Donald Trump should aim for winning a much
larger share of
the black vote in 2020.
In 2016, Donald Trump received a slightly higher share of
the black vote than did Mitt Romney in 2012 or John McCain in 2008. But he
still received just 8 percent.
Now black support for Trump is in the mid-30s.
While a 30 percent approval rating doesn’t necessarily translate into a 30
percent vote-share from black Americans in 2020, 30 percent approval is
significant. Even if black support for Trump were in the mid-teens on election
day, that could
swing states like Michigan, Florida, and even Minnesota solidly into
Trump’s camp.
Some of this increased black support is due to a
historically low
unemployment rate for black Americans, along with hefty income gains
for many black Americans, as working-class and blue-collar wages finally begin
to outpace managerial
wages. Another reason is surely Trump’s criminal justice reform efforts.
Other issues include school choice, which blacks
resoundingly support — and likely propelled Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) to
victory in 2018, because a group of black mothers swung
in his favor.
The
Disconnect Between Black America and Democrats
There’s a tremendous chasm between the black American
working class and the Democratic Party. On issues such as education
and abortion, huge polling gaps emerge between Democratic whites and
blacks. Even among Democrats who are politically active, one-third of
black Democratic primary voters say abortion should be illegal all the time,
compared to only 3 percent of white Democratic primary voters.
On economics too, better-off white liberals have little
in common with the priorities of many black voters. Most black voters would
rather talk about wages, social mobility, and fairness, in stark contrast to
those who obsess over pronouns and climate change. And when many Democrats talk
economics, they talk about student debt bailouts, which would
disproportionately benefit the relatively better-off.
Stating the obvious, a coalition that includes white,
left-wing college graduates on one hand — who insanely compare LGBT issues to
being black in the South during Jim Crow — and socially conservative, black
Christians on the other, is irrational and absurd. Black America suffers
terribly when transgender rights are considered the new civil rights, abortion
is treated as a sacrament, and gender fluidity is assumed to be more important
than jobs and economic mobility.
Overall, only a fifth of
black voters (and less than a quarter of Latino voters) describe themselves as
very liberal. Half of black American voters say they are moderate or
conservative. In the words of one author,
“[T]he Democrats have shed working class whites, but black voters, once a
tilting force, are becoming the new working-class whites, frustratingly more
conservative and less radical than the Left would like.”
Given this, it isn’t good enough for Trump to get 15
percent or even 25 percent of the black vote. He should aim for at least
one-third of the black vote in 2020. With such a feat, American politics could
truly become post-racial, as both parties would actually compete for black
votes. Black America, and all of America, would benefit tremendously.
Why
Many Black Americans Approve of Trump
Deeper factors are at play in Trump’s growing black
support, beyond a checklist of issues a Republican political consultant would
cook up.
Much of Trump’s rising support among black America is due
to Trump’s unconventional but foundational conservatism. Trump won by touting
the American
working class, nationalism, and cultural conservatism. Given that many
black Americans are working class, culturally
conservative, love their country, and wish to see a politically and
economically post-racial America, it makes sense that this foundational
platform would jive with working-class voters, white or black.
But black America won’t come over to the GOP unless the
conservative party directly addresses issues affecting black communities. We
can talk about the minimum wage’s harmful effects on many young black males’
first-job prospects, but that doesn’t address the main problem: After rapid
deindustrialization, many men are facing a lack of working-class jobs.
Blacks left the Republican Party mostly during the Great
Depression because President Franklin Roosevelt focused on working-class issues
and spoke directly to the common man and woman. Any effort to bring black
Americans back to the GOP must involve doubling down on Trump’s working-class
focus. Trump can accomplish this huge task of bringing black Americans
back into the Republican Party in 2020 by running on a “Contract with Black
America,” which has three points: the cessation of black pain, black economic
equality, and American families first.
The
Cessation of Black Pain
Borrowing from Adrian
Norman, this point has a rhetorical element. Trump must go into black
communities, talk, and listen. He must acknowledge that blacks have received an
unfair deal in America for too long, but point out that Democrats’ efforts are
only making things worse.
First, black Americans have been shortchanged on the
public services government is supposed to provide. Too many poor black kids are
assigned to bad schools, and too many young black men have been incarcerated.
