The number marks a record high, the pollster noted, and shows a rapid rise in support for the president among black voters, compared to Rasmussen’s own results from a year ago.
Why Trump
Black Americans have voted exceedingly left since the 1960s. The presidential election in 1964, especially, fixated black voters on the Democrats. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy the year before primed the nation to choose his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, to continue his legacy. Democrats also portrayed the Republican contender, Barry Goldwater, as a racist, because he opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act.It didn’t help that Goldwater was, to a degree, a small-government libertarian who believed that welfare would lead to moral erosion by means of government dependency. His unabashed rhetoric gave his opponents ammunition to accuse him of wanting to drastically cut welfare.
Trump, with an unabashedness of his own, received only 8 percent of the black vote in 2016. But that was still more than Goldwater or even Mitt Romney.
Trump has steered clear of talking up welfare cuts at large, taking more popular angles, such as repealing Obamacare and imposing job requirements on welfare seekers. But, perhaps more than Goldwater, he was liberally accused of racism by Democrats.
Those attacks, however, seem to be losing effectiveness. To begin with, Trump hadn’t been considered racist in the left-leaning circles of mainstream media and entertainment until he ran for president.
He’s also spent considerable effort to appeal to black voters, asking them to consider how electing Democrats for decades benefited them. Trump promised them jobs, safety, and education.
‘Blexit’
The support of singer, producer, and businessman Kanye West has been helping Trump from another angle. West says he doesn’t agree with Trump on everything, but that it frees his mind to put on a Trump hat, as it allows him to escape the certain modes of thinking that society expects of him.Some effects of the efforts of Owens and others can be seen among the blacks joining the Walk Away movement to leave the Democratic Party.
Owens has recently announced a new initiative called “Blexit,” which specifically urges black Americans to leave the Democratic Party. A clothing line accompanies the movement, sporting “Blexit” and “We Free” in capital letters.