| | | | |  | | By Brakkton Booker | Hey Recast fam, welcome to a special election edition. Donald Trump won the presidency — again — in part because the Democratic Party has a messaging problem with Black and brown men in the working class. Let’s get into it.
|  Members of Blacks For Trump arrive to attempt to gain access to an election watch party held by former President Donald Trump in West Palm Beach, Fla., Nov. 5, 2024. | Francis Chung/POLITICO | | DETROIT — Kamala Harris’ campaign was aware she had challenges winning over enough Black and Latino men during her White House run. They just underestimated how deep the mistrust ran. Trump doubled his standing with Black men from four years ago and secured nearly half — 47 percent — of Latino men, according to exit polling. “We have to do a better job of elevating working-class voices in the party. And I think we have to clearly … do a better job of speaking to working-class voters,” said Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. Austin Davis, whose mother works as a hairdresser and father drives a bus for Pittsburgh Regional Transit. The prevailing takeaway is this: A growing share of Black and Latino men are losing faith in the Democratic Party’s ability to deliver on policies that can benefit them. “The problem is you can't change 15 years of bad branding in 100 days,” said longtime GOP strategist Mike Madrid, referring to the short runway Harris had to prop up — and then win — a presidential campaign. Madrid, author of “The Latino Century: How America's Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy,” credits Harris for her pivot to the right on immigration. It’s something he says more Democrats should do if they want to compete for working-class voters, including voters of color, in the future. He pointed to the bipartisan border security bill as one example of something that could sway these voters.
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| | Black and Latino men, Madrid and others who closely watch voters of color said, care about the economy, the price of everyday household items and how to curb the flow of illegal immigration into the country — a common theme among all voters won over by Donald Trump since 2020. Many Black and Latino men called the campaign's efforts little-too-late overtures. Several Black voters in the Detroit-area told POLITICO last month that surrogates and high-ranking party officials questioned their intelligence and came off as condescending. One longtime Democratic operative who worked on Obama presidential campaigns dismissed it as an electorate issue, not a party issue. “No, the country has a white nationalist problem,” the operative — who was granted anonymity to speak candidly — wrote in a text message Wednesday morning.
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For her part, Harris tried to counter the narrative that Democrats just don’t understand working-class voters of color.
She leaned into her middle-class upbringing and how she even worked at McDonald’s for a time. She rolled out a plan specifically aimed at winning over Black men: the Opportunity Agenda, which she revealed less than a month before Election Day, promising 1 million forgivable loans of up to $20,000 for Black men to start a business, and create pathways for Black men to become teachers and school leaders. She also unveiled a plan for Latino men, dubbed “ Hombres con Harris,” in mid-October that wasn't much different from one of her earliest policy offerings: building 3 million new homes and offering $25,000-down payment assistance to “make homeownership a reality for more Latino families across the country.”
|  Vice President Kamala Harris gives her concession speech at Howard University in Washington, on Nov. 6, 2024. | Jamie Kelter Davis for POLITICO | Still, the American public sent a clear message on Tuesday: Her approach was too incremental. Most of the country shifted toward Trump compared to four years ago. But the shifts were most dramatic in majority-Hispanic counties, according to a POLITICO analysis of election results, with Trump improving his vote share by an average of more than 6 points. The shift in majority-Black counties was less dramatic, though Harris still underperformed President Joe Biden’s 2020 margins. And in electing Trump to a second term, voters picked a president who promised to launch the largest deportation in U.S. history, using agencies across the federal government to do so. Black Republicans like Texas Rep. Wesley Hunt, spent the cycle amplifying the critique that Democrats take Black men’s votes for granted. Instead of courting their vote, Hunt said, Democrats deployed surrogates like former President Barack Obama to tell them to vote for Harris just because she’s Black. “So you're assuming that they're stupid,” Hunt said in a social media conversation hosted by the Black Conservative Federation in the days before the election. “You are assuming that they cannot make an educated assumption as to how they want to live their lives moving forward based on their pocketbook."
|  Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-Texas) speaks on stage on the first day of the Republican National Convention on July 15, 2024, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. | Scott Olson/Getty Images | | This cycle has sparked a change in both parties, said Darius Jones, founder and president of the National Black Empowerment Council, which advocates for social and political uplift of Black communities. Democrats, Jones contends, previously viewed Black men as only get-out-the-vote targets and will have to work to convince them more seriously. Meanwhile, Republicans will have to make real investments in their outreach to Black men to build on Trump’s recent gains with this bloc. “This election cycle, the fact that Black men have begun to be more vocal ... We are willing to explore other political alternatives,” Jones said. “I think it's something which, in the long run, is going to be advantageous to our community.” Edited by Rishika Dugyala and Kay Steiger | | | | Follow us on Twitter | | | | Follow us | | | | |
