fbpx

For Many Black Voters, 2020 Is About Beating Trump, Not About Pride Or Making History

For Many Black Voters, 2020 Is About Beating Trump, Not About Pride Or Making History

Black voters
In this Aug. 24, 2018 photo, Betty L. Petty of Sunflower County Parents and Students United, addresses a meeting of the Black Voters Matter Fund and several Mississippi grassroots organizations at MACE, Mississippi Action for Community Education, headquarters in Greenville, Miss. Democrats and Democratic-affiliated groups are making strategic shifts to ensure that in November the party avoids a problem that has bedeviled it in years past: low turnout in off-year elections. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)

With so many Democratic candidates vying for the party’s 2020 nomination, recent polling suggests Black people are more concerned with ousting Trump than they are making history, reported the LA Times. As a result, Black voters are willing to vote for candidates that don’t necessarily resonate with them to gain the lesser of two evils.

Ron Lester is a Washington pollster with decades of experience surveying the attitudes of Black voters. He told the Times, some will favor “a white male” like Joe Biden over candidates like Kamala Harris and Cory Booker due to this mentality.

“They are so sick and tired of being sick and tired of Trump, there’s this almost unconscious feeling they’re going to go with the candidate that is more likely to beat him,” Lester said, citing Black people’s experience “that America is still a very racist place and a very misogynistic place and that a candidate who doesn’t get any white votes is probably going to lose.”

Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 56: Howard Franklin PT 2

Part 2: Jamarlin continues his series on The Swamp with Howard Franklin, who has lobbied for Amazon, Google and Sprint. They discuss AIPAC, Beto O’Rourke calling Benjamin Netanyahu racist, and whether there is a basket of deplorables in Israel.

Though, historically known for voting their conscience, in 2020 Black voters are more likely to embofy the old adage “Charge it to my head, not my heart.”

Catrena Norris Carter, 51, and Faya Toure, 74, are in that demographic. “We really need to be taking the temperature of the entire country … Not just people who think like us,” Carter said.

“My pragmatic side says that the person that can win this election is someone more in the middle, that’s not going to come out for [repealing] the death penalty and reparations,” Toure said, noting that she’d love that, but doesn’t think it a realistic outcome.

While some younger Black voters differ in who they will vote for in the primary, Kenyan Carter, 21, is proof they will vote for whomever opposes Trump and secures the Democratic nomination.

“Biden to me is how you get people like Trump … Biden is how you get people disassociated from politics because you get people like him in power.” But he will vote for him if it comes down to it, Carter said.