There Are Reasons for African American Voter Apathy
Once the Democratic Party anointed her heir to a president unceremoniously kicked to the curb, Kamala Harris had mere weeks to campaign. She ended up trapped in a Groundhog Day carousel of appearances in a sort of American Pangaea —Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, and Georgia all melded together with Pennsylvania and its glittering crown jewel, Philadelphia, where so many of Harris-Walz's campaign chips went. Where Hillary Clinton went wrong, Kamala Harris would do it right. But if Hillary Clinton couldn't swing white people to her banner, Kamala Harris, a multi-hyphenated American, certainly wasn't going to have a better shot, even if she spent more time in the states that "mattered."
So why did Black Democratic voters, the party's most reliable constituency, stay home at such a pivotal moment? We know now that there was no eye-popping Black surge to Trump. Not only did many Black Democratic voters stay home, but so did everybody else. The final estimate for turnout (with votes still being counted) is at around 155 million, three million fewer than 2020, and Harris will come up about six million votes short of Joe Biden.
The reasons, with the appropriate exercise of brain cells, aren't hard to understand. That story—and it's a big nuanced one ripe for the taking—has all but evaporated in the shocking, for some, unexplainable, inexplicable, miraculous reascendancy of Donald Trump and the majorities of white voters that voted for him.
After so much hype, the un-news about the Black vote (and the Black male vote in particular) now gets short shrift in comparison to the revelations about Trump's capture of the Latino vote (despite a Bad Bunny endorsement!) and white women vote (despite abortion!), perhaps just because the fable did not spin out the way prognosticators thought it would.
On X, TheGrio's Michael Harriot knocked his frustration out of the park: "Turnout was down across the board. So, while Trump got the same the % of the Black male vote as 2020, THE TOTAL # of BLACK MEN who voted 4 him actually DECREASED."
Days before the election, columnist Annie Duke offered this on the Black vote: "We can't know what to make of the numbers—whether they are big or small, or significant or not—if we're looking at the data in isolation, as the majority of commentators have presented it." She wanted to know "Compared with what? Out of how many?"
In Philadelphia, overall 2024 turnout dropped from 66 percent in 2020 to 63 percent this year. Kamala Harris won the city with 79 percent of the vote, with 567,000 voters. In 2020 , Joe Biden got 81 percent of the vote and 604,000 voters.
As for the Black vote, reported : "Trump also improved in the city's majority-Black precincts, but his support in those areas was still far below the city average, despite significant hand-wringing in the Democratic Party about Harris potentially losing support among Black men. Trump won barely 6% of the vote in majority-Black areas, an increase of 4 percentage points over his performance in those areas in 2016."
Many young people are disconnected from the importance of voting.
Where Black Philadelphians did come out, they came out strongly for Harris. In many predominantly Black areas of Ward 3 in West Philadelphia, bordering Cobbs Creek Park on the Delaware County line, Harris captured more than 90 percent of the vote, while Trump tallied up low single digits.
The step to the right never made much sense in informal conversations I had about the so-called Blacks to Trump surge. It's no surprise that some Black people liked Donald Trump—why not go with the man who'd sent them checks during the pandemic? But it was difficult to understand why the fable gained traction beyond some editors poring over "data" who decided that it was the Average Black Voter story of the season.
The malaise that defeated Harris in Black Philadelphia communities goes much deeper, has been decades in the making, and requires more than a little nuance. Black residential neighborhoods have a shocking level of strategic disinvestment. In West Philadelphia, the South 60th Street shopping district is run-down, with working retailers next to vacant crumbling storefronts and streets strewn with litter. Who would know today that in a bygone era the street was a prosperous commercial strip—with, dare I say it, boutiques that sold things like the kinds of hats still loved by serious church ladies everywhere—unless perhaps they've seen the bittersweet memorial to that era and that shop in the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture?
Another shopping district, 52nd Street, is up for redevelopment "marching" westward from the University of Pennsylvania. However, local residents often view this "march" as synonymous with gentrification and the white "colonizers," who will price out longtime Black residents.
Elected leaders, some voters rationalize, ignore these trends. In 2023, when Cherelle Parker became mayor , less than 30 percent of registered voters cast a ballot. Increasing economic opportunity was a consistent refrain for Harris, who laid out an Opportunity Agenda of education, health, and economic goals for Black men. That effort did not get people up and out to vote.
That messaging may have missed Philadelphia's African American Muslim communities, where some men echoed some of the frustrations of white working-class men elsewhere in Pennsylvania. Trump's anti-Black/Muslim racism is well known. But Harris's gender, and her reluctance to delink herself from the Biden administration's support for Israel in its war on Gaza, likely fueled the choices made by stay-at-homers.
Harris could not control Black voters' consumption of an alarming amount of misinformation. Social media was awash in AI-generated images of Trump surrounded by Black men. They also credited Trump with COVID relief funding (which came from Congress, not Trump) that most Americans, not just Black men, received. Though some people feared a mandatory gun buyback program, Harris had no intention of confiscating guns. Her gun ownership or her running mate's apparently meant little to apathetic voters, particularly in places like Philadelphia, which has long suffered from high rates of gun violence.
Gun violence rates have dropped sharply in the city in 2024 due to a number of local programs, such as community violence interventions that assist people affected by gun violence, and a crackdown on gun violence task force agenda items like trafficking, straw purchases, and other illegal activities. But Democratic presidents have not been able to break the fealty to the Second Amendment to come up with the controls needed to dent crime and restore voter confidence.
Many young people are disconnected from the importance of voting. Capital B interviewed an 80-year-old African American Philadelphia elder working to get eligible Black students to vote at a local high school. They told her repeatedly, "Why would I vote?" or "That doesn't do anything" or "An election doesn't have anything to do with me." If a Harris presidency had little to offer, why would they bother? Though an elder certainly understands that in a different time and place voting was not an inconvenience or an empty gesture but a possible death sentence, it's hard to convince young men and women who don't know their own history or care about people who lost their lives attempting to take the minimum effort that's required to vote in the 21st century.
The economy defeated the vice president despite her attempts to signal what a Harris administration could take on. When eggs are $5.99, as a Harris canvasser often heard in downtown Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, it's hard to see a president doing anything about that sticker shock in the haze of getting to work, finding a job or a home that doesn't cost megabucks, picking up the kids, and seeing doctors, all while counting the dollars to decide if those dozen eggs are in the budget this week.
