This election has been different in a lot of ways, but one way that has been pretty much ignored by the media (main stream or not) is the large numbers of African-Americans who loudly and proudly say they are voting for Donald Trump. This has not happened before with any other Republican candidate since at least the 1950s.
It should be pointed out that the Republican party is the natural home of African Americans, since it was born out of the Abolitionist movement of the nineteenth century and since the Democrat legislatures in the South voted to secede from the union just because the first Republican president was elected. The Republican party came into being to free African American slaves. The Republican party gave freed African Americans the right to vote and restored that right when Democrat politicians in the South disenfranchised them through Jim Crow laws.
However, in the 1960s, John Kennedy was attractive to many African Americans and he started the ball rolling on what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was filibustered and voted against by members of his own party, including Al Gore, Sr. and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan Robert Byrd. Republicans voted for it en masse.
Many of the African Americans & Latinos are leaving the democrat plantation bigly for Mr Trump bye #Hillary #debatenight #SCOTUS #TrumpWon pic.twitter.com/Wm8CJWf25S
— Deplorable Melissa (@sweetatertot2) October 20, 2016
After JFK was assassinated, Lyndon Johnson vowed to “have those N*****s voting Democrat for 100 years” by introducing the “War on Poverty”, which greatly increased Federal welfare programs. And he was successful in getting African Americans to vote for Democrats by more than 90% ever since.
Until now.
If you surf the net and social media you will find quite a bit of video of rank-and-file African Americans who are voting for the Republican nominee this time (as in my previous post). Johnson’s vow survived for 50 years, not 100.
So what’s different this time? I think there are three reasons African Americans are breaking with the past and voting Republican in 2016:
1. Barack Obama. The current president has been a real eye-opener for the African American community. They voted for him in huge numbers and many still support him, but many, many others are disillusioned. They thought voting for the first African American president would solve the nation’s racial and discrimination problems, but instead, the ecomony has worsened. Unemployment in the African-American community is nearly 50% in some age groups. Also, race relations, instead of improving have worsened, with the Obama Administration often stoking the fires by standing with violent agitators against the police that keep the peace in their communities. The movement that became “Black Lives Matter” has destroyed economic infrastructure in African American communities over narratives that often proved to be false.
The upshot is many have realized that voting skin color is meaningless.
2. Hillary Clinton. Secondly, the Democrat candidate is terrible. She is obviously a liar and a crook. Anybody who objectively looks at her activities as Secretary of State and the relationship to the Clinton Foundation realizes that she is corrupt and likely guilty of criminal wrongdoing (James Comey aside). Donald Trump called the foundation a “criminal enterprise” and he is exactly right. The “pay-to-play” money trail is definitely an impeachable offense. Destroying 33,000 emails AFTER receiving a subpeona is obstruction of justice.
Many in the African American community are CONSERVATIVE Christians, so the evidence of lies and corruption is just too great this time and, while they have overlooked the Democrat platform on abortion before, Hillary’s defence of partial-birth abortion is too much for many of them to bear.
3. Donald Trump. The first two reasons might not have been enough to allow African Americans to vote for the Republican nominee if that nominee had been Jeb Bush, but because it is Donald Trump, they feel they can. Why? Because Donald Trump is not like all the previous Republican nominees. He is so unlike them in fact that many of those previous nominees are not supporting him. The establishment (donors, consultants, moderate politicians and pundits) opposes him, so, although he is the Republican nominee, he’s not the Republican PARTY’S first choice. In fact, many in the GOP establishment have said they will vote for Clinton!
For African Americans, even though Trump is white, he doesn’t seem like the milquetoast, white-bread, silk-stocking GOP nominees of the past. Even though he’s a billionaire, African Americans (as well as the hundreds of thousands of all races who have attended Trumps’ rallies) see him as someone they can relate to; someone who understands their plight.
Trump’s promise to create jobs and turn the economy around rings true because he has a lot of experience creating jobs and building economic prosperity, and that’s what’s needed by African Americans and all Americans.
