Published September 1, 2024
Kamala Harris’ meteoric polling rise obscures her continuing weakness with black voters.
If she can’t cure this by Election Day, her path to win most of the key swing states will be in grave danger.
And her campaign is well aware of this potentially fatal flaw: That’s why her vaunted bus tour through southeastern Georgia stopped in black-dominated Liberty County and a local historically black college.
Savannah, the site of Harris’ final rally of the tour, is majority black and gave President Biden over 75% of the vote in 2020.
Black voters in Georgia and nationwide have been the mainstay of the Democratic Party for decades: Exit polls show that Democratic presidential candidates have carried them by at least 72 percentage points since 1980 — easily the largest margin for either party among a significant demographic.
Even Republicans’ margins among white evangelical voters, which has never been larger than 65 points, pales in comparison to Democratic domination of the black vote.
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Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, studies and provides commentary on American politics. His work focuses on how America’s political order is being upended by populist challenges, from the left and the right. He also studies populism’s impact in other democracies in the developed world.
