Former President Donald Trump has claimed Black voters are fans of his who view him as a victim of unjust prosecution, but the polls and experts tell a different story.
Trump controversially told a crowd of nearly 500 Republicans in South Carolina last Friday that his 91 criminal charges have boosted his support among Black voters. He told attendees gathered at an event sponsored by the Black Conservative Federation that “…a lot of people said that’s why the Black people like me, because they have been hurt so badly and discriminated against, and they actually viewed me as I’m being discriminated against.”
“I think that’s why the Black people are so much on my side now,” he added later in the speech. “Because they see what’s happening to me happens to them.”
But a January USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll found that Trump’s support among Black Americans has stayed consistently low since 2020, and that 83% of Black Americans view the legal actions against Trump as “appropriate.” While other polls show Trump’s support among Black Americans has slightly increased since 2020, he’s nowhere close to earning a majority of the Black vote.
Several pollsters and Black political scientists that spoke with USA TODAY said that the former president’s comparison between his legal troubles and the injustices that Black Americans have faced in the legal system are invalid.
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“There have been numerous instances of disparities in the sentencing and arrests of Black men and women who have been accused of crimes that have nothing in common with whatever he thinks he’s experiencing,” said Sharon Austin, a political science professor at the University of Florida.
Where Trump stands with Black voters
In 2016, Trump received the support of 8% of Black voters, according to exit polls. That support increased to 12% in 2020. The USA TODAY/Suffolk poll from January found that Trump’s support among Black voters has stayed the same at 12%. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden’s support has slipped from 87% in 2020, according to the Roper Center, to 63%.
But while Biden’s lead over Trump has narrowed, “that does not mean Black voters are rushing to vote for (Trump) for any reason that he makes up,” said David Paleologos, director of Suffolk’s University’s Political Research Center. Rather, he said, some Black voters are moving toward third-party candidates.
When Black voters were asked who their first choice would be among seven candidates in the poll, 12% said they would choose Trump, while 6% said they would support Robert F. Kennedy and 7% said they’d support academic and activist Cornel West. Asked who their second choice would be, 9% chose Trump while 9% chose Kennedy and 18% chose West.
However, Patrick Murray, director of the polling institute at Monmouth University, said that some polls show Trump’s support among Black voters has steadily increased from 12% depending on the methodology used and the margin of error. Most polls show that number anywhere between 15% and 20%.
A survey from Genforward released last December, for instance, found that if the election were held that day, 17% of Black voters said they would cast their ballot for Trump. Meanwhile, 20% of Black voters polled said they would vote for someone else other than Trump or Biden, and 63% of the voters said they would support Biden.
“One thing that we do know with the data that we have available to us is that Black voters were dissatisfied with Joe Biden before the 2024 race started taking shape,” Murray said. “So those voters have to at least for the time being go someplace. So that’s part of the reason clearly why Trump’s numbers are higher now than they had been.”
Most Republican presidential candidates win anywhere between 10% to 14% of the Black vote in a given year, according to Leah Wright Rigueur, an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University.
“Any kind of numbers that Donald Trump has picked up amongst Black voters is not because of anything that Donald Trump has done,” Rigueur said. “It’s because of things that the Democratic Party has done. That’s why Black voters are leaving, they’re saying you know what? I have a better shot voting for a third party candidate, or maybe even Donald Trump, because I’m so upset at the Democratic Party.”
Trump’s comments are nothing new, experts say
Cliff Albright, co-founder of the group Black Voters Matter, found Trump’s remarks in South Carolina hypocritical.
Albright said that if most Black elected officials were in the same legal position as Trump − facing 91 criminal counts in four separate indictments, plus having just lost civil fraud and defamation trials − they likely wouldn’t be seen as viable candidates for the presidency. “And we wouldn’t be out here traveling around from state to state running for president, we wouldn’t be out here raising hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Albright said, adding that because of race and class bias in the criminal justice system, most Black Americans wouldn’t even have been released pre-trial.
“At best we’d be sitting at home with an ankle bracelet on,” he concluded.
Erik McDuffie, associate professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, agreed, noting that Trump’s remarks “fires up his base of white voters” and feed into their anger and grievances.
Trump has previously made comments that have generated backlash from Black voters. For instance, he said last month that the Civil War could have been negotiated. In 2018, during his time as president, he used an expletive when referring to Haiti and African nations during a meeting with bipartisan senators at the White House.
Most notoriously, Trump transitioned from a reality TV star to a political figure by promoting the racist lie that then-President Barack Obama was born in Kenya, leading the White House to publish Obama’s birth certificate showing he was born in Hawaii.
“In his mind, I assume, these types of approaches work. I assume he thinks they work for some types of Black voters….But − are they going to work with a broader group of Black voters − no,” said Paula McClain, a political science and African American studies professor at Duke University.