Here Trump should find ways to get states to mirror his federal criminal
justice reform efforts.
On education, Trump should start with an overhaul of the
federal Title
I funding formula, which hugely affects urban schools. States and
localities that don’t stand in the way of charter schools should be awarded. On
the campaign trail, Trump should slam local politicians who are blocking
charters and school choice.
Public schools in urban areas must be made better too. To
get better teachers in urban public schools, the formula should give more
federal money to states that release school districts from union-demanded pay
scales that punish top teachers. This would set local districts free to
explicitly pay more to smart people who have better job options, especially in
the math, science, and special education fields, which are all hurt by
socializing teacher pay scales.
Title I dollars should also be used to incentivize states
to end the accrediting cartel. States should recognize teacher credentialing
from private accreditation organizations as equivalent in worth to state
credentials, and offer certification reciprocity with other states. Teacher
credentialing is a major cash cow for state universities, but it saddles future
teachers with debt, while doing little to serve children. The accreditation
racket particularly harms poor black children, for it keeps good teachers out
of urban classrooms.
Next, go after bastions of elite privilege. Endowments of
major colleges that are above a certain dollar-level should be taxed further.
Harvard and Yale come to mind. The proceeds should fund post-high school
apprenticeships, scholarships for America’s underprivileged youth to attend
technical schools, and science and math scholarships at the nation’s
historically black colleges.
Apprenticeships and technical schools could replace a
costly college education for some. These scholarships wouldn’t be based on
race, but solely on income and class. Perversely, black Americans can be left
behind by affirmative action programs, which too often go to better-off
“minorities” who don’t need the help.
While liberals obsess about climate change, actual
communities where black Americans live have been neglected. Local
environmentalism, run by local communities, should be the focus instead. This
includes trash cleanup and policies to reduce homelessness and open violation
of the law. And infrastructure in these areas is a must — not a shiny new
government building, but infrastructure that brings more working-class jobs
into an area.
Next, the president must stress shared values and
Americanism. Blacks deserve their slice of the American pie. Martin Luther King
Jr.’s dream of a race-blind society, which stems from America’s founding
documents, won’t be realized until general economic equality exists between whites
and blacks.
The future of America depends on an American identity
superseding racial identity. This doesn’t mean “diversity” or achieving
“color-blindness.” It means white Americans have much more in common with black
Americans than with Europeans — because we are both Americans, and this country
means something.
But Democrats’ efforts to create equality among
Americans, primarily motived by cynical and short-term politics, have utterly
failed.
Economic
Equality
First, Democrats took away many black men’s jobs via the
Davis-Bacon Act. In the Jim Crow South and even in the North, unions were
whites-only. Black laborers would do often higher-quality construction work for
less money. Davis-Bacon came along and said any project tied to federal money
must pay the prevailing union wage. The law was explicitly passed on
the grounds of race, due to white union complaints about black laborers
taking work.
Then the Democrats packed black families into urban areas
via segregated public housing. “The projects” is the popular descriptor for
these liberal dreams that quickly turned into nightmares for the families that
lived there. As any sociologist will tell you now, the last thing you do to
poor people is pack them all tightly together in an area with little economic
opportunity relative to their skills.
Next, Democrats passed a massive
welfare expansion that explicitly paid dads to be out of the home.
Dads, short on work, left during the week to give their kids vastly more
resources. The system snowballed into the broken black families we have today.
While Republicans have been asleep at the wheel or even
indifferent about these issues for decades, it was Democratic
policies that wrecked black families. Up until 1950, black women had
a higher
marriage rate than white women. During this time, the number of black
children in single-parent families was under 10 percent. Until the 1960s,
despite massive racism, blacks were catching up to whites economically. Yet
despite the civil rights push in the ’60s, black progress came to a standstill
when Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson used federal largess to intrude upon black
lives.
Black economic equality starts with undoing this toxic
economic cocktail. First, Davis-Bacon should be amended to be void if unions
benefiting from the law are not racially representative of the area of the
country the union is in.
