Mayor Rob Ford is more popular with black Torontonians than the first black president is with black Americans, Councillor Doug Ford said with sincerity on Monday.

“I understand — just had a call saying the black community will not be supporting Rob Ford. That is the furthest from the truth. He’s going to have more votes in the black community than President Obama,” Doug Ford said in a call to Newstalk 1010’s Humble and Fred show. “You know that, everyone else knows that.”

Nobody else actually knows that.

Exit polls suggest Obama got 95 per cent of black votes in the 2008 election, 93 per cent in 2012 — more than 15 million people each time. A total of 383,501 people of all races voted for Rob Ford in 2010.

Doug Ford phoned Newstalk during an appearance by Andray Domise, a black business professional who is running against Ford nephew Michael Ford for the Etobicoke council seat Doug Ford is vacating. Domise criticized the mayor’s rhetoric and actions toward the black community in a recent open letter .

Domise responded to Doug Ford’s Obama assertion by incredulously asking for evidence. He then said, “You can’t keep lying to people and expect that we’re going to keep swallowing that.”

Doug Ford soon repeated a frequent claim: “There’s no one that’s helped specifically the black community more than Rob Ford has, and every other community.”

Domise responded: “What about our own communities? What about people in our own communities, Doug?”

In a subsequent interview, Domise, laughing, said Ford is technically correct: Black Canadians in Toronto will cast more votes for Rob Ford than they did for an American they’re not allowed to vote for. But he scoffed at the plain meaning of Ford’s words.

“It speaks to his longstanding grudge against the truth,” he said. “It’s almost like Hatfield-McCoy warfare.”

This is not the first time Doug Ford has invoked the president in defending the mayor. In November, at the height of Rob Ford’s crack cocaine scandal, Doug Ford told CNN that his brother is “a huge, massive social liberal.”

"He loves Obama,” Doug Ford said, though Rob Ford himself says he does not. “The headlines of the papers when he won? ‘The White Obama.’” That claim by Ford seems to have been based on a lone National Post column, two months before Rob Ford’s victory, that deemed him “the Barack Obama of Toronto.”

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