Can Donald Trump Capture the Black Vote?

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Is Donald Trump a racist?

Ask a journalist/entertainer at CNN or MSNBC and the answer will almost certainly be yes. Ask the White House and they will tell you that no president has ever delivered a lower unemployment rate for African-Americans. And no president — despite past promises — has ever managed to pass criminal justice reform that benefits many minority communities.

But what do black voters think?

That has been the subject of raucous debate over the last week. In 2016, Republican candidate Trump won just 8 percent of the black vote. But a new poll by Washington pollster James Zogby shows that 22 percent of black voters now back Trump — nearly tripling his share.

It must be said that Zogby is in the minority. One poll, conducted by Third Way and the Joint Center, a policy center that seeks to better the standing of black Americans, found that black voters are especially motivated to vote this year — to unseat Donald Trump. Respondents said that Trump has emboldened people with racist views and has been a “disaster” for the country.

Whatever the case, Trump’s campaign clearly believes it can capture at least part of the black vote. Witness the advertisement on Super Bowl Sunday that highlighted Trump’s successful push for criminal reform, along with the number of African-Americans he highlighted in his recent State of the Union speech. The thinking goes like this: in a record-setting economy, with record-low unemployment, why wouldn’t an average black voter vote for Trump? Especially if given the choice of Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, or Michael Bloomberg, all of whom have had trouble connecting with the African-American electorate, for separate reasons.