Up until the final hours before election results started rolling in Tuesday, Democrats swore they didn’t have a problem with Black men.
So intense was their denial, and so certain were Democrats that they knew better, that pundits and operatives were blaming the media for what they said were inaccurate stories about Donald Trump’s gains with Black men.
“I see Black men performing the way Black women perform,” Roland Martin, one of the popular faces of Kamala Harris’ outreach to Black men, told NOTUS on Monday. Martin was also part of the group that organized the “Win With Black Men” calls.
“It was a bullshit narrative when Stacey Abrams ran, and it’s a bullshit narrative now,” Martin said. “This is what happens when you have people in mainstream media who don’t know Black people, who don’t talk to Black people, who don’t talk to Black men, who don’t talk to organizations that are on the ground that specifically deal with Black men.”
To some extent, Democrats like Martin weren’t wrong.
CNN exit polls reported that 78% of Black male voters said they voted for Harris, and an NAACP poll in the closing weeks of the race pointed to Black men under the age of 50 supporting Trump at even lower rates than they did just a month earlier, going from 27% to 21%.
But it’s also clear that Black men did vote for Harris at lower rates than they voted for Joe Biden in 2020, much like most nonwhite demographics — and most counties, for that matter.
Democrats did have a problem. They had a lot of problems.
Their issue with Black men may not be as daunting as other challenges, but they will still likely have to solve their stumbles with Black men if they want to put Georgia and North Carolina back in play during presidential elections.
But already, Republicans are looking to their gains with Black men as evidence that their efforts worked. They invested a lot of sweat equity into winning over Black men, specifically in those two battleground states.
“We’re seeing Black men take leadership of their families,” Diante Johnson, president of the Black Conservative Federation, told NOTUS. “This time, Black men said, ‘You don’t tell me what to do. I’m going to do what I need to do for my family.’”
When the Black Conservative Federation created its Black voter outreach program, it met with a data team to target areas where Trump had made small gains with Black voters in 2020, which also showed promise in the 2024 cycle.
The goal, Johnson said, was to double outreach efforts in those areas.
His group invested roughly $3 million to court Black men — whether it was through door knocking, community events or church visits. It also focused on Black men living in Montgomery, Chester and Philadelphia counties in Pennsylvania, as well as Wake and Guilford counties in North Carolina.
The outreach tactic itself was simple: Make Black men feel heard.
The group knocked on more than 70,000 doors and reached thousands more through events in barber shops and community centers. The group also had a hand in organizing the “Congress, Cognac and Cigars” tour, spearheaded by Black Republican Reps. Byron Donalds and Wesley Hunt.
“We just focused on everyday issues,” Johnson said. “It’s so simple. We just listened to Black men.”
Even in southeast Michigan, where the Trump campaign made targeted investments to blunt the advantage Democrats had with Black men in the area, the strategy was similar.
“We talked about ways to climb up the economic ladder,” Martell Bivings, who lost his long-shot bid for Detroit’s House seat, told NOTUS.
“Democrats tried to use scare tactics, and they didn’t resonate,” he said, criticizing Harris’ attack on Trump as a threat to democracy.
Democrats still contend that Black men aren’t responsible for Harris’ loss — and that, instead, it was Trump’s much larger gains with other demographics that propelled him to the White House.
“It was white women. It was Latino men,” Martin said. “What people in the campaign are talking about is, ‘How did this campaign completely misread the mood of this country?’”
Mondale Robinson, founder of the Black Male Voter Project, told NOTUS that he’s skeptical of any exit poll data, arguing that Harris came up short because of how little time she had to mount a competitive campaign — not because some Black men voted for Trump.
“This is a 100-day campaign,” Robinson said. “Regardless of the resources she had, it’s still a 100-day campaign to introduce yourself to the entire country and you’re still combating years of white supremacy tactics to prevent Black men from voting.”
Harris supporters in Congress largely had the same view.
“We didn’t go wrong with Black men,” Rep. Marc Veasey said in a text to NOTUS. “We aren’t going to start blaming Black men when we clearly did much better than any other male demographic on the Dem side.”
But there is a general consensus among party insiders that Democrats need to have a come-to-Jesus moment with regard to how they court Black men. It starts, some said, with talking to Black men even when there’s no election.
“There has to be real conversation and real research around what Black men are feeling, what they’re facing, and ensuring that we’re organizing there early and often,” Scott Holiday, political director at Detroit Action, told NOTUS.
Martin argued that Democrats need to start autopsying Black men’s voting patterns and using the results to inform their strategy. He said he’s been telling Democrats since 2012 that “if you do not target specific demographics, you’re going to see the erosion.”
“You need to spend more money and talk to these groups in a different way than the old model,” he said.
Meanwhile, Robinson said the “consultant class” needed to have a change of heart.
Democrats need to address “the consultant class and how they continue to miss what Black men are going through.”
“This idea that you’re going to find some famous person to speak to what Black men are suffering through does not pan out,” he said.
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Tinashe Chingarande is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
Emily Kennard is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.