Further, a policy of reindustrialization should be
pursued. This includes but is not limited to monetary reform, infrastructure
focused on manufacturing and supply chains, and a small general tariff on
foreign products to fund this infrastructure. These ideas could fit neatly into
an overall agenda of Middle
Class Capitalism.
Reindustrialization would help both the white and black
working class, but historically black urban areas will not be revitalized until
factory jobs that can provide young men a middle-class wage return to those
areas. Infrastructure should focus on increasing manufacturing benefits in
these urban areas.
Next, as much as possible, the federal government should
pursue policies that force states and localities to change zoning laws to
lessen the cost of building new housing. Affordable housing programs should
focus on home ownership in distant suburbs and small towns. Such policies would
bring new families to suburbs and rural areas, which tend to have less-crowded
schools and better public resources.
Meanwhile, infrastructure projects should incent the
creation of new industrial centers in these areas. Again, if federal money is
tied to the infrastructure project, all-white unions shouldn’t be allowed to
push out non-union competitors. Finally, if tax policy is to be discussed, it
should be a payroll tax cut.
American
Families First
Ultimately, the key to ending much black pain and
advancing black economies is black fathers in the home. Statistically, one of
the greatest single indicators of a child’s success is the number
of fathers in the community. In other words, a father in the home
increases a child’s social mobility more than the government ever could.
Yet more
than half of black children today grow up without a father in the
home. One culprit may be stiff penalties to marriage in the safety net, which
black Americans disproportionately bear. That’s why Trump should run on
legislation that would use federal dollars to incentivize states to remove
these marriage penalties.
Many thinkers blame only culture, which implicitly seems
to blame black people. Yet marriage penalties can
reach up to a third of a family’s income — easily over $15,000 per
year. While a group effect certainly exists when it comes to decisions such as
cohabitation and divorce, it’s hard to argue these stark financial incentives
don’t matter. That’s partly why the military,
which incentivizes marriage and minimizes racial discrimination, sees a much
smaller gap between black and white marriage rates compared to the country
overall.
Another culprit of black family decline, and of general
working-class family breakdown and fatherlessness, is stagnant male wages and a
shortage of marriageable men. Aside from the efforts above, Trump should launch
a program to expand technical education and apprenticeships, focused on the
skilled trades and high-tech manufacturing, at the expense
of federal subsidies to “liberal arts” colleges. Meanwhile, these colleges
and universities should be required to have skin in the game. If they aren’t
producing good results, they should be on the line for student debt.
Finally, American
families first, both black and white, requires a crackdown on unfettered
low-skill immigration — illegal or legal — and an end to American adventurism
and nation-building overseas. It makes no sense for working-class boys and
girls to toil away in Afghanistan for two decades. They are forced
to defend Afghan forces who do disgusting things,
and are fighting a war Washington knows
we can’t win and has been lying about for years.
On the subject of immigration, the greatest victims of
unfettered low-wage immigration into the United States are working-class
Americans — whites, Hispanics, and blacks — who experience a constant headwind
to wage gains. Democrats and many Republicans claim immigration doesn’t affect
wages, but people would change their tune if we started importing lawyers,
college professors, or Vox.com writers. Studies show an influx of labor to an
area depresses lower-income wages, at least over the short term. What do you
think a steady
flow of unskilled labor over the long term does to low-income wages?
The
Contract with Black America
The coalition of the Democratic Party is brittle. While
Republicans may have a brittle donor coalition, Democrats have a brittle
voting-base coalition. Which is worse?
More than 90 percent of black Americans shouldn’t be
consistently voting Democrat, unless they are college professors, trial
lawyers, or public-sector union workers. Since the vast majority of black
Americans aren’t college professors, trial lawyers, or public-sector union
workers, there’s a huge opportunity for nationalist, culturally conservative,
and working-class-focused Republicans going forward.
Trump is uniquely gifted to bring black America back into
the GOP. Come spring 2020, Trump should go to Detroit and launch the Contract.
This could help break the chains of identity politics in America and fulfill
the ultimate hope of America’s founding documents.
Willis L. Krumholz is a fellow at Defense
Priorities. He holds a JD and MBA degree from the University of St. Thomas, and
works in the financial services industry. The views expressed are those of the
author only. You can follow Willis on Twitter @WillKrumholz.
