How Kamala Harris Can Win Back Black Voters

High numbers of Black voters haven’t yet decided who they’re going to vote for in the 2024 election, according to a new survey.
Polling from the Alliance for Black Equality, conducted between October 2 and 4, indicates that 10 percent of Black voters are still undecided, with less than 20 days to go until the election. It also shows that Harris is trailing behind her predecessors among Black voters, with 73 percent of the demographic supporting her, compared to 88 percent for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and 87 percent for Joe Biden in 2020.
According to the survey, Harris’ declining support is down to a “gender-generation gap” in the Black electorate, whereby support for both Biden and Harris has been soft among millennial and Gen Z Black voters generally, with about one in four millennial and Gen Z respondents reporting support for Trump. But support for Harris has been especially weak with Black men in those cohorts, with only 49 percent of Black Gen Z men supporting Harris, while 40 percent said they back Trump. An estimated 90 percent of Black men voted for Joe Biden in 2020.
It isn’t the first time polls have shown Harris trailing Biden and Clinton among Black and Black male voters. In August, analysis by Newsweek revealed that on average, Harris was polling at 76 percent among Black voters, while Trump was polling at 16 percent.
Meanwhile, analysis by pollster and political analyst Harry Enten found Trump saw the strongest support among Black male voters, especially young Black men, for a Republican candidate since 1960.
Enten’s analysis showed that Harris has a 54-point lead among Black men, down from Biden’s 69-point lead in 2020, Clinton’s 71-point lead in 2016, and Obama’s 85-point lead in 2012.
Among Black men aged 18-44, Harris had a lead of only 41 points. That is compared to Biden’s 53-point lead in 2020, Clinton’s 63-point lead in 2016, and Obama’s 81-point lead in 2012.
Enten did not provide a breakdown of how he formed his aggregates but cited an average of post-election surveys from 2012-2020 and pre-election surveys this year.
Additionally, a New York Times/Siena College poll conducted between September 29 and October 6 showed 78 percent of Black men planning to vote for Harris, with 15 percent supporting Trump.
Amid the loss of some support among Black voters, a key base of support for the Democratic party, the Harris campaign rolled its new Opportunity Agenda for Black Men last week.
The policies include offering as many as 1 million fully forgivable loans of up to $20,000 for Black entrepreneurs, along with increased investment in training, mentorship and apprenticeship programs aimed at helping Black men secure jobs in high-demand industries. The plan also includes legalizing recreational marijuana and ensuring Black men have access to wealth-building opportunities and jobs in that market.
“This agenda is an extension of Vice President Harris’ Opportunity Economy, empowering Black men with the tools to succeed—buy a home, support their families, start businesses, and build wealth,” Harris-Walz campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond said.
However, polling from the Alliance for Black Equality indicates that the Harris campaign should take a different approach if it wants to win back some Black male voters.
According to the poll, Harris could boost her support among younger Black male voters by as much as 15 percent if she shifts her messaging to highlight the risks of a Trump presidency. Specifically, her campaign should focus on Trump’s plans to implement nationwide stop-and-frisk policies, his record of undermining federal civil rights, and his endorsement of Project 2025 initiatives, the poll shows.
Project 2025 supports banning DEI programs, although Trump has denied any association with Project 2025. However, he has supported punishing universities for pursuing DEI initiatives, as well as reinstating stop-and-frisk policing nationwide.
The poll found that each message increased approval of Kamala Harris among Black men by 8-15 points. Stop-and-frisk slightly outperformed the others, increasing Harris’ approval by a net 15 points. Meanwhile, among those who were unsure of their vote choice or whether they would vote, each message increased Harris approval by double digits, while stop-and-frisk messaging increased approval by 12 points.
Christopher Towler, associate professor of political science at Sacramento State University and part of the Black Voter Project, told Newsweek that the Alliance for Black Equality polling is in line with the research he has been doing for years.
“Since 2022, we’ve been trying to get into the Democrat’s ears, telling them that mobilizing low-propensity Black voters requires a different strategy, as they are far less receptive to messages that try to convince them to feel excited and hopeful about politics. Therefore, we’ve pushed for campaigns to try to meet unlikely Black voters where they are and discuss voting as just as much a protective act as a progressive one. This, then, entails using messages of threat that highlight how politicians, far-right movements, and even political institutions can harm the Black community and undo generations of racial progress,” he said.
He warned that because of this, Harris’ Opportunity Agenda may “fall flat on low-propensity Black voters who feel alienated from politics.”
“While Harris’ Opportunity Agenda offers some real positive policy for Black America and is long overdue as Black voters have been the Democrat’s most loyal supporters for decades, it also may fall flat on low-propensity Black voters who feel alienated from politics altogether as they may not see (or even understand) how policy affects their everyday lives,” he said.
“However, these are the exact Black voters in the margins that Harris will need to win swing states that often come down to less than one percent of the entire statewide electorate.”
Meanwhile, Alvin Tillery, founder of Alliance for Black Equality and co-founder of 2040 Strategy Group, told Newsweek that while he “commends” Harris for her Opportunity Agenda, she still has more work to do to win over Balc men.
“I commend Vice President Harris and her team on their Opportunity Agenda for Black men,” Tillery said. “It’s clear they understand they must earn, rather than depend on, the support of Black voters nationwide. Still, the Vice President needs to go further and call a spade a spade here. Donald Trump has promised he’ll implement a nationwide stop-and-frisk program. Donald Trump has already tried to gut the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Civil Rights Act. Donald Trump embraces Project 2025 and plans to roll back criminal justice and policing reforms from Day 1 in office.
“Our polling is clear: Vice President Harris needs to be shouting these harsh truths from the mountaintop. We can’t go backwards.”
He added that messaging highlighting the risks of a Trump presidency would appeal mostly to Black swing voters.
“The messages that our polls have found move Black voters the most are those focused on highlighting how Donald Trump portends a fundamental downgrading of their status as free citizens in this country. These messages – that Donald Trump wants to allow the police to stop-and-frisk you, to be able to brutalize you without accountability, and rollback the laws that protect you from discrimination in the workplace – would appeal to anyone with the lived experiences of the new Black swing voters,” he said.
“These voters are younger, have greater economic precarity, and likely have already had encounters with police that have left them shaken. I would also bet my house that most of them either participated in or posted about the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 after the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.”
Tillery went on to say that the Harris campaign simply has not spent enough time trying to win over Black male swing voters.
“As the first woman of color to seek the presidency, and coming into the role the way she did, VP Harris was placed in a position where she needed to shore up what most of the political establishment in Washington thinks are the “swing voters” – white, college-educated voters who live in the suburbs,” he said.
“The kind of messaging that VP Harris had to deploy in the early part of the summer to not appear threatening to the white moderates who were thinking about voting for her meant that she could not engage in the kinds of tailored messages that Black men need to hear from her to believe she is with them. The sad reality for candidates of color even after Barack Obama’s presidency is that they often need to de-emphasize their identities to be electorally viable. Add that to that axiom, the incredible time pressure that VP Harris has been under and it is not surprising that the push for Black swing voters is coming at the 11th hour.
“The skepticism that Black men have toward the Democratic Party is due in large part to their failure to keep messaging on the key issues after the 2020 election. That is in no way the fault of VP Harris, but in order to win she is going to need to go a lot bigger than the most race-neutral policy package that her team has announced last week.”
Newsweek has contacted the Trump and Harris campaigns for comment via email.