Thread by @Tyler_A_Harper

I wrote about the question on everyone’s mind: are black men really going to vote for Donald Trump? 

White Democrats imagine minorities as half-saints, half-superheroes who they team up with to fight fascism. But the pesky truth is many minority men have Trump-ish beliefs.🧵

https://twitter.com/theatlantic/status/1852329788649730061

For almost ten years, liberal politicians and pundits have spotlighted and relentlessly attacked Donald Trump’s open bigotry. And remarkably, these efforts didn’t just fail. They coincided with black and brown Americans moving in ever greater numbers toward the bigot’s party. 2/

These trends have been particularly acute among black men, whose support for Democratic presidential candidates has steadily decreased since 2012. Over the last year, polls have suggested Trump could get historic levels of support from black men. That wouldn’t be surprising. 3/

Black Democrats often have significantly more conservative views on immigration, gender, abortion and religion than other Dem racial demographics. A Pew poll this summer found black Dem voters were twice as likely as whites to say emphasizing family makes society better off. 4/

64% of Black Dem voters said gender is determined by birth sex compared to 32% of whites. 53% said belief in God is required for morality vs 8% of whites. Another Pew poll found HALF of black men AND women think the government promotes abortion to control the black population. 5/

This isn’t just Black men: a recent poll found that 44% of young Hispanic men support Trump, and another found that OVER HALF of Hispanic men support deportations (51%) and building the wall (52%). They’re twice as likely to say Trump helped them personally compared to Biden. 6/

And it’s not just culture. Black voters also tend to have views on foreign policy that clash with the Democrats: they’re generally less supportive of sending money to Ukraine and Israel and more supportive of ceasefires. These are also views that don’t mesh well with the Dems. 7/

Is it that surprising that Trump is polling so well with black voters, especially even more conservative black men? However, some political scientists told me that I shouldn’t take polls showing black men supporting Trump too seriously because the sample sizes are too small. 8/

They also argued that black discontent with the Democratic Party wasn’t new, neither were polls showing black men moving to the GOP. They felt these warning signs appear every four years, but typically fail to materialize on Election Day. These arguments are not unreasonable. 9/

But in my view they also discount the fact that Dems HAVE been bleeding black men for over a decade. And while many polls do sample small numbers of black people—and thus have higher error rates—that doesn’t explain why all the “errors” would be in one direction: to Trump. 10/

If we are in a racial realignment, it’s hard to see how Harris’ strategy will win these GOP-curious black men back (even if most black men still vote Dem). No matter how much she promises to expand the border wall, she can’t outflank Trump on conservative culture issues. 11/

So what can the Dems do? Black voters are perhaps the most conservative element of the Dem coalition, but they are also among the most progressive on economic issues. The key to winning these voters back is in my view the same as working-class white voters: it’s populism, stupid.