Vice President Kamala Harris is desperately rolling out a new spate of policy proposals aimed at courting black men as she battles lackluster polling involving the key demographic.
The Democratic presidential candidate’s proposal, dubbed the Opportunