The most politically significant thing about President Trump’s State of the Union Address is that it shows he intends to compete hard for the votes of African Americans in the forthcoming 2020 election.
He thus directly appealed to these voters by pointing, with justifiable pride, to his record as president:
The unemployment rate for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans has reached the lowest levels in history. African-American youth unemployment has reached an all-time low. African-American poverty has declined to the lowest rate ever recorded…
Workers without a high school diploma have achieved the lowest unemployment rate recorded in U.S. history. A record number of young Americans are now employed…
In eight years under the last administration, over 300,000 working-age people dropped out of the workforce. In just three years of my administration, 3.5 million people, working-age people, have joined the workforce.
Since my election, the net worth of the bottom half of wage-earners has increased by 47 percent, three times faster than the increase for the top 1 percent.
After decades of flat and falling incomes, wages are rising fast — and, wonderfully, they are rising fastest for low-income workers, who have seen a 16 percent pay increase since my election.
This is a blue-collar boom…
Our roaring economy has, for the first time ever, given many former prisoners the ability to get a great job and a fresh start.
This second chance at life is made possible because we passed landmark criminal justice reform into law. Everybody said that criminal justice reform couldn’t be done, but I got it done, and the people in this room got it done.
Trump’s concerted effort to win the support of African Americans will strike many political pundits as either fanciful or ludicrous; but it’s actually very wise and strategic: because black voters may well hold the key to Trump’s reelection.
Conservative pundits think it’s fanciful because, they note, African Americans have been reliably Democratic voters for generations, and there is little reason, they think, to believe that will change in 2020.
So-called progressive pundits, likewise, think it’s ludicrous because, in their view, Trump is an obvious racist whom African Americans could never seriously consider supporting.
Trump and African Americans. But both the left and the right are wrong about Trump and the black vote. The Senate’s only African American Senator, Tim Scott (R-South Carolina), told Fox News’s Martha MacCallum this evening that four recent polls show Trump getting as much as 30 percent of the black vote.
Scott said we should discount those numbers and cut those estimates in half. He thinks around 15 percent of the black vote is a reasonable target for the president. If that’s true and those numbers hold up on election day, Trump will easily win reelection.
(Scott, not coincidentally, was specifically recognized by Trump for sponsoring Opportunity Zones in disadvantaged neighborhoods, many of them predominantly African American.
(“Jobs and investments,” said Trump, “are pouring into 9,000 previously neglected neighborhoods thanks to Opportunity Zones, a plan spearheaded by Senator Tim Scott as part of our great Republican tax cuts.”)
The Democrats simply cannot afford to lose more than 5-10 percent of the black vote, especially in key swing states like Michigan, Florida, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Wisconsin. And, despite Trump’s myriad flaws, the man is clearly not a racist, and most African American voters know this.
Certainly, the African American celebrities whom Trump has befriended and worked with over the past several decades know this. They can attest to Trump’s good will, even if his rhetoric is sometimes lacking and occasionally cringe-inducing.
Right Action. Competing hard for the votes of African Americans is smart politics and the right thing to do. It is smart politics, because America is rapidly becoming more racially and ethnically diverse. Thus to remain electorally competitive in 2020 and beyond, Republicans very much need to win more of the minority vote.
More importantly, though, it is the right thing to do. All Americans have a stake in our future and thus deserve the respect and consideration of our two major political parties.
National unity and social cohesion, moreover, are best served when key racial and demographic groups are well-represented throughout the political spectrum and across the political aisle.
Plus: competition in the political marketplace, no less than competition in the economic marketplace, spurs policy excellence and innovation.
The president may or may not win 15 percent of the black vote; we’ll see. But both he and the Republican Party, as well as the nation, will be better off and better served for seriously trying to do just that.
Feature photo credit: The New York Times.