With less than four weeks to go before Election Day, Republican insiders say their party has stopped trying to hold onto the Black voters who helped send President Donald Trump back to the White House.
The Washington Sun spoke to nearly a dozen Republican strategists, lawmakers and local officials who conceded that GOP efforts to court Black voters have shrunk nationwide since 2024, when Trump won 15 percent of Black voters nationally and 21 percent of Black men, according to Pew Research.
“I don’t think the expectation is that we’re gonna have a large amount of Black folks coming out to support us because we can’t even get the white folks to support us,” the operative told the Sun.
According to three people familiar with the talks, the Frederick Douglass Freedom Alliance pitched both the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee this spring on a canvassing and messaging plan aimed at Black voters in about five midterm races. Both committees turned it down. Sources said individual campaigns also rejected or ignored similar offers from other Black grassroots groups.
“President Trump’s 2024 strategy proved intentional, relationship driven engagement in black and brown communities works,” Troy Rolling, the group’s president and CEO, said in a statement. “Now, the Republican Party needs to trust that model, invest in it, and stick with it.”
A prominent Black Republican strategist placed the blame on the White House, arguing that the administration never followed through on the economic worries that drew Black men to Trump.
“So Black men are looking at us, and they’re saying, ‘Nothing really changed for me. There’s not a damn thing I can point to as tangible to say my life has gotten better,’” the strategist said.
The Black unemployment rate has climbed a full percentage point over the past year to 7 percent, nearly double the rate for white workers. And when the Education Department announced nearly $175 million in new funding for historically Black colleges in September, the White House barely mentioned it.
People familiar with the matter told the outlet the White House didn’t want to look like it was promoting DEI before the midterms.
Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), who is running for Florida governor and has spent seven figures courting Black voters on his own, offered a gentle jab at his party. “I think a lot of the party doesn’t know how, and I don’t think it’s that they don’t want to,” he said. “I just think they don’t know how.”
The NRCC said Republicans are working to “earn the trust of Black voters,” and its spokesperson Mike Marinella accused Democrats of having “taken too many voters for granted,” but another Black GOP strategist said those efforts were wasted.
“You know how you buy some stuff, put it in the garage and forget that it’s there? That’s where the effort is at,” that Black GOP strategist said.