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October 15, 2024

Kamala Harris suddenly comes courting black male voters

By Monica Showalter

After doing four years of nothing for black men as vice president, and watching rising numbers of them take their support to President Trump, Kamala Harris has launched a last-ditch effort to win over black male voters.

Some 78% of black voters say they will vote for her, according to a New York Times / Siena College poll, but that's down from the 90% who said they voted for Joe Biden in 2020, and the 92% who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Given the leftist orientation of the poll, the actual numbers are probably higher. That would explain the panic in the Harris campaign.

It didn't go well.

First, she wheeled out President Obama to rally support for Harris over the weekend.

Obama, in that characteristic way of his similar to Michelle Obama ("Get your knuckle-headed nephew on the couch to vote"), decided to scold these voters as a way of winning their votes.

Ahead of a Pittsburgh campaign event on Thursday, Obama spoke to a group of Black Harris supporters, and questioned the lack of support for the candidate, saying: "We have not yet seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities as we saw when I was running."

Appearing to suggest that sexism lay behind the apprehension to support the Democrat, Obama said that the issue "seems to be more pronounced with the brothers."

His speech was intended to remedy apparent gaps in Harris' support among the base, with which she is currently failing to garner the backing Biden enjoyed at a similar stage in 2020. It also spoke to disparities in levels of support for the candidate among Black women and men, as revealed by a recent NAACP poll.

Nobody likes to be scolded, particularly by a rich man with three mansions who got his as black men strive to stay above water, so one can see where at least some of the problem is.

Newsweek's Hugh Cameron now reports that based on the research he saw, the effort actually damaged Harris's campaign, driving more black voters from Harris.

Former President Barack Obama's recent speech may have done more harm than good to Kamala Harris' standing among swing state voters, as social media analysis revealed a negative reaction to his scolding of the Black, male electorate for its reluctance to support the vice president.

This sort of thing was going on around the internet:

Since that flopped, Harris herself launched a slapped-together plan of action to win over these black male voters:

Based on what's been seen in the press and on Twitter, that didn't help, either.

The start-up cash, which is apparently only for minorities, will probably never make it out of court, given that it discriminates against whites. But the cash itself also was viewed as a sudden bribe to win over black votes and voters see through that.

The black men's health initiative sounds like cash for NGOs when many black men would just rather have affordable health insurance and access to care as well as good medical outcomes.

The cryptocurrency offer was downright bizarre -- since when has cryptocurrency been a uniquely hot topic in the black male community? It sounds like someone threw that in, being unable to think of anything else.

The marijuana offer, thrown out to black men rather than anyone else, was downright insulting.

Some responses are here:

What has she been doing all these years since sitting in the vice president's seat?

There are a lot of reasons for thinking this won't work the way they think it will.

Harris has all kinds of problems with black men that go well beyond her sudden interest in black men that wasn't there before.

I always wondered about this one -- and I am not alone:

After all, if you're being courted as a special interest group based on the color of your skin, it wouldn't be surprising if you started looking who she chooses to be around.

Meanwhile, there's also the Harris record, dating from her days as district attorney in San Francisco and California's state attorney general. If this were you, or one of your family members, you'd remember Kamala.

Imagine the insult to injury -- first in getting the book thrown at you for a minor drug offense because you are black and powerless, and then in being kept in prison beyond your term. How could this even be legal?

The 'you're all potheads' offer was treated as the insult it was, at least by some, too:

Legalized pot has done hellish things for the urban areas of America, putting junkies on the street, making some young men schizophrenic, and raising crime, and giving Mexico's cartels a piece of the action. While there are plenty of African-Americans who like pot, there are plenty of whites who do, too, but only black voters have to pay the price for this hellish expansion of the trade. Encouraging more black people to become legal sellers, particularly in an overregulated environment, generally puts legal sellers in competition with illegal ones, as well as creates more gateways for addition to worse drugs. Do black neighborhoods need more of that? A lot of black voters have seen what the legal pot trade does up close and want no part of it.

Because the fact of the matter is, what, really, has she ever had to do with black men? She was raised in wealthy white Canada, and then in plummy Berkeley, California among its academic class. That's not the working class part of Oakland. She's never had much of anything to do with them, and now that she's got Obama scolding them, a lot are just tuning out.

That may explain why her offers to woo black male voters come off as so tin earred.

 

 

 

 

 

 

While it's true she hooked up with Willie Brown as his mistress, and he definitely knew the rougher parts of black political culture, he wasn't particularly 'black' either in those years -- he liked to shop at tony Wilkes Bashford and Brooks Brothers as I recall, he dined at Jeremiah Tower's Stars and all the trendiest San Francisco restaurants, and he introduced young Kamala to his Pacific Heights set, the wealthy white billionaires like the Gettys who financed her first campaigns and remain her moneybags allies. That was who he hung out with -- the black reverends out in the Fillmore and Hunters Point were for show. That's who Kamala hung out with, too. She needed a BMW to be seen in, so Willie bought her one of those.

Sound like the kind of candidate a black male voter might like to vote for? Not these days. The old expectations that blacks will always go for the black candidate, based on skin color affinity, is rapidly falling apart with Kamala's inability to woo black male voters. With a record like hers, why should they?

 

Image: Twitter video screen shot

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