According to the 2020 census Black Americans make up 12.1 percent of the United States population, down from 12.6 percent in the 2010 census. This may seem insignificant in terms of political power, but the Black American vote has been the most important voting bloc in every presidential election of the modern era. Black voters have enormous political power, and as a voting bloc, the Black vote has the power to pick the President of the United States every 4 years. Black voters have the power to decide the fate of an incumbent running for reelection, and the power to make a challenger president and change the course of the country. No constituency in America has more powerful.
You may be wondering, “how does 12 percent of the population have so much political power?” The answer lies in where that 12 percent is located in the country. The vast majority of that 12 percent is centered in the urban areas of the most important swing states. To understand how this came to be, and the political impact that it has in the United States today, you must understand the Great Migration.
The Great Migration was the movement of approximately 6 million Black people out of the South during reconstruction and Jim Crow, over a period of about 60 years from 1915 to early 1970s. If you have never heard of the Great Migration, it is no surprise. Isabel Wilkerson wrote the award-winning book on the Great Migration called, “The Warmth of Other Suns”. She refers to it as, “the biggest underreported story of the 20th century”. One reason so few people know about the Great Migration is because it happened over 6 decades. If 6 million people all at once migrate to another location it is going to register, but when 6 million people migrate separately over 6 decades it can go unnoticed, especially when they stay within the borders of a nation.
Several factors were driving the migration. For some it was the Black Codes and Jim Crow laws, or the outright dehumanization and frequent lynchings of Black people in the South. For others it was the opportunity for job in a factory in the North instead of struggling as a sharecropper to feed their family in the South. Many reasons motivated so many people to pack up and say goodbye to their friends and the only homes they had ever known. Wilkerson writes,
No one knows who was the first to leave. It was sometime in the middle of World War I. The North faced a labor shortage and, after centuries of indifference, cast its gaze at last on the servant class of the South. The North needed workers, and the workers needed an escape. No one knows exactly when or how it commenced or who took the first actual step of what would become the Great Migration.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, and are asking, “Where did all of these people go when they left the South?”, the answer to that question brings us back to the question of why 12 percent of the population has so much political power today? As I’ve already told you, they went to the large urban areas of today’s most important swing states. Wilkerson identified three routes these migrates took, and depending on which area of the South they left she could predict the area of the United States where they ended up. People from Louisiana and Texas ended up in South Central Los Angeles, Oakland, and even as far north as Seattle. People from Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia went to Washington DC, Philadelphia and New York City. Those people from Arkansas, Alabama and Mississippi went to work in the factors in the Midwest, and ended up in cities like Cleavland, Akron, Cincinnati, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, and as far north as the twin cities of Minnesota.
This is why the Black vote is so important and why Black voters as a voting bloc have so much political power. You don’t win Pennsylvania without turning out large numbers of Black voters in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. You don’t win in Michigan without the Black vote in Detroit, and you can’t win Wisconsin without turning out herds of Black voters in Milwaukee. These are the states that decide who becomes president, and elections are determined by how much of the Black vote turns out for the Democratic Party nominee. If Democrats have high turnout of Black voters, they win and if they do not have high Black voter turnout, they lose.
Democrats are confident that if they can just motivate Black people to show up and vote, that they will vote for the Democrat candidate. It is inconceivable that Black voters would vote for a Republican. This is why Joe Biden famously said, “If you having troubling figuring out if you’re for me or for Trump then you ain’t Black.” Democrats spend little time explaining why Black voters should vote for them, and they focus more on voter registration, voter drives, and turnout on Election Day. It’s not about ‘why they should vote for us’ for Democrats. It’s about just get them to the polls, as many as we herd, and they WILL vote for us. They take the Black vote as a given. However, what if Black voters did start voting for a Republican candidate? How much of the Black vote would the Republican candidate need to win a presidential election? The answer is, not much!
