A Republican Plea to Donald Trump: Black Votes Matter

When Donald J. Trump went to Detroit last week to deliver a speech on his economic proposals, he laid the chronic problems of the heavily black city at the feet of his opponents, saying Democrats had a stranglehold on power, “and unless we change policies, we will not change results.”

But Mr. Trump had no firsthand encounter with the very difficulties he described: He flew into the city on his private plane, got into his sport utility vehicle and motorcaded on highways past several black neighborhoods before reaching the downtown convention center where he addressed the heavily white Detroit Economic Club.

Then he left without taking questions about the decline and nascent recovery of the country’s automotive capital, a hub of black America.

In attempting to fashion a populist message, Mr. Trump has criticized Democrats for doing little to address urban joblessness and despair. But in the more than a year since he began his White House bid, the Republican nominee has not held a single event aimed at black voters in their communities, shunning the traditional stops at African-American churches, historically black colleges and barber shops and salons that have long been staples of the presidential campaign trail.

Mr. Trump may not have purposefully snubbed black neighborhoods — he rarely plunges into any community to tour businesses, sample local cuisine or spontaneously engage in the handshake and back-patting rituals of everyday campaigning. His preferred style of politicking consists almost entirely of addressing arena-size rallies, conducting media interviews and receiving visitors in private at events or at his Manhattan skyscraper.

But the 70-year-old white self-described billionaire has not just walled himself off from African-American voters where they live. He has also turned down repeated invitations to address gatherings of black leaders, ignored African-American conservatives in states he needs to win and made numerous inflammatory comments about minorities.

Mr. Trump’s mix of provocation and neglect has infuriated black Republicans, who fear that the party’s already dismal standing with African-Americans may sink so low that it barely registers in swing states.


“He’s alienated a number of minority voters, and that’s reflected in his low numbers,” said Tara Wall, a communications consultant who helped with black outreach on both of George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns and Mitt Romney’s 2012 bid. “You have to do the bare minimum, and he’s not even doing that.”

Republican presidential candidates typically perform poorly among black voters, perhaps the most loyal constituency in the Democratic Party. Since President Gerald R. Ford received 16 percent of the African-American vote in 1976, no Republican nominee has attained more than 12 percent.

But as demonstrated in the past two White House races — in which John McCain received 4 percent of black votes in 2008 and Mitt Romney received 6 percent in 2012 — when a Republican collapses into single digits among African-Americans and struggles with other minorities, it reduces the number of white votes a Democrat needs to win the presidency.

That is what worries Republicans this year, particularly in states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania with heavily black cities, where an NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll last week showed Mr. Trump receiving only 1 percent of the black vote. (The poll’s three percentage point margin of error among all voters suggests that his support could be slightly higher.)

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