Trump’s low standing with black voters is unprecedented in the modern era. Political scientist Larry Sabato observes:

Trump polls 1-2% among blacks. In '64 Goldwater got 6% after voting no on the Civil Rights Act. In '68 segregationist George Wallace won 3%. — Larry Sabato (@LarrySabato) August 21, 2016

After months of blithely asserting that black voters will support him or else simply ignoring his poor standing, Trump has recently begun to address it, approaching the problem with a mixture of humility and bravado.

“In recent days, across this country, I've asked the African-American community to honor me with their vote,” Trump said in Virginia over the weekend. “I fully recognize that outreach to the African-American community is an area where the Republican Party must do better.” Yet he also predicted he’d sweep the black vote during his 2020 reelection campaign. “At the end of four years, I guarantee you that I will get over 95 percent of the African-American vote.”

That would be truly remarkable. As I reported in November 2015, the best any Republican has done with black voters in the last few decades was Gerald Ford’s 17 percent in 1976, running against a Southern Democrat in an era when Dixiecrats and Democratic support for segregation were still within recent memory. (At the time, one poll showed Trump pulling 25 percent of the black vote; most analysts predicted the real numbers would be much lower, and here we are.) What’s more, a 95 percent total would match only Barack Obama in 2008, and would exceed his 2012 showing among African Americans.

Nor do his recent appeals seem likely to close the gap much. First, Trump’s approach risks coming across more as lecturing than as reaching out. His comments in Akron were similar to a riff he delivered in Michigan on Friday, calling on black voters to give him a chance.

“You're living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed. What the hell do you have to lose?”

This paternalistic tone has been Trump’s hallmark of late—for example, in his nomination-acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, where he told listeners, “I alone can fix it.”

Trump’s caricatures of black communities as dens of crime, poverty, and shiftlessness are not likely to win him many fans. (In May, when the journalist Robert Draper asked him the most dangerous place he’d ever been, he quipped, “Brooklyn.” He was probably not referring to the threat posed by Williamsburg gentrifiers.) Not all blacks are living in poverty. While some black Americans live in rough neighborhoods, others do not. And African American voters are widely concerned with racial discrimination, both at the hands of the police and criminal-justice system and otherwise. Calling for more stringent policing is not necessarily the solution that black communities want. Trump, in contrast, has made praising the police a regular part of his speech, and when asked whether he believed African Americans were subject to bias, he said he could empathize because the election system was “rigged” against him.