are turning to Trump in numbers unimaginable since Roosevelt was elected. This is a nightmare for a political party that’s relied on black votes since the inveterate racist LBJ decided to coopt blacks as a monolith for electoral purpose.  Democrats must do anything — including destroying whole cities or engaging in vile racist rhetoric — to keep blacks from voting for Trump.

However, it’s possible that, in the chaos of 2020, it will finally happen that Trump will break LBJ’s stranglehold on the black vote far short of the “200 years” LBJ predicted.  There could be nothing more beneficial for blacks and for the nation at large if that happens.  We as a nation either continue forward and thrive as a melting pot or we become Lincoln’s house divided, falling to a dire fate few if any of us can foresee.

And as a reminder, from the People’s Cube: