AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall
Black men will deliver Donald Trump to the White House in November. In any other year, this statement would have been written off as wishful thinking at best and wholly delusional at worst. But from where I stand today - as a 21 year old young black man reared in the Deep South of Georgia - I see it as all but inevitable. Go to any black church or patronize any black barbershop and the feeling is palpable. Black men are tired of being used and abused by a political party that doesn’t give a damn about them. Black men are tired of being treated as second-class citizens - in a country that their ancestors inarguably helped build - by a Democrat Party that would rather roll out the welcome mat to illegal aliens spilling across our border than deliver for the everyday Americans who live within it.
Black men are tired of dutifully doing what they’ve been told.
Because after decades of supporting the Democrat Party - in damn near unanimity, we have begun to ask ourselves and rightfully so: what the hell do we have to show for it?
And what I share with you today aren’t just isolated occurrences or cherry-picked conversations I’ve had with members of my community; they’re emblematic of a broader shift in sentiment among black Americans all throughout America. And I have the numbers to back it up.
According to a recent report by the Center for Politics at The University of Virginia, American political scientist and author Alan Abramowitz reported that recent polling from six independent pollsters - Quinnipiac, NYT/Siena, CBS/YouGov, Daily Kos, The Economist, and Yahoo - showed a “breakthrough for Trump”. Abramowitz writes, “on average, Donald Trump received 18% of the vote from Black voters who expressed a preference for either Trump or Biden in the six national polls. If that result were to hold up in November, it would represent by far the highest level of Black support for a Republican presidential candidate in the past 60 years.
And these numbers shouldn’t come as a surprise. Under President Biden, our community has felt the brunt of runaway inflation, record high gas prices, and the destruction that progressive policies have waged on urban cities all throughout America. Eighty percent of Black voters have a negative view of the current economic conditions And while a recent study by the Dallas Federal Reserve reports that Bidenflation is disproportionately hurting Black households, with 53.7 percent of Black Americans stressed by high inflation compared to just 43.6 percent of white Americans, wages for black families in Biden’s America have failed to keep up.
It was hell of a lot easier to be black in Donald Trump’s America, where the black unemployment rate reached its lowest point in history, the median income of black households was on the rise, and the poverty rate for blacks fell to an all-time record low as reported by USA Today.
But instead of trying to win back black voters with policy, the Democrats have resorted back to their tried and tired methods of pandering and fear-mongering as shown by Vice President Kamala Harris’s recent appearance at the BET Awards, where she awkwardly remarked that she’s been “out in these streets” (the Vice President lives at the Naval Observatory and enjoys Secret Service protection) and warned of the imaginary and supposed dangers of Project 2025, a conservative policy agenda developed by the Heritage Foundation - entirely independent of President Trump and his campaign.
But they wouldn’t lie if they weren’t worried. And If I were them, I’d be worried too.
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RELATED ARTICLE
By Spencer Chretien - Associate Director, 2025 Presidential Transition Project| The Heritage Foundation
KEY TAKEAWAYS
It’s past time to lay the groundwork for a White House more friendly to the right.
The policy book Mandate for Leadership represents the work of more than 350 leading conservatives and outlines a vision of conservative success.
The usual suspects in the permanent political class will be ready for the next conservative administration. Will we be ready for them?
With the Biden administration half over and with the immediate dangers inherent to one-party rule in Washington behind us for now, it’s past time to lay the groundwork for a White House more friendly to the right. For decades, as the left has continued its march through America’s institutions, conservatives have been outgunned and outmatched when it comes to the art of government.
One reason is because the Republican establishment never moved on from the 1980s. Beltway conservatives still prioritize supply-side economics and a bellicose foreign policy above all else. Belief in small government, strangely enough, has manifested itself in a belief among some conservatives that we should lead by example and not fill all political appointments. Belief in the primacy of the national security state has caused conservative administrations to defer political decisions to the generals and the intelligence community.
The result has been decades of disappointment.
Fortunately, this situation is changing. The conservative movement increasingly knows what time it is in America. More and more of our politicians are willing to use the government to achieve our vision, because the neutrality of “keeping the government out of it” will lose every time to the left’s vast power. The calls for a “new Church Committee” represent a momentous shift in energy; while conservatives used to lament liberal Sen. Frank Church’s original project as a kooky leftist attack against “The Brave Men And Women of Our Intelligence Community,” we’re now the ones agitating for Congress to go after the three-letter agencies.
This new vigor of the right can be found at Project 2025. Organized by the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 has brought together 45 (and counting) right-of-center organizations that are ready to get into the business of restoring this country through the combination of the right policies and well-trained people. The Project’s foundation is built on four interconnected pillars.
The first pillar, the upcoming production of the policy book Mandate for Leadership, represents the work of more than 350 leading conservatives and outlines a vision of conservative success at each federal agency during the next administration. Presidential candidates won’t be able to ignore what the conservative movement demands in this book.
The second is our online personnel database. This “Conservative LinkedIn” will launch in March and will provide an opportunity for rock-solid conservatives to place themselves in contention for roles in the next administration. This pillar will bring Mr. (and Mrs.) Smith to Washington.
The third is our Presidential Administration Academy. When conservatives do finally make it into an administration, they often don’t know what to do or how to seize the gears of power effectively. Through their action, inaction, and their encyclopedic knowledge of volumes of technicalities about the federal workforce, certain career federal employees are masterful in tripping us up. Our interactive, on-demand training sessions will change that. They will turn future conservative political appointees into experts in governmental effectiveness.
The fourth and final pillar of Project 2025 is our Playbook, which will take the policy ideas expressed in Mandate for Leadership and transform them into an implementation plan for each agency to advocate to the incoming administration. What regulations and executive orders must be signed on Day One? Where are the greatest needs for more political appointees? How can we effectively use the mechanisms of government to face our most challenging problems? Our Playbook will put our movement to work answering questions like these.
In November 2016, American conservatives stood on the verge of greatness. The election of Donald Trump to the presidency was a triumph that offered the best chance to reverse the left’s incessant march of progress for its own sake. Many of the best accomplishments, though, happened only in the last year of the Trump administration, after our political appointees had finally figured out the policies and process of different agencies, and after the right personnel were finally in place.
The usual suspects in the permanent political class will be ready for the next conservative administration. Will we be ready for them? That’s where Project 2025 comes in. We have two years, and one chance, to get this right.
