Trump Approval Among Black Voters Rises to Record 40 Percent in Rasmussen Poll

Some 40 percent of black likely voters approve of the job President Donald Trump is doing, according to the daily Rasmussen poll released on Oct. 29.

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.

The poll showed 29 percent support for Trump among blacks on Aug. 6, compared with 15 percent on Aug. 3, 2017.

Reuters/Ipsos polls also have revealed an increase, though more modest, to 16.5 percent approval among blacks in an Oct. 18–22 survey, from 11 percent at the end of August.

Among all likely voters, Rasmussen has been tracking Trump job approval at around the 50 percent mark throughout October, compared to the 40 to 47 percent range being reported by other pollsters.

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.

Goldwater was actually against segregation and racial discrimination, The Heritage Foundation’s Lee Edwards wrote in 2014. Goldwater had voted for the civil rights bills of 1957 and 1960, but warned, prophetically, that the 1964 legislation was written in a way that would lead to another form of racial discrimination—affirmative action.

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.

“We’re fighting every day for African-Americans, for more jobs, for higher wages, for safer communities, for great schools, and we want school choice. We got to have,” Trump said at the Oct. 27 rally in Evansville, Indiana. “We’re fighting hard. It’s going to make a big difference.”

Black unemployment, a powerful talking point, has dropped to historic lows under his administration’s “America First” economic agenda. Violent crime also slightly declined in 2017, after two years of increases.

‘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.

Conservative political commentators such as Candace Owens and Dinesh D’Souza have popularized the expression “the Democratic Plantation,” which draws a parallel between the racism against blacks advocated by the Democratic Party in the past and the system of government dependency represented by the welfare state advocated by the Democrats of the present.

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.