If Vice President Kamala Harris slips in support with Black men, as some polls have warned, there are a few factors that could be behind it, New York Times columnist Charles Blow wrote in a lengthy analysis Wednesday.
Blow remains skeptical that the shift in the polls, which has prompted urgent calls to arms from key leaders like former President Barack Obama, is capturing a real phenomenon, and even so, Harris is certain to win Black men overall — but in his anecdotal experience, he has run into some Black men who have grown frustrated with the Democratic Party, and there are multiple reasons for it.
These voters, he added, may well understand former President Donald Trump's racism — but have other priorities.
ALSO READ: 'People have had enough': Here are the 3 'big-picture' reasons why Kamala Harris will win
"There are Black power advocates who are anti-abortion because they want more Black babies. They see a Black population that is growing more slowly than other minority groups," wrote Blow. "There are the Black gender purists and homophobes who agree with the Republican talking point that Democrats 'don’t know the difference between a man and a woman.' There are the Black opponents of immigration who chafe if American resources, at any level of government, go to accommodating recent migrants rather than being spent on native-born communities" — a tension Trump has tried to exploit with his controversial remarks about "Black jobs." And some have become frustrated with the Israel-Hamas war, seeing the U.S. as on the wrong side of an injustice.
"Consider that a century ago, the Black nationalist Marcus Garvey met secretly with the leader of the Ku Klux Klan. Garvey once said, 'I regard the Klan, the Anglo-Saxon clubs and White American societies, as far as the Negro is concerned, as better friends of the race than all other groups of hypocritical whites put together,'" wrote Blow. "One way to interpret this is that some Black men have shown a willingness to downplay a racist track record as a political consideration."
Whatever the source of the division, he concluded, Trump is happy to exploit it.
"There is a feeling that liberalism in general, and the Democratic Party in particular, has moved away from the party of hard hats to the party of safe spaces, that it has been feminized and that Trump’s bravado and rampant sexism, no matter how toxic, are at least forms of masculinity," he wrote.