With US Presidential elections just days away, the Kamala Harris campaign is scrambling to capture the hearts and minds of Black voters, particularly Black men, who Democrats worry have drifted away from their Party.
US President Joe Biden won the 2020 election with 90% of Black voters, and even still won by narrow margins in key swing states. New York Times/Siena polling indicates that Black voter support for Harris has dropped down to 78%, with 15% now drifting to the Democratic Party, as opposed to 9% in 2020.
It is unclear how the numbers will turn out for the actual election. But this has put pressure on Democratic Party operatives, who have gone as far as to deploy US President Barack Obama to entreat Black men to support Harris. Harris, for her part, has addressed Black voters directly by telling them that they are not in Donald Trump’s “club”.
“You think he’s having you over for dinner?” Harris said in a recent interview. “You think when he’s with his buddies, his billionaire buddies, he’s thinking about what we need to do to deal with addressing, for example, my work, around what I’m doing to address disparities in Black men’s health.”
If Black voters are not part of Trump’s “club”, some Black radical grassroots organizers argue that they are not part of Harris’ club either. In a webinar, BreakThrough News journalist Eugene Puryear, Philadelphia community activist Hiram Rivera, author and professor Jared Ball, and organizer Kameron Hurt provided analysis on how the two-party system has failed Black men.
Hurt, who organized in the movement to free political prisoner and Black freedom fighter Ruchell Magee, and is now part of the socialist campaign of Claudia De la Cruz and Karina Garcia, who are running against both Trump and Harris, made the argument that “the two parties don’t have a strategy for Black working class people as well as working class people as a whole.”
Rivera claimed that the Democratic Party is in fact gearing up to “scapegoat” Black voters if they lose the presidential election to Trump. “You have a presidential candidate who got the nomination and had no platform,” Rivera articulated, referring to Harris, who moved quickly to replace Biden as the Democratic Party favorite after Biden’s abysmal debate performance, and for a while into her campaign did not have a single policy listed on her website.
“Nobody votes more Democrat [than Black people],” Rivera said. Rivera denounced “scapegoating of brothers” which is used to blame Black voters “for whatever Republican comes into office.”
“But you’re not talking to those white people who go in droves to vote for Donald Trump,” Rivera said.
Jared Ball spoke about Obama’s recent surprise visit to a Harris campaign office in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to chide Black male voters who might be “ thinking about sitting out” of this upcoming presidential race.
“Part of it makes me think, and I’m speaking to men directly, part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that,” Obama bluntly said.
Ball accused Obama of being a “spokesperson” for the “elite leadership is certainly the white, liberal and conservative ruling circles” in order to “put Black people in line.”
“How many times did [Obama] use his presidential pulpit over those eight years to chastise Black people and Black men in particular?”
Eugene Puryear proposed building an alternative to the Democratic Party that will address the needs of Black working class people. “At a certain point, you got to draw a line in the sand, that we’re going to build the uncompromising anti-capitalist alternative right now,” he said. For those who’ve “lost faith in everything,” Puryear does not blame them.
“We put too much on the masses of people and we say people don’t understand,” he said. “What are we giving them to help them see that we’re serious about struggling? That’s what people want to know. You say you want to fight. Are you willing to really fight? And I think if we can’t even say we won’t vote against the system, how can we really possibly say that we’re going to fight against the system?”