After Donald Trump’s recent indictment and arrest in Georgia many people have been discussing the potential of Donald Trump to win enough of the Black vote to get reelected. Fox News put out a poll showing Trump could win 20 percent of the Black vote. Others have speculated 50 percent. All of these discussions were sparked by numerous videos that we viral on social media after Trump’s arrest. It was Black faces one after one in support of Donald Trump. One Black Trump supporter went viral with his commentary on what he called a “two-tiered justice system”, but it was the t-shirt he wore that likely made him go viral. It read, “Niggas for Trump 2024”. Other Black people in Atanta lined the streets as Trump’s motorcade left the Fulton County jail. They were cheering for him and one of them is herd chanting, “free Trump!” These demonstrations have people asking, how much ‘more’ of the Black vote would Trump need to win in 2024? I emphasize the word ‘more’, because Trump has already done better with Black voters than any other Republican in the past 50 years.
Black Americans have been voting for Democrats in large numbers since FDR. In the wake of the Great Depression the New Deal used the power of government to create programs to assist poor and needy Americans. There were many Americans struggling at this time, but Black Americans were at the very bottom of the caste. Those who could vote, started voting for FDR like most Americans. However, it wasn’t until 1964 that Democrats started getting, practically, ALL of the Black vote.
In 1964 LBJ received 94 percent of the Black vote. This was in the middle of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights movements, and five months before the 1964 election LBJ signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It is rumored that he said, in regard to him signing that law, “I’ll have those niggers voting Democrat for the next 200 years.” If he did say this, he only needs another 140 years to be proven right. So far, he’s batting a thousand.
Johnson wasn’t opposed to using the word, “nigger”. He was a Southern Democrat from Texas. His grandfather was a Confederate soldier, and he may have been a member of the Klan. When Johnson was in Congress for many years before becoming Vice President and then President, he opposed Civil Rights for Blacks. However, Johnson was a shrewd politician, and he could see the tied was turning. Many historians attribute Johnson winning such an overwhelming amount of the Black vote in 1964 to his support of the new Civil Rights Act. I personally believe it had more to do with John Kennedy being killed a year prior to that election, and the love the Black community had for Kennedy. Kennedy was considered by many Blacks as the “Great White Hope”.
After the 1964 election LBJ held the record for the most Black vote received by a candidate for president, until 2008 when Barack Obama received 95 percent. Although, Obama received 93 percent when he won reelection in 2012, and Hillary Clinton lost with 89 percent in 2016. Joe Biden received 87 percent, and he should have lost just like Hillary Clinton. This is just another of the many reasons why Joe Biden’s win doesn’t make sense.
Regardless, notice the trend. Democrats are incrementally losing Black vote by several percentage points in every presidential election since Obama’s big win in 2008: down from 95 percent to 87 percent. If the trend continues Biden should get 86 percent or less of the Black vote in 2024. If that happens, he loses. Biden cannot win, fairly, without getting above 90 percent of the Black vote in 2024, and he loses even if those Black voters don’t vote for Trump. Biden needs the Black vote, Trump doesn’t. Trump just needs them not to vote for Biden. If a Black American doesn’t vote for Biden it is essentially a vote for Trump.
So, with that understanding, how many more Black voters does Trump need to actually vote for him to win in 2024? Again, not much! Trump got 8 percent when he won in 2016. He followed that up with 12 percent in 2020— 4 percent more! While Democrats are trending down, Trump is trending up with Black voters. Trump should have easily won in 2020 with 12 percent of the Black, especially considering that he got more than 11 million votes overall. Something is very fishy about Biden’s win in 2020. Biden got more votes than Obama’s big win 2008, with 8 percent less of the Black vote. They tell us Biden won because he out preformed with Black voters, and you are a racist if you question that.
Trump doesn’t need 50 percent of the Black vote to defeat Joe Biden next year. He doesn’t need 25 percent. If Trump can win just 3 percent more Black voters in 2024, which would give him 15 percent, it’s a wrap for Biden and the Democrats. Even if they stuff the ballot boxes, 15 percent of the Black vote would be enough to overcome it. Just 3 percent more can significantly turn the election in Trump’s favor, and this very achievable. Most Black Americans are keenly aware that the Democratic Party has done nothing for them, and there has never been a greater opportunity for Republicans to win Black voters.
