Every election, Democratic candidates promise nonwhite voters the moon in return for their votes. And most of the time, a large majority of those voters comply.
According to Pew Research, 91% of black voters and 66% of Hispanic voters voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Only 6% of blacks and 28% of Hispanics voted for President Trump.
It’s understandable. Republicans don’t normally spend much money, time, or effort in minority communities. They figure they’re going to get trounced there, so why bother?
But the absence of any serious Republican message to minority voters means that many of them only hear what Democrats want them to hear. When they call Republicans racists, no one shows up to rebut it. When they promise better schools, more jobs, higher wages, and a better life through bigger government and higher taxes on someone else, often no one is there to say, “Hey, wait a minute — how’s that been working out?”
Even former President Barack Obama didn’t deliver for minorities, not really. He presided over a period of flat job creation and stagnant wages. In his last two years, only about 73,000 manufacturing jobs were created in the U.S. — about one new manufacturing job for every 4.8 new government jobs. Obama’s high taxes and burdensome regulations got so bad that many manufacturers either laid-off workers and turned to automation or exported their jobs overseas.
When a black union leader complained to Obama during a PBS News Hour forum in June 2016, Obama ridiculed Trump’s promise to restore manufacturing jobs, saying: “How exactly are you going to do that, what are you going to do, there’s no answer to it … what magic wand do you have?”
Then came the election, and in the first two years of the Trump administration, manufacturers added 467,000 jobs — more than six times the number created in the previous two years of the Obama administration.
Today, unemployment is at a 50-year low. More blacks and Hispanics are working than ever before — not just in manufacturing either, but in every occupation from service worker to entrepreneur to college professor. Wages are heading up, especially for lower-wage jobs, and education choices are expanding. Families are gaining more control over their futures.
With economic opportunity breaking out across the country, Democrats have again turned to their favorite campaign tactic: name-calling. They allege Trump’s nearly every act is motivated by racial hatred. Liberal pundits write about it constantly, civil rights leaders rant about it nonstop, and supposedly neutral journalists report it as fact.
So imagine the liberal horror when recent public opinion polls revealed a serious up-tick in black support for Trump.
Rasmussen reported last month that black support for Trump could be as high as 34% right now. Zogby found black voters who support Trump near 27%. When he paired specific Democrat names against Trump, black support for Trump dropped, but it was still twice the 7% or so that Trump received in 2016. In key swing states where the black vote is significant, such as Michigan, Florida, and North Carolina, that might well be enough to put him over the top in 2020.
A CNN poll in the Democratic bastion of California showed Trump getting 32% of nonwhite voters against Joe Biden. The Hill put out a poll in September showing Trump’s job approval among Hispanics at 37% — not too far behind his overall approval.
Nonwhite voters know the economic opportunity they’re experiencing didn’t come about by accident. It’s happening because they have a president who is actually doing what he said he would do.
Democrats know that if even just 25% of black voters bolt and vote Republican, it’s game over for them. This is why their rhetoric has to be so hysterical. It is why they must keep telling minority voters that Trump is making things worse, despite their personal experience to the contrary.
But the more Democrats tell them not to believe their own lying eyes, the more likely they will be to see through it and to deem Democrats and their leftist policies as the real reason they’ve been left behind.
John Philip Sousa, IV is a businessman and the author of John Philip Sousa, A Patriot’s Life in Words and Pictures; and Ben Carson, Rx for America.
