Why Black Voters Abandoned Trump
“We love you,” Trump responded, adding, “We’ve energized the Republican Party, and we’ve expanded the Republican Party.” At the time, he was right: The share of Black voters supporting Trump had ticked up in 2020 and seemed to be growing.
Key points
- As he looked around at the organization’s leaders onstage with him, he smiled and said, “These guys know it’s no mistake.” When ballots were cast later that year, roughly 15 percent of Black voters chose Trump over Kamala Harris in the general election, up from 6 percent in 2016 and 8 percent in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center.
- Christopher Towler, a political scientist at California State University at Sacramento who studies Black voting behavior, argues that the shift toward Trump in 2024 was never as significant as it appeared, and that much of it could be explained by diminished overall turnout among Black voters that year.
- The question now is whether last Tuesday’s vote proves that 2024 was an anomaly and that Black voters have come back to the Democratic Party to stay, or whether they will be up for grabs in 2028 and beyond.
No one argument could capture the full picture, but the bottom line was clear: Black voters seemed to be moving, however tentatively, toward Trump and the GOP.
Additional details
- He said the share of Black voters who choose Republicans has stayed relatively stable for six decades (except for 1996 and 2008, when nearly all Black voters backed the Democrat for president), but it accounts for a larger percentage of the Black vote in low-turnout elections.
- According to the Associated Press, about 90 percent of Black voters supported Democrats last Tuesday, up from the roughly eight in 10 who went for Harris in 2024.
- state, the share of Black midterm voters who went to the polls last week reached 54 percent, up from 45.5 percent in 2022 and 39 percent in 2010.
- “And they’re going, Wait a minute—there must be a mistake here; they’re saying, Black people must really like Trump.
- Black voters have always been pragmatic: They vote for the party that they believe will “do us less harm,” he said.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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