The Trump campaign is using the few black Republicans in Congress to capitalize on a growing shift in the polls with African-American voters moving away from Democrats.
While Joe Biden still has a large lead among Black voters, Trump nearly doubled his Black support between 2020 and 2024, according to a recent CNN poll.
Trump’s support among black voters rose to 22 percent compared to 2020, when the 45th president had the support of only 9 percent of the population. Biden, on the other hand, saw his 81 percent of black voter support drop to 69 percent in 2020.
Black Republicans, especially those who appear to be auditioning for a potential VP spot with Trump, are campaigning to raise money and court support for the former president.
As part of a “Black Americans for Trump” initiative, the campaign opened an office in Philadelphia on Tuesday and enlisted Reps. Wesley Hunt, R-Texas, and Byron Donalds, R-Pa., to court black voters over cigars and brandy. .
The duo is looking to Atlanta, Georgia for their next black voter outreach event, a spokesperson for Hunt told DailyMail.com.
“To win a fight you have to go where the fish are,” Hunt said outside the office opening in northeast Philadelphia. “We’re boldly going where Republicans haven’t gone in decades, and we’re going straight to the community.”
“The reason the Democrats have a hold on the black community is because our parents’ parents keep telling us, ‘You should vote Democrat,’” Hunt said. “It’s up to us in this generation to say, ‘Well, why?’
But the Philadelphia Inquirer said the office was placed in a neighborhood with 65 percent of white people who voted for Donald Trump in 2020.
In a message of optimism, Donalds said he is beginning to see a “revitalization of the black family,” claiming that more young black people were forming nuclear family units, which is “helping spark the resurgence of a black middle class in America.” .
“Black issues are American issues,” Hunt said at another point. “We hate what’s happening at the border. We don’t like being unsafe… and the person who is going to save the country from the brink is Donald John Trump.”
National polls show there could be a realignment among nonwhite working-class voters without a college degree, and nonwhite conservatives shifted their support to Trump in November. Republicans argue that even small increases can lead to big shifts in election results.
Hunt, Donalds and Senator Tim Scott make up three of the five black Republicans in Congress.
Scott claimed this week that the shift is “becoming so obvious that it is now undeniable.”
“You see a lot of black people and minorities moving toward the Republican Party because of the issues of employment and justice,” Scott said.
The argument is that if Trump increases his margins among non-college-educated voters by another two points and his margins among non-white voters by three points in 2024, he would win an additional five states and the Electoral College.
The conservative Great Opportunity PAC is seizing what it sees as an opportunity.
It has an initial budget of $14 million for the elections, with expectations of raising even more. The budget includes more than $9 million for voter outreach and more than $4.7 million for earned and paid media.
The plan is to organize a large-scale campaign in black communities and communicate directly with black voters to help Trump and the Republicans in the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Scott said he also believes that Trump’s conviction on 34 felony charges in New York last month will actually help drive more African Americans to the Republican Party.
“There’s so much corrosion in that courtroom and that, in my opinion, has to do with the statements that black guys I talk to in South Carolina, particularly African American men, are tired of this tiered justice system, so much so that I would suggest that today that number is closer to 50 percent, 45 to 50 percent of African American men who are open,” Scott claimed.
Donalds, meanwhile, said black voters had become loyal to Democrats because of their leadership in the civil rights movement, but Democratic policies were eroding their family values.
“You see, during Jim Crow, the Black family was together. “During Jim Crow, more black people were not only conservative — black people always tend to be conservative — but more black people voted conservative,” Donalds, Florida, had said at an event to reach black voters on Tuesday.
Donalds was criticized by Democrats for suggesting there was an upside to the Jim Crow era of legal segregation.
He shot back in a clip at X:
“(Democrats) are trying to say I said ‘black people did better under Jim Crow.’ I never said that, they’re lying. But why should you be surprised? Because they always lie. This is the same Joe Biden who said if you don’t vote for him, then you are not black. The man is a liar. Sorry, just call it what it is. What I was saying was that under Jim Crow you have more black families, and the policies under HEW under the welfare state have contributed to the destruction of the black family. That’s what I said,” he said, referring to the expansion of the Social Security system under President Lyndon Johnson.
Donalds, Hunt and Scott are rumored to be eyeing a spot on the Trump ticket as vice president.
“And then HEW, Lyndon Johnson – you go down that road, and now we are where we are,” Donalds said, referring to the expansion of the welfare state and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
At one point during the event, Donalds and Tafoya discussed the differences between black men and black women’s politics, as polls have shown that much of Trump’s rise in the polls among black voters has come from men.
“First of all, there is a difference between men and women anyway,” Donalds said. ‘People were created by God to be conquerors, to be hunters. That’s who they are. And so a black man in today’s America looks around and says, “How can I hunt for my people and hunt for my family?” … They look at what Joe Biden has done and say, ‘I can’t hunt! You took my spear. You took my bow.”