Derek Stevenson wears a trash bag and a Trump hat to cast his vote at the C.T. Martin polling place on Nov. 5, in Atlanta, Ga.Megan Varner/Getty Images
In Barack Obama’s triumphant 2008 election campaign, he was not merely the first Black man to become president. He was also the leader of a party that was the near-unanimous choice of Black Americans. That year, 95 per cent of Blacks in the U.S. voted Democrat. In 2020, more than nine in 10 Black voters once again came out to support Joe Biden, a bloc of unbending support that helped to make him president.
Four years later, that solidarity has been badly fractured. An Associated Press voter survey showed Kamala Harris, the first Black woman to run for president, won 83 per cent of the Black vote. Among Black men, support waned to just 74 per cent.
Vote counts across the most predominantly Black districts in the country show Ms. Harris losing ground. In Mississippi, where Blacks make up roughly 87 per cent of the people in Jefferson County, Ms. Harris fell 2.6 points short of Mr. Biden in 2020. In Alabama’s Greene County, which is roughly 82-per-cent Black, she underperformed him by 3.7 points. In Georgia, Ms. Harris saw a 4.2-point decline relative to her predecessor in Hancock County, which is 70-per-cent Black.
For Republicans, it was a plank in the path to a victory for Donald Trump that many see as historic.
“Vice-President Harris was not able to close the deal with a lot of Black voters, who look at the last four years and say, ‘Things haven’t gotten better for me,’” Joshua McKoon, chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, said in an interview.
Georgia’s support for Mr. Trump was a reversion to form. The state voted for a Republican presidential candidate in six straight elections before Mr. Biden’s narrow win in 2020. He owed part of his success to the rising influence of Georgia’s Black community, which represented nearly half of the state’s population growth in the previous two decades.
This year, a meaningful number of those voters defected to Mr. Trump.
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Among them was Jerard Stokes, who marked ballots as a faithful registered Democrat until 2020. Like many of those around him, he recoiled at Mr. Trump in his first presidential campaign. “I couldn’t stand him,” said Mr. Stokes, an Atlanta man who juggles jobs in valet parking and hospital logistics.
But the more he listened, the more he liked, particularly this year when Mr. Trump promised to cut taxes on tips and overtime. “That works out in my favour,” he said.
At the same time, the hardships brought by inflation shook his faith in Democrats. When he voted for Mr. Biden, he promised himself that if “they don’t do anything that impacts me and my family, then I’m not going to them again,” he said. Under Mr. Trump, “everything was just more affordable.”
“And that’s why I switched.”
This year, his uncle, two of his cousins and three of his nephews all joined him in voting Republican for the first time.
For Scottie Dennis, the conversion happened much earlier. An Atlanta landscape architect, his vote for Mr. Obama was the last time he supported a Democrat for president. He holds conservative views on issues like family, saying, “I’m a firm believer in just nature, men lead women.” He found Mr. Obama’s politics too liberal, and believes he is not alone in rejecting the party once embraced by younger Black voters like himself, born in the 1980s.
“We’re not what you call legacy Democrats. We didn’t grow up during the Civil Rights era. We grew up in an integrated society. We don’t know anything about real racism and real white supremacy, like some of our ancestors,” he said.
With that, he said, comes a greater openness to right-wing values – and Republican politics.
“Black conservatives, we don’t view ourselves as victims. We view ourselves as Americans. And we can do anything that whites or Hispanics or any other person can do,” he said.
“All we have to do is just go out there and roll up our shirtsleeves and do the work.”