by Massimo Gaggi
The decline in support could cost Kamala Harris the state. And the White House
«Trump may have been a great sinner, but God has always used sinners. And anyway, who can cast the first stone? The way I see it, so far the Republicans ignored us blacks, we were of no use. Trump is the first to show real interest. He’s been here talking and listening. For me he is the only one who can do something for a state, Michigan, which has always been governed by Democrats. And that, with them, it went deeper and deeper.” Lorenzo Sewell, pastor of 180 Church in Detroit (180 degrees, a harbinger of radical change), has just finished his Sunday sermon in the Stansbury Avenue temple with the same excited tones he used three months ago, on stage at the Republican convention in Milwaukee.
Here the contents are less explicitly political, but there is no shortage of references to the bad government of the Dems. «We do in-depth analyzes on our electoral choices on Fridays»he explains to me as he leads me into a sort of sacristy behind the stage, where his wife and three children are waiting for him.
Here I see the Souls of the Polls posterthe weekly meeting dedicated to “prayer and political discourse”. While he says that sociologists and political scientists are coming to speak, he shows me a stack of small volumes released on October 3 to be distributed to the faithful: The Black America Report. Subtitle: a guide to learning how to make contracts, obtain loans and gain political weight. Sewell, a forty-year-old who after a troubled childhood (father in prison, younger brother murdered, him for a time the leader of a gang) experienced twenty years of “spiritual awakening” culminating in the leadership of this congregation, is certainly not , the faithful mirror of how the African-American community is moving, given its clear Trumpian choice. But it’s a good starting point to understand how the Republicans are dealing with ethnic minorities and the reason for the sensational outburst of Barack Obama who in recent days severely reprimanded black males who “are looking for excuses not to vote for Kamala Harris”.
The former president, who some criticized for using explicit and abrupt words, almost like a professor scolding his students, intervened because polls have long indicated an alarming evolution for the Democrats: Kamala Harris is credited with 78% of the black vote. Better than the 74% attributed to Biden in recent months, but worse than the 90% obtained by Biden himself in 2020.
Kamala gets along better with African American women (83%) and this suggests a sexist prejudice among many males. Some confirmation emerges from some surveys. And in an electoral race that could be decided by a hair’s breadth everything will have its weight. But this is not the only factor – and perhaps not even the most relevant – among those that hold Harris back with blacks (after all, in 2016 Hillary Clinton, despite being defeated, took 92% of the African-American vote).
For example, many consider Kamala an expression of one black elite closest to the white aristocracy than to the black proletariat and middle class: «We have been accustomed to treating blackness as a monolithic phenomenon of people who have suffered persecution or marginalization» claims Reihan Salam, director of the (conservative-leaning) research center Manhattan Institute.
«It’s not like that. Other factors — education, the environment in which one grows up, wealth, even mixed marriages — alter the equation of ethnic identity.”
Among the factors that weigh, in addition to socioeconomic ones, there is a fair penetration of the dark Trumpian narrative even among blacks. Let’s take Michigan again, a state that Harris absolutely cannot afford to lose. Polls say that even African Americans here believe that the most serious problem is the spread of crime, even if crime rates are falling sharply in almost all American cities. These are cracks in the democratic blue wall that Trump is trying to exploit by also appearing at many rallies accompanied by more or less famous rappers or by going to speak from the pulpit of the black congregations that welcome him.
Sewell argues that his faithful (he brings together 300 of them every week) they argue, but I largely agree with him in choosing to abandon the Democrats “who have taken advantage of us for too many years”. In reality, the majority of blacks will continue to vote to the left but a small shift is enough to change the balance in a state with 8.2 million voters, won 4 years ago by Biden with a majority of 150 thousand votes.
And Sewell’s is just one of 12 black congregations that push, perhaps in a less explicit way, their faithful towards Trump: comand the Jubilee City Church of Pastor Apostle Ellis Smith who explains to you: “I am not a Republican or a Democrat: I am a Biblecrat.” To then add that the demand for reproductive rights “is of a diabolical nature” and that there is always the devil behind the pressure for “an inclusive social attitude of the transgender movement”.
Now Kamala is running for cover: tomorrow she will be in Detroit, interviewed by a popular black host and comedian, Charlamagne tha God. He will try to regain ground by illustrating a plan of interventions in favor of black minorities. It must be able to prevent the prediction of its decline among blacks from materializing. But it will be difficult to confirm Biden’s 95% “Bulgarian” in Detroit. Especially when the survey by the League for Civil Rights says that among young African Americans, less connected than their fathers to unions and Democrats, support for Trump is at 25%.
