Early Turnout: Harris Falters Among Black Voters

In 2016, one of the first signs Hillary Clinton might be in trouble was weak polling among Black voters. Shortly before the election, during an interview on the “Tom Joyner Morning Show,” Barack Obama issued this warning: “The overall vote is up. But the African-American vote, right now, is not as solid as it needs to be.” Clinton ended up winning 89 percent of the Black vote — six points down from the 95 percent Obama won in 2008. In 2020, the slippage continued when Joe Biden garnered 87 percent. Most Democrats assumed that replacing Biden with Kamala Harris would improve on that performance, but various polls have shown her drawing far less support among Black voters than they expected.

This reality has manifested itself in early turnout. In Georgia, for example, Democrats typically need 30 percent of Black voters to cast early ballots to offset robust Election Day turnout by Republicans. In 2024, early turnout in the Peach State has been strong but the percentage of ballots cast by Black voters was low enough to alarm Georgia Democrats according to a report in the Capital B Atlanta: “State Rep. Carl Gilliard, D-Savannah, joined an emergency Zoom call with about 70 other Black Georgia faith leaders Monday night to discuss their concerns about the state’s latest early voting figures.” As early voting ended on Sunday, the Democratic percentage remained at a lackluster 26.4 percent. Politico describes a similar story in North Carolina:

As of Wednesday, Black voters make up 18 percent of the electorate in early voting, and some Democratic operatives said they must bump that up to about 20 percent for Harris to be competitive statewide. In 2020, Black voters were 19 percent of the electorate, when Donald Trump narrowly won the state. And Democrats acknowledge that without a swing in their favor in the last days of early voting or on Election Day, it may not be good enough … Harris is expected to win a majority of African American voters in North Carolina, and nationally, but any slippage with this group would be a blow to the vice president.

As early voting ended Saturday evening, the percentage of Black voters who cast early ballots in North Carolina had stalled at 17.8 percent. Moreover, as is usually the case in Georgia, turnout in the Tar Heel State on Election Day will likely favor Trump. Meanwhile, The Carolina Journal reports, “According to ad tracking firm AdImpact, the Harris-Walz presidential campaign has changed much of its remaining ad spending in North Carolina in the last week of the election, pulling millions of dollars worth of ads from the major North Carolina media markets.” Trump held rallies in the state on Saturday and Sunday. He will return Monday to close the sale, while the DNC tries to rouse Black rural voters with a new ad campaign.

Georgia and North Carolina are, of course, among the seven crucial swing states in which the election will probably be decided. The RCP Top Battlegrounds average, shows Trump leading in Georgia by 1.9 percent and ahead in North Carolina by 1.5 percent. If he wins in these two states, Harris will be left with only one plausible route to victory in the Electoral College. Trump also enjoys modest leads in three of the remaining five swing states, so she will likely need to run the table in the Rust Belt — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. But her tepid support among Black voters is a nationwide phenomenon that includes the so-called “blue wall” states. A recent New York Times report explains her dilemma:

Much of the erosion in support for Ms. Harris is driven by a growing belief that Democrats, who have long celebrated Black voters as the “backbone” of their party, have failed to deliver on their promises … Ms. Harris’s problems with African American voters rest on the same issue that her struggles with other constituencies do: the economy. Nearly three-quarters of Black voters rated the economy fair or poor, and the economy and abortion were rated their most pressing concerns. More than seven in 10 Black voters said they had cut back on groceries because of cost; 56 percent said they had cut back often.

It’s Not Only the Black Vote

Another anomaly that produced the lower than normal Black turnout percentages for Harris involves the record-breaking number of early ballots cast by GOP voters. In swing states that report voter registration data, they outnumbered Democrats. In North Carolina the Raleigh News & Observer reports, “Registered Republicans slightly outnumbered Democrats in early voting and mail-in totals, currently accounting for 33.3 percent of votes cast so far, compared to Democrats’ 32.4 percent.” In Nevada the Reno Gazette Journal reports, “After the final day of early voting, registered Republicans have cast almost 50,000 more votes than Democrats statewide, according to Secretary of State data released at 9 p.m. Friday.”

This more or less mirrors what has been happening in most of the seven swing states. Unfortunately, considering their importance to the outcome of the 2024 election, most have clunky election websites that provide incomplete and often incoherent information on early voting. The good news is this: In every state that provides coherent data, the Republicans appear to be ascendant and the Democrat coalition is disintegrating. Black voters are the most obvious defectors, but they are by no means alone. As former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer put it on Sunday, “30 of 31 states that register voters by party have become either more Republican or less Democrat than they were at the time of the 2020 election.”

When the Democrat-run states are finally forced to stop creating … er … counting votes, it will already be obvious who will be taking the oath of office on January 20, 2025.

READ MORE from David Catron:

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