Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, left, is accompanied by his running mate, Governor of Indiana, Mike Pence, during a campaign rally in Cleveland, Ohio, on Saturday October 22, 2016. (AP Photo / Evan Vucci)
Here’s the astonishing truth the media’s not talking about and Democrats refuse to believe — Donald Trump is getting more than double, and sometimes more than triple, the black vote Romney got 4 years ago.
Recent polling by Remington Research shows Trump getting 22% in Florida, Romney got 5 percent. In North Carolina, Trump’s getting 19%, Romney got 4 percent. Trump’s getting 22% of black voters in Wisconsin compared with Romney’s 6% 4 years ago. And in Pennsylvania, Trump scores an astounding 29% against Romney’s 7% share in 2012.
Nationally, Romney received less than 7% of the black vote in 2012. Even Trump’s worst numbers among African-Americans show him getting 19%, and some polls show him doing much better.
Even more exciting for Republican prospects, increasing black support is not confined to Trump. In Wisconsin, Ron Johnson has pulled even in his race for re-election to the U.S. Senate thanks largely to black defection from the Democrat party. A CNN poll shows Rob Portman getting 32% of non-white voters in Ohio, mostly African Americans. In North Carolina, a Quinnipiac Poll shows Richard Burr gets 24% of the ethnic vote, most of them African Americans.
Generally, there are three reasons African-Americans are voting in record numbers for Republicans this year.
First, for the first time since anyone can remember, Republicans have broken the communications monopoly Democrats have enjoyed among African-Americans. Trump is persistently reaching out to them; visiting their churches and neighborhoods, making a commitment to rebuild America’s cities, economy and jobs.
Second, Trump’s not the only one speaking to African Americans. The organization I am honored to Chair, the 2016 Committee — best known for our successful effort to draft Dr. Ben Carson into the presidential race — has, in the last three months, raised and spent more than $1.3 million in 6 battleground states on radio ads targeted to African American voters. It’s an ad effort focused on Trump, but providing real value for Republicans down-ticket as well.
Our ad campaign is based on concrete test data. In fact, the predecessor to The 2016 Committee, the National Draft Ben Carson for President Committee, ran a test of this approach in the North Carolina Senate race two years ago which pit incumbent Kay Hagen against challenger Thom Tillis.
We ran radio ads for 8 weeks in that part of North Carolina where just under two-thirds of African Americans live. Radio ads were not run in the northern tier of the state on the Virginia border, nor in the southern crescent adjacent to the South Carolina border.
Rasmussen polling before the ads started showed that Kay Hagen was winning 99% of the African American vote -- about the same support she received in 2008 with Barack Obama at the top of the ticket. A few weeks after the ads started running polls indicated a notable shift in black voter preference.
On election day, exit polls taken by Rasmussen showed Thom Tillis received 11.9% of the African-American vote statewide. This is clearly a result of the more than $300,000 worth of radio ads run by the Committee.
As further validation, Tillis received precisely the result you’d expect if he won 1% of the black vote where the ads did not run and 18% in the areas where ads could be heard.
The third and most significant reason for the shift in African- American voter preferences this year is African-Americans have grown weary of shopworn liberal policies aimed at buying black votes while limiting black opportunity and prosperity. Hillary promises to double down on those failed policies.
The 2016 Committee’s radio ads make the case with examples from three broad issue areas: education, jobs and abortion.
Our ads show how Hillary’s unconditional support for teachers’ unions and opposition to charter schools condemn poor children to continuing poverty.
We discuss Hillary’s support for higher taxes, more regulation and bigger government — the liberal trifecta that restricts minorities to the economic hole leftist policies have anchored them in, prohibits job growth in the private sector, and guarantees deteriorating living conditions.
And we point out that despite boasting of her work for kids, she defends abortion in horrifically painful ways right up to the last hour even though one of three babies aborted in America is black. How can she take for granted black votes when she isn’t interested in protecting the lives of black babies?
Those who claim a Trump win depends entirely on his running the board with white voters are missing a historic shift in party alignment that will profoundly impact American politics.
Given the growing desperation of minorities victimized by liberal policies for the last 6 decades, it can’t happen soon enough.
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