The NPR Politics Podcast - President Trump's Push for Black Voters Could Help Persuade Suburban Whites

Episode Date: November 11, 2019

The Trump campaign launched its "Black Voices for Trump" initiative in Atlanta last week, touting record low black unemployment and criminal justice reform. Experts say that while the push may not make a big difference among black voters, it could help to reassure suburban white voters concerned about Trump's rhetoric on race. This episode: political correspondent Scott Detrow, political reporter Ayesha Rascoe, and senior political editor and correspondent Ron Elving. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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Most of the world heard this for the first time when President Trump tweeted it, announcing what he was calling the MAGA Challenge. Aisha, can you fill us in? Yes. So this person tweeted out a video of themselves rapping their own version of support for make america great again and down with like the liberals and things like that and up with trump he did this on the day that he was going to Atlanta, which is kind of a hip hop home or the home of a lot of hip hop legends. But he was going down there to announce black voices for Trump. And that's what we're going to talk about more than the MAGA challenge.

This is something that you have looked into a lot, Aisha. What is the point of this initiative? And how real is this initiative? How much is this something the Trump campaign is actually doing, as opposed to just saying, yeah, we've got support from everywhere? So this is something that they launched specifically to reach out to black voters. They have done this in the past that, you know, they have women for Trump. I believe they have Latinos for Trump. So this is a part of their kind of specific outreach that they're doing. I mean they're saying that it's real I talked to Katrina Pearson who's a senior advisor on the campaign she is

african-american and she says that they are going to be going to places like Houston going to Philadelphia Charlotte to bring what they feel is a very good message for African-Americans, talking about low black unemployment, talking about criminal justice reform. They say that they have a good story to tell. Ron, typically the breakdown of the African-American vote is something like 90% for the Democrat. You know, the percentage that a Republican gets varies a little, but it's hardly ever double digits. But yet, President Trump is not the first Republican incumbent to make a push. We had Sammy Davis Jr. in 1972.

But even before that, Jackie Robinson, the man who broke the color line in baseball, campaigned for Republicans in his day, but then turned bitterly against them and turned against Richard Nixon in particular and ran against or campaigned against him in 68. By then, Nixon had moved on to Wilt Chamberlain, the basketball icon, and Chamberlain actually helped Nixon get past protesters into Martin Luther King's funeral in 1968 and campaigned for him a lot. Later on, looking to a more modern example, George W. Bush won the critical state of Ohio, which if he had lost, he would not have gotten a second term as president. He won that state with a constitutional amendment on same-sex marriage that Karl Rove, his campaign manager, marketed heavily to the African-American community through an organization of conservative black ministers. And while they didn't necessarily want George W. Bush to win the presidency, Bush's numbers went from 9% of the black vote, the figure you mentioned, typically right below double digits, up to 16% in Ohio.

And that alone was enough to swing the state for George W. Bush and win him a second term. So, Ayesha, to put it mildly, there is a lot of skepticism about this initiative for a few reasons. And I will just name a few, whether it's calling certain countries blank holes or tweeting racist things about minority congresswomen or going back to before he was president, President Trump questioning whether President Obama was born in the United States. He's got a pretty long track record of saying things that are offensive or more to African-American voters. Well, I think that's the issue here is that, you know, talking to people who have studied black voting patterns and studied demographics and things of that nature,

I mean, they say that there's a limited amount that President Trump will be able to grow his share of the black vote. And part of that is because of the things that he says, the rhetoric that he uses. And even when you talk about low black unemployment there is it is at record low levels but it's still double white unemployment and there are still places especially pockets in this country where black unemployment is still really high you know if you go to certain places and so I think that's that's still an issue that President Trump will have to deal with and have to confront. And not only that, but his language itself has just been a turnoff.

So within this universe of voters, though, are there people that he could make a reasonable message to and maybe get their vote? Yes. So I talked to Theodore Johnson of the Brennan Center for Justice, and he studies race and voting. And he said that there is this group of black male voters who could who Trump could appeal to. He said it's all is they're kind of like the Rust Belt, non-college educated white voters who Trump is trying to appeal to, this kind of small piece of the black electorate, they are, they can, the message of economics and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and being an entrepreneur and all of that with President Trump being a billionaire, all of that, that appeals to them. And that's a message that resonates to them. And so there is a slice of the electorate that he could try to pull a bit and that could help in a

close election. So Ron, last question on this, circling back to that MAGA challenge, that rap challenge, we looked at it overwhelmingly, the respondents to that are white. How much of this effort is about courting black voters and how much of it is about making an appeal, a public appeal to black voters to counter the constant criticism from every Democrat running against him and others that he routinely says and does racist things? To some degree, this campaign can do double duty, Scott. I mean, not only are you appealing to African-American voters who might be susceptible of the message, but you're also talking to white people who may want to vote for Donald Trump, but be somewhat put off by some of the more overt things that he has said.

