Black Voters Drift From Democrats, Imperiling Harris’s Bid

Vice President Kamala Harris has improved her party’s standing among Black voters since President Biden left the presidential race, but she still significantly trails Mr. Biden’s 2020 share of that vital Democratic constituency, according to a New York Times/Siena Collage poll of Black like voters.

Nearly eight out of 10 Black voters nationwide said they would vote for Ms. Harris, the poll found, a marked increase from the 74 percent of Black voters who said they would support Mr. Biden before he dropped out of the race in July. But Mr. Biden won 90 percent of Black voters to capture the White House by narrow margins in 2020, and the drop-off for Ms. Harris, if it holds, is large enough to imperil her chances of winning key battleground states.

Democrats have been banking on a tidal wave of support from Black voters, drawn by the chance to elect the first Black female president and by revulsion toward former President Donald J. Trump, whose questioning of Ms. Harris’s racial identity, comments on “Black jobs” and demonizing of Haitian immigrants pushed his long history of racist attacks to the forefront of the campaign.

Ms. Harris is no doubt on track to win an overwhelming majority of Black voters, but Mr. Trump appears to be chipping away broadly at a longstanding Democratic advantage. His campaign has relied on targeted advertising and sporadic outreach events to court African American voters — especially Black men — and has seen an uptick in support. About 15 percent of Black likely voters said they planned to vote for the former president, according to the new poll, a six-point increase from four years ago.

Much of the erosion in support for Ms. Harris is driven by a growing belief that Democrats, who have long celebrated Black voters as the “backbone” of their party, have failed to deliver on their promises, the poll showed. Forty percent of African American voters under 30 said the Republican Party was more likely to follow through on its campaign commitments than Democrats were.

“They sweep table scraps off the table like we’re a trained dog and say, ‘This is for you,’” LaPage Drake, 63, of Cedar Hill, Texas, just outside Dallas, said of the Democratic Party. “And we clap like trained seals.”

Mr. Drake, who owns a tree removal service, said he would back Mr. Trump.

“Regardless of how people call him racist and stuff, he is for the country of America,” Mr. Drake said.

The vice president’s support from Black women is strong, about 83 percent. Twelve percent of Black women said they would back Mr. Trump, with 5 percent undecided. But the slip from Mr. Biden’s 2020 numbers among Black men is striking; 70 percent said they would vote for Ms. Harris in November, down from Mr. Biden’s 85 percent in 2020. This is in line with the gender gap more broadly, but relatively new among Black voters.

Still, despite Mr. Trump’s continuing efforts to convince African American voters that they were better off during his presidency, more Black voters now, than in February, say the policies of the Biden-Harris administration have helped them.

Substantially fewer now say that Mr. Trump’s policies helped them.

In Pittsburgh on Thursday night, former President Barack Obama appealed directly to Black men who might be on the fence about supporting Ms. Harris, suggesting that many “just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president” and reminded them that the “women in our lives have been getting our backs this entire time.”

Allies of Ms. Harris point to her work as vice president to lower Black unemployment, stabilize health care costs and increase funding for historically Black colleges and universities as examples of a concerted and measurable effort to deliver for Black communities. In recent interviews, Ms. Harris has said that she knows it is not a foregone conclusion that African American voters will flock to her campaign.

In an effort to reach these voters, Ms. Harris’s campaign has started a tour of historically Black colleges and universities, and will begin a push to engage Black faith voters in battleground states over the weekend. Ms. Harris has also sought to engage Black men through surrogate events and nontraditional media interviews, including a recent appearance on the podcast “All the Smoke,” hosted by Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson, former professional basketball players.

The vice president is scheduled to attend a town-hall-style event in Detroit on Tuesday hosted by the morning radio program “The Breakfast Club,” one of the show’s hosts, Charlamagne Tha God, said on Friday. The nationally syndicated show is popular with Black millennials.

African American voters do have a far more favorable view of Ms. Harris personally than of Mr. Trump; 75 percent said Ms. Harris would do a better job handling the issues important to them personally. Only 17 percent said Mr. Trump would.

