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The Donald Trump campaign is doubling down on its outreach to African-American voters ahead of Thursday’s faceoff between the former and current presidents in Atlanta — as the latter’s support among black voters continues to drop.
Rocky’s Barbershop will host a series of luminaries from Trump World Wednesday at 1 p.m. The subject won’t be shaves and fades though.
Rather, it’ll be what Team Trump calls a “Black American Business Leaders Barbershop Roundtable,” which will focus on the presumptive Republican presidential candidate’s “No Tax on Tips” policy — one seemingly custom tailored for barbers, who typically make commission or pay for their chair space and rely on tips to make ends meet.
Florida Rep. Byron Donalds will moderate a discussion that includes his congressional colleague Wesley Hunt of Texas, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Dr. Ben Carson, talk-show host Shelley Winter and various other local businesspeople.
Beyond pitching the necessity of eliminating tax burdens from gratuities, Donalds & Co. are slated to discuss other issues central to Trump’s attempts to make meaningful inroads with black voters — a cohort long considered a reliable bulwark of Democratic support.
Trump “took action to improve the lives of Black Americans by making investments in programs like Opportunity Zones that led to $75 billion in new private investment into distressed communities, and prioritized support for Historically Black Colleges and Universities,” notes the campaign media advisory, suggesting these policy highlights will be part of the package.
And it’s to be expected that those on hand will draw strong contrasts with the current president.
His “Bidenflation” is described as having “left Black Americans behind, burdened with higher prices and lower wages.” And Team Trump blames Biden for “pro-criminal and weak open border policies that harm Black communities at a much higher rate than others.”
The barbershop blowout is the first of two events where Reps. Donalds and Hunt will feature. As The Post exclusively reported, the dynamic duo will helm the alliteratively titled Cigars, Cognac, and Congress event in Fairburn Wednesday evening. ESPN SportsCenter alum Sage Steele will host that discussion.
Donalds and Hunt have been key to black outreach for the former president’s 2024 campaign, with events in Philadelphia last month and another planned for Milwaukee to coincide with July’s Republican National Convention.
While neither of them has gone so far as to predict Trump can win the black vote outright, they do expect their efforts to contribute to what could be a significant recalibration of that community’s electoral performance.
“So what we’re trying to do is focus on areas where we know we can peel off between 25% and 30% of the black vote, and then mathematically Democrats can’t win. My team and I are spearheading this outreach to actually go to the belly of the beast, to bravely go where no conservative and a Republican has gone in the last 30 years,” Hunt told us last week.
“It’s a math conversation,” he added. “We’ve been looking at polling and trends for the past two years. President Trump in 2020 got 18.7% of the black male vote. If we get that number to 25% to 30%, then mathematically Democrats can’t win.”
Trump’s press shop contends — based on public polling even CNN has reported — he’s at 20% with black voters. In battleground states, Biden takes an anemic 63% in a head to head with Trump. When third-party candidates such as Robert Kennedy Jr., Jill Stein and Cornel West are factored in, Biden is under 50% with those voters.