Several commenters have pointed out that Trump made a speech recently that appealed to black voters. Here’s how commenter Richard Saunders describes it, for example:
Trump makes the best speech of the campaign, and is the one of the first, if not the first, Republican to reach out to the black community in 50 years, a brilliant move both substantively and strategically…
I’ve already said, many times, how little I think that any of Trump’s speeches matter to anyone except those who already are predisposed to like him. One of the many many troubles with Trump (as I described at some length yesterday) is that there is an unusally huge (yuge?) gap perceived between his off-the-cuff words and his scripted words/persona, and the former tend to trump (sorry!) the latter because they appear to express his own thoughts rather than those of others. So my first reaction is the same as to any Trump speech.
But let’s put that aside and take the speech on its merits. Several people have indicated that it’s something no other Republican has done in 50 years or more (or very very few, anyway, as Richard Saunders concedes). But on what is that assertion based? Memory? Memory can play funny tricks on you; that’s why Google is our friend.
And just a very quick Googling reveals that both Mitt Romney and George Bush reached out in a similar way during campaigns, as did Rand Paul during the 2016 campaign (see this, this, and this). That’s as far back as I tried to search at first (to search all the Republican presidents and candidates of the last 50 years would take too long), but just now I decided to Google “Gerald Ford speaks to black community” and up came this:
In the months after he assumed the presidency, Ford actively presented his views on domestic policy, including civil rights and urban affairs, to African American organizations, including the National Baptist Convention, and at forums such as the White House Conference on Domestic and Economic Affairs. He used a 1975 speech at the NAACP national convention to talk about the adverse impact of the recession and inflation on low-income workers and the poor. He promised that his administration’s policy of fiscal restraint wouldn’t mean turning the country’s back on problems of employment, housing, education, transportation and health care…
Meanwhile, the president reached out to African American audiences to sell his policies. For example, his 1975 speech to the predominantly black National Newspaper Publishers Association addressed the economy, crime, taxes, unemployment and voting rights. “Blacks in our society have too often been mentally segregated by some thinkers and planners who acted as if blacks did not have the same expectations and problems as other Americans,” he said. “I promised at the very beginning of my administration to be president of all the people, and I am keeping that pledge. The administration will not slice off a small portion of the pie and say, ”˜This is enough for the 25 millions of Americans who are black.’”
There’s a good deal more at the link; the whole thing is an excerpt from a book entitled Presidents and Black America: A Documentary History (can’t find it at Amazon, though), which might correct the record on misconceptions about a lot of presidents.
I have grown tired of people who support Trump asserting he’s the only one who has done this, or that, or the other thing (tough talk on immigration being another) when in fact he’s not all that singular at all. The truth about the GOP and the black community in recent years is that the perception of “Democrats good, GOP bad” by the black community has become entrenched and is probably not amenable to a speech, period.
The MSM has long been engaged in promoting the idea that Republicans ignore black people. It’s said often enough by the left that I don’t think the right needs to repeat the falsehood. And yet, the right often accepts that characterization by the left without questioning or researching it.
During the primaries there was also lot of hype about how Trump was getting or about to be getting a significant amount of the black vote, as expressed in polls. I believe that was something that was not only pushed by Trump supporters for obvious reasons, but was pushed by the MSM to get more support in the primaries for Trump because they felt he’d actually be the weakest opponent for Hillary to face. But when I looked more closely at that claim about Trump’s support among blacks, it tended to evaporate (see this and this).
James Taranto has a recent article on the subject of Trump and the black vote in which he says:
Consider, though, that it would have been all but impossible to assemble a crowd of Trump supporters in a black neighborhood. Several recent polls have shown Trump’s African-American support, both nationally and in battleground states, as low as 1% or even zero.
On the other hand, Trump’s black support wasn’t always so low. This is from a May NewsMax report:
A May 2 Public Policy Polling release showed that in the swing state of Ohio, Donald Trump would garner 15 percent of the African-American vote vs. Hillary Clinton.
According to Van Jones, former aide to President Barack Obama and CNN contributor, that puts Trump in the White House.
“If only 70 percent don’t like Donald Trump, that means 30 percent are open to his argument; if he gets half of those, he’s president,” Jones said in a video posted on his Facebook page. “In order for the Democrats to win the White House, they . . . need 90 to 92 percent of the black vote.”
Of course that 90% to 92% threshold varies depending on turnout and on the candidates’ performances with nonblack voters. But if Trump’s black support has declined from a respectable (for a Republican) 15% a few months ago to 1% or less today, that suggests his detractors””Democrats, media people and even some Republicans””have been successful in their effort to portray him as racist. It makes sense for him to counter that perception, since most voters of whatever race would rather not cast ballots for a candidate they see as racist.
Some commentators have observed that given the margin of error, if a poll shows 1% support, the actual level of support could be negative. That’s impossible, of course: The margin of error does not supersede the absolute lower limit of zero. But the margin of error does work the other way: A poll showing zero or near-zero support could underestimate the actual level. And the margin of error of a small subsample””blacks are approximately one-eighth of the total U.S. population””is considerably higher than that of the entire sample.
It’s possible that the May poll showing 15% support among blacks in Ohio (a state whose African-American population share is close to that of the whole country) is a more reliable indicator than the recent zero or 1% polls. Perhaps social-acceptability bias has made black Trump supporters less willing to admit their true preference.
In any case, an optimistic Trump supporter would point out that the current polls are so low that they leave room for nothing other than improvement. Trump would be a fool not to take advantage of the opportunity.
In analyzing that poll from May, the first thing one has to realize is that in recent presidential elections, Republicans have gotten less than 15% of the vote but hardly zero. Romney (running against black candidate Barack Obama) got 6% of the black vote in 2012; McCain (against the same opponent) got 4% in 2008, while in 2004 George Bush (running against Kerry) got 11% and in 2000 he got 9% (running against Gore). Prior to that, Bob Dole got 12% and Perot 4% in 1996, and in 1992 George Bush got 10%.
Those are the figures for comparison. Remember, however, that the Public Policy poll from May was taken in Ohio rather than nationwide, but fortunately we are able to compare that 15% of black voters who were supposedly for Trump to the vote in Ohio for George W. Bush in 2004 against John Kerry—according to exit polls, it was 16%; pretty similar.
But there’s another problem with that 15% figure for Trump in Ohio back in May. If you actually look at the poll figures, you will see that it was a survey of 799 Ohio voters. 12% of those voters were black, which means (rounded up) that the poll queried 96 black voters. Therefore, Trump’s 15% of those black voters would have been 14 people. For comparison, Cruz got 11% of the black voters in the same poll, which would have been about 10.5 people. The difference seems rather meaningless because the n is just too small to matter. The margin of error for the entire group of 799 was +-3.2%, but for the subgroup of black voters it would be much larger.
I wouldn’t come to any conclusions about much of anything from poll results like that, except that the poll needs a larger n. At any rate, as Taranto points out, Trump no longer appears to be pulling anything like those numbers of black voters nationwide, if in fact he ever did in Ohio, and if in fact we trust that polls can measure this accurately. I somehow doubt that either finding—the 15% in May or the near-0% since then—are valid, and I would guess that the truth lies somewhere in-between, and will remain there no matter how many speeches Trump makes to the black community.
[NOTE: By the way, unlike many of his predecessors such as Romney—who gave his speech to the NAACP—Trump’s speech was given to a white audience. Make of that what you will.]