“She’s more capable of doing the job than he is, I feel,” said William Cox, 47, a truck driver in Greensboro, N.C. “She stands more for what betters my family.”

But on specific issues, Black voters were divided. Fifty-six percent said the United States should pay less attention to problems overseas and concentrate on problems at home, a position more reflective of Mr. Trump’s views than Ms. Harris’s. Forty percent of Black voters favor Mr. Trump’s border wall, and 41 percent support deporting immigrants in the country illegally, something Mr. Trump has said he will do en masse. That is fewer than the 52 percent who oppose that proposal, but still a substantial piece of the Black electorate.

Mr. Trump, closing out his campaign with increasingly nativist rhetoric and scare tactics, frequently invokes a false picture of crime running rampant in the nation’s cities, driven by undocumented immigrants. In fact, violent crime in U.S. cities has fallen.

But 47 percent of African American voters, a plurality, said crime in big cities had gotten out of control, seemingly siding with Mr. Trump’s portrayals. Forty-two percent agreed with a more moderate phrasing of the issue: Crime is a major problem in big cities, but it is not out of control.

Crime rates, especially murder rates, are, in fact, improving in most major cities after the coronavirus pandemic surge in the final year of Mr. Trump’s term, statistics show.

Black voters, however, have softened their view of Mr. Biden’s time in office. In February, more African American voters said Mr. Biden’s policies had hurt them than said they had helped them, by 25 percentage points. Views are now reversed, and Black voters are 23 percentage points more likely to say Mr. Biden’s policies had helped them, a potential edge for Ms. Harris as she tries to make her case.

At the same time, views of Mr. Trump’s time in office have turned more sour since February. Black voters are now twice as likely to say Mr. Trump’s policies had hurt them than to say they had helped them; in February, Black voters were split on the question.

Still, Ms. Harris’s problems with African American voters rest on the same issue that her struggles with other constituencies do: the economy. Nearly three-quarters of Black voters rated the economy fair or poor, and the economy and abortion were rated their most pressing concerns. More than seven in 10 Black voters said they had cut back on groceries because of cost; 56 percent said they had cut back often.

Fully 78 percent of Black voters said race still posed significant obstacles to getting ahead, and of that figure, 21 percent said the Democratic Party had no solutions to address the obstacles.

What could help Ms. Harris, however, is her party’s enduring reputation for aiding low-income people of color, which persists among a broad swath of Black voters.

“Things do get better when we have Democratic presidents,” said Queneshia Baldwin, 34, a home health employee in Norwood, N.C., who added that she would vote for Ms. Harris. “I think it’s more so the problem is with Republicans.”

Here are the key things to know about this poll:

• Interviewers spoke with 589 Black voters from Sept. 29 to Oct. 6, 2024, as part of a national poll of 3,385 voters.

• This survey includes responses from more than three times as many Black voters as in a typical national survey, using a polling technique known as an oversample. The goal of an oversample is to enable confident analysis of subgroups, such as Black men or younger Black voters. This method does not affect the top-level results of the final poll; in the overall poll of the nation, Black respondents are weighted down so that they represent the proper share of all voters and so their views are not overrepresented in the survey results.

• Times/Siena polls are conducted by telephone, using live interviewers, in both English and Spanish. Overall, about 98 percent of respondents were contacted on a cellphone for these polls. You can see the exact questions that were asked and the order in which they were asked here.

• Voters are selected for the survey from a list of registered voters. The list contains information on the demographic characteristics of every registered voter, allowing us to make sure we reach the right number of voters of each party, race and region.

• To further ensure that the results reflect the entire voting population, not just those willing to take a poll, we give more weight to respondents from demographic groups that are underrepresented among survey respondents, like people without a college degree. You can see more information about the characteristics of respondents and the weighted sample at the bottom of the results and methodology page, under “Composition of the Sample.”

• The margin of sampling error among the likely Black electorate is plus or minus 5.6 points. In theory, this means that the results should reflect the views of the overall population most of the time, though many other challenges create additional sources of error. When the difference between two values is computed, such as a candidate’s lead in a race, the margin of error is twice as large.

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