by Rebeka Zeljko
Former President Donald Trump is gobbling up a large share of likely black voters heading into November, according to a new New York Times/Siena College poll released Wednesday.
Trump is pulling in support from 26 percent of likely black voters, according to the poll, which is a significant uptick from just 5 percent support of black registered voters leading up to the last presidential election, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll from June of 2020. Likely black voters are largely pessimistic about the state of the country under President Joe Biden, with 67 percent saying the country is headed in the wrong direction, and only 26 percent saying the country is on the right track.
Even still, 57 percent of likely black voters identify themselves as Democrats, 30 percent identify themselves as independent and only 8 percent say they are Republican, according to the recent poll.
Van Lathan, former TMZ personality, said in an interview with Don Lemon that black Americans are shifting towards Trump because he “is the most crystal-clear example of the American Dream” and because “they don’t feel particularly inspired by Joe Biden.”
“They don’t see things changing in their neighborhoods, and the political promises they’re aware of from Joe Biden, they can see very obviously that they didn’t happen,” Lathan said in the interview.
Black Americans have historically voted for Democrats by overwhelming margins.
In 2020, 87 percent of black Americans voted for Biden, while 12 percent voted for Trump, according to the Roper Center. In 2016, former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton won 89 percent of the black vote, while Trump only got 8 percent.
In key swing-states, 30 percent of Black men registered to vote say that they’ll definitely or probably back former President Trump in 2024, while Biden received roughly 57 percent, according to a March Wall Street Journal poll.
“Biden is further off than where we have seen Democrats in the past,” Michael Bocian, a pollster, told the WSJ. “I think winning back more Black men is going to be key for him.”
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Rebeka Zeljko is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.
Photo “Black Trump Supporter” by Black Trump Supporters. CC BY-SA 2.0
