Trump’s gains among Black men leave many asking: What went wrong?

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Maurice Myers didn’t bother showing up to the polls.

The Pittsburgh native, who holds down a day job as a dishwasher in an Italian restaurant in Market Square, pursues entrepreneurial endeavors such as his TikTok channel with nearly 10,000 followers.

Nothing in the presidential election affects his day-to-day life, he said. The 44-year-old Black man leaned toward voting for Vice President Kamala Harris based on concerns conveyed by his mother, but he felt the Democratic nominee had never tried to earn his vote.

“I didn’t vote at all,” Myers said. “I just didn’t see the need.”

For many Black men, Republican Donald Trump’s decisive victory over Harris on Tuesday landed like a gut punch.

Roughly 72 million Americans voted to return the former president to power despite a record that included questioning Harris’ racial heritage, two impeachments, a conviction on 34 felonies and the violence of Jan. 6, 2021.

Trump defeated Harris by holding his base and expanding his margins among Black and Latino voters – a confounding statistic for many Black men, who are trying to figure out what went wrong and how they can keep it from happening again.

To win, many said, candidates need to talk from the start about policies and positions that are important to Black voters, especially men. Then they must persuade and mobilize Black communities around those issues, said Khalil Thompson, a political strategist and veteran of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

“I believe that wasn't a strategy that was adhered to from either side – not just from Democrats – from either side,” said Thompson, the founder and CEO of the grassroots organization Win With Black Men.

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Black voters have long been the Democratic Party's most loyal voting bloc, often catapulting Democrats to victory. That includes Black men, who have been the second-highest bloc of progressive voters for decades, behind Black women.

While Trump didn’t win a majority of Black voters or Latinos, he did make inroads. He won support from about 13% of Black voters nationally and 45% of Latino voters, according to CNN exit polls. In the 2020 election, Trump won just 8% of Black voters and 32% of Latinos.

For months, Trump and his allies pinned part of their strategy on peeling men of color away from the Democratic coalition.

The campaign relentlessly chipped at the Black vote, for instance, with messages of discontent about the economy, illegal immigration and culture war issues.

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Trump's team dispatched high-profile surrogates at fast food restaurants, churches and barbershops in predominantly African-American communities carrying similar messages.

"White people being racist is not a big issue for me," former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, whose prison sentence for corruption charges was commuted by Trump, told USA TODAY in July.

"My life doesn't change because somebody white said something racist.”

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Experts warned months ago how a growing pessimism among a segment of Black voters ? chiefly younger working-class men living in urban centers ? could bear fruit for the former president.

A 2022 Pew Research Center poll, for instance, found 64% of Black Americans said the increased focus on issues of race and racial inequality has not led to improvement in the lives of Black people.

Another 51% of Black Americans said they believed racism would worsen over their lifetimes, according to a 2023 Washington Post-Ipsos survey.

That strategy paid off as roughly 3 in 10 Black men under age 45 went for Trump, according to AP VoteCast figures, almost double what he received four years ago.

Harris, who is Black and Asian American, was at a disadvantage because of the calendar. She didn’t enter the presidential race until late July, when President Joe Biden ended his bid for a second term amid questions about whether he could defeat Trump. She had to quickly put together a campaign just weeks before the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and with just a little more than three months left until the election.

The VP’s allies were confident her numbers would steadily improve as the election approached.

Bakari Sellers, a CNN political analyst and longtime Harris friend, told USA TODAY in September that most surveys at that time had Harris raking in more than 80% of the Black vote. He said she needed to get closer to 90% to win, however.

Harris carried Black voters by 86% and Latino voters 53%, according to CNN exit polls. But in the 2020 election, Biden won Black voters by a wider 92%-8% margin over Trump and Latinos 65%-32%.

There were other alarming signs for Democrats. In Texas, for example, Trump carried roughly one-third (34%) of the vote among Black men – a nearly 20-point gain from four years ago. In 2020, Trump won just 15% of Black men in the Lone Star State.

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Win With Black Men hosted an online forum with dozens of Black male canvassers, strategists and community activists on Wednesday, where many expressed dismay at Trump’s return to power but also expressed sharp criticism toward Democrats.

Ambrose Lane, president of Million Man Vote, said though the U.S. economy has been “robust” under Biden, the cost of “things that people buy every day” remained high to the point where the Harris campaign spoke about stopping price gouging.

“So Biden very well could have stopped price gouging during his term before he even passed the reins over to Kamala, but he didn't do that,” he said. “And so I think that those economic issue played a significant role.”

Some blamed the convergence of racism and sexism nationwide as a handicap against Harris.

Part of that was brought to the forefront by Obama, who was chastised in October when he suggested some Black men “aren't feeling the idea of having a woman as president.”

Preliminary exit polls show roughly 78% of Black men pulled their lever for Harris, more than any other group of male voters in the country.

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Many in the Win With Black Men discussion called out how millions of eligible Black male voters in battleground states sat out this November.

Others sought an agenda to motivate those non-voters ahead of the next election. It was even suggested to the group that they should lobby the returning Trump administration on certain policy goals, which was a nonstarter for some.

“Blacks who voted on the red side vote against their own interests,” William Mitchell, a North Carolina political activist, told the group.

“Trump has no interest to help the Black man,” Mitchell added. “He's not done a damn thing for Black men in his entire 78 years of living.”

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As far as gender friction within the Black community, many in Wednesday's online meeting praised Black women for their role in the election.

Holli Holliday, president of Sisters Lead Sisters Vote, which among other things conducts research on Black women running for local and national offices, said Black men "engage differently than us" politically.

That "doesn't mean that they're misaligned from us," she said.

Thompson, the Win With Black Men leader, said he doesn’t fault Harris, who entered the race late and didn’t have enough time to engage with Black voters in the way they needed to be approached, he said.

“There was excitement around her candidacy,” Thompson said, “but did she have the opportunity to really start a conversation with Black men as the candidate?”

A misstep, he said, was the heavy focus on new media and engagement with social media influencers to deliver a message. That may have been a unique approach, “but not the one I would have taken,” he said.

Thompson said he would have knocked on more doors and had more direct conversations with voters. “Texting is great because that’s the device that’s in everybody’s hand,” he said, but it’s not as effective as direct conversations with voters.

Looking ahead, the group plans to host a series of regional conversations focused on policy, including with conservative-leaning Black men who may have voted for Trump.

The goal, Thompson said, is to reach working class Black men wherever they are – whether that’s the barbershop, the pool hall or the biker community.

And to reach men like Myers, who don’t vote at all.

“I still believe in our mission to engage Black men at a granular level of how we're going to move them to make effective community change—starts now,” Thompson said.

Contributing: Erin Mansfield, Deborah Berry, Joey Garrison and Rebecca Morin

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: After Kamala Harris' loss, Black voters ask what went wrong