The battle to attract Black voters is reaching a fever pitch ahead of President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump speaking in Atlanta on Thursday.
Surrogates, officials and organizers from both parties have held a series of events in barber shops, community centers and labor halls across Atlanta this week, urging key voters in the heart of key battleground states to return to the polls in November with the two presidential candidates in early contests.
Their efforts come as Black voters, long considered the Democrats' most loyal constituency, have grown increasingly frustrated with Biden and his party in recent months, with some suggesting they will support Trump in November or not vote at all.
But as the Trump campaign seeks to capitalize on softening Republican support for Biden, it faces the challenge of expanding grassroots Black support and adopting a policy platform that is popular with a sizable swath of Black voters who have historically backed Democrats.Some of the challenges Republicans face in splitting Biden's coalition were made clear at these events.
A Republican-led debate at a Black-owned barbershop in Atlanta on Wednesday quickly soured as debaters vacillated between vague policy proposals, cultural grievances and sometimes ahistorical assumptions about black Americans. One debater called the transatlantic slave trade an “experience” and said older generations of black voters have created a “divisive narrative.”
Another panelist, speaking as an independent, suggested Republicans might have a better chance of appealing to black voters by “looking away from Trump” and turning to another candidate in the next presidential election. At the end of a 90-minute session in which reporters and GOP organizers far outnumbered potential voters, the owner of Rocky's Barbershop said he still hadn't decided who he would support in November's presidential election.
“I'm a black man living in America, and I just want the right person to win,” owner Rocky Jones said. “I like the word 'unity.' I like diversity. I like people that support me, and I support them. I like teamwork.”
The event was attended by several prominent black surrogates from the Trump campaign, including Reps. Byron Donald of Florida and Wesley Hunt of Texas, and former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson. Trump also attended the rally briefly, touting his record of lowering black unemployment and promising to lower gas prices if re-elected. He also repeated his claim that his support with black and Latino voters had “skyrocketed” after his arrest photo and subsequent felony conviction, a claim that the Biden campaign quickly condemned as racist.
Representatives for Trump's campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Democrats, meanwhile, sent dozens of Black surrogates to hold events in Atlanta ahead of the debate, and while many of the Biden campaign's policy-focused campaign events have not been explicitly targeted to Black voters, they have been led by local Black officials accompanied by Black community leaders.
Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former Atlanta mayor who was named a senior adviser to Biden's campaign, said at a press conference on Monday that Biden has a “track record” of acting on behalf of the Black community. Still, she and other Black supporters of the president face a much tougher battle getting that message to Black voters in battleground states like Georgia, which Biden won by fewer than 12,000 votes in the 2020 presidential election.
“The job is done,” she said of the president's policy record, “and there are always opportunities to say it more often and more loudly.”
Republicans are sensitive about the turnout of black voters, which could determine the outcome of the election. Hunt, Donald and other people involved in planning events on behalf of the Trump campaign say their main goal is to boost support among certain segments of the electorate, including black men, who polls and focus groups have shown are more likely to back conservatives.
“If there's one thing to blame the way the Republican Party has been run for the last 60 years, it's that they never took the time to have a conversation with Black voters and tell them there was another way to listen to us,” Donald said Wednesday at a “Congress, Cigars and Cognac” event in suburban Atlanta.
