In this episode, we explore how Mr. Trump, the Republican nominee, is faring so poorly with black voters, according to polls. We also assess where both parties stand with the black electorate: whether the Republican Party is ready to have an honest conversation about race, and whether the Democratic Party, which has benefited so much from Mr. Trump’s blunders with black voters, deserves the overwhelming support of African-Americans it has garnered this year.

Ms. Wall, a veteran black campaign operative, offers a candid, behind-the-scenes assessment. Few have had her insider’s perspective: as an adviser to President Bush, the last Republican presidential candidate to carry, in 2004, 11 percent of the black vote — a relative high-water mark for Republicans — and as an aide to Mitt Romney, who failed to match that level of support in 2012.

We also talk with the New York Times columnist Charles Blow and the reporter Yamiche Alcindor, who have both covered the campaign and its racial dynamics for the past two years.

Mr. Blow discusses the difficult choice this election. “One party approaches you with a philosophy of pain, and the other approaches you with a philosophy of pity,” he says. “And most black people, I would venture, don’t want either.”

But he warns about false equivalency. “Have Democrats been perfect? Of course they haven’t. But there are actual attacks on individual people of color in this country,” he says, speaking of efforts to enact stricter voter registration laws. “Everyone knows the net effect of them will be a disproportionate impact on poor people and minorities and, in particular, black people,” he said, “and those are, for the most part, Republican legislatures doing that.”