They don't want to vote for somebody they think is a racist. So white people who are perhaps suburban, perhaps live wherever they may live, may have black friends, may be a little bit uncomfortable with that. If the president reaches out to black people, that helps them reach back to the president. All right, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about a couple new books that peek inside the Trump administration. This message comes from NPR sponsor CBSN, the live streaming video news channel from CBS News. CBSN is perfect for cord cutters because you can watch the news wherever you are across all streaming devices. You can find CBSN on your phone, tablet, smart TV. It's also available

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Listen now and share with your friends. We are back. Time for the NPR Politics Book Corner. I wish that was a regular segment. It is not. But former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley has made news with a new book called With All Due Respect. Ron, you reviewed it. And there are some eyebrow razors in there, to put it mildly.

We will get to those in a moment. But first, why is Haley worth talking about? Why is she such a key figure in the Republican Party, even though she's no longer in the Trump administration and hasn't been for a while? To some degree, this goes back to the conversation we were just having, because she is a woman of color. Her parents were immigrants, and she was born in Bagwell, South Carolina, rose to be the governor of South Carolina, the first woman, the first person of color to rise to that honor. And while she was there, she took the Confederate flag down from the state capitol after the shooting at the Mother

Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, the loss of nine lives there in 2015. Horrific story in which she performed rather admirably from all perspectives. And that really made her something of a star. And a good chunk of the book is about her fighting, she argues, for President Trump's interests within his own administration. One of the things that's gotten a lot of attention is her talking about how former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, former Chief of Staff John Kelly, basically telling her, hey, sometimes we just ignore the president. Sometimes we do more than that. We counter the president. And here's why. What does she write there? She writes there that they were trying to, quote, save the country, unquote, from Donald Trump, that they were restraining him and controlling him and battening him as a dangerous hand grenade in

the Oval Office. And they were trying to recruit her to be part of that effort. Something like the kind of thing you heard described as the resistance within the White House by this author, Anonymous, who has another book that's also coming out and wrote an op-ed previously about this going on. So in her particular case, she wants no part of that whatsoever and denounces it and denounces the people who are part of it. I should add here that she has very little use for Rex Tillerson in general, a dozen references to him reliably negative. And Haley talked to NPR about this. She did an interview with Mary Louise Kelly. One of the things she was asked about is how she views this author who came out with a book

who's allegedly in the Trump administration, crashed the Trump administration, but won't say who he or she is. If you have a problem with the president, you should speak up, but you should speak up to the president. And I saw multiple conversations and debates in front of the president. And at the end of the day, the president decides what policy is. And if you can't live with it, then quit. Ayesha, why did you make that? Because she keeps coming back to this broader theme in the book, too, of saying this person was elected president of the United States and has a right to do whatever he wants policy wise. It gets to this broader theme of really the Trump administration.

And what President Trump would argue is that he did get elected and that it's up to these people who are around him to follow his orders, that he sets the policy. What it seems like some of the people that have worked under Trump have said is that their duty is not to President Trump, but to, I guess in their minds, they might argue it's to the Constitution, it's to the American public, and that they tried to, if not directly to kind of subvert his will, but to maybe slow walk things that they thought were hazardous. So, Ron, one thing that I think is pretty interesting here, if you look past the book and you look more at how Nikki Haley is positioning herself going forward, this is somebody who everybody thinks is going to run for president someday, who their rumors could might be on the ticket with Donald Trump.

At least that's something that's speculated about, that he would dump Mike Pence for her, even though Trump has denied that, people in his orbit have denied that. But still, she is somebody who has a future in the Republican Party. And it's interesting to me that if you look at the choices she's making and how she's positioning herself, she seems to be thinking that there is going to be more of a world for a Trump ally than somebody who is not Donald Trump like at all. It seems to put no thought into this theory that the Republican Party will kind of act like Donald Trump never happened one day. You know, she pledges allegiance to Donald Trump many times in the book, but it's really, if you look at it carefully, it's less to Donald Trump, the person whom she does at times criticize, but to his voters, his voter base, the people that he represents. She talks about the people back in Bamberg,

South Carolina, the little town where her immigrant parents moved in 1969, where she was born. This is the phrase she uses, real Americans, the people who were forgotten by Washington and New York and the media. And these are the people that she's appealing to. And there's a very strong populist streak through all of this book. The larger political conversation that she wants to be part of is all directed towards those voters, real or imagined. I enjoyed when she writes about having to flee Washington and get back to, you know, the real America of the east side of New York City, where the United Nations is located. She writes about the United Nations, but she's clearly focused on a much larger political future and much larger political conversation. She never says anything bad about Mike Pence. She's very respectful of him in each of the very few references she makes to him. And she makes it clear she has no intent whatsoever to run

against Donald Trump in 2020. And that's about where she leaves. All right. That is a wrap for today. And this past weekend, we had a live show in Washington, D.C. Aisha, I think it was pretty fun. It was great. I enjoyed it. So if you couldn't make it to that one, don't worry. We have two more shows in January. One is in Chicago, January 10th. The other is at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey on January 22nd.

Grab tickets at nprpresents.org. And if you're thinking, I don't live in Chicago or New Jersey, don't worry. We have even more shows coming up next year. We're going to announce it a little bit. All right. Hope to see you there. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the campaign.

I'm Ayesha Roscoe. I cover the White House. And I'm Ron Elving, editor correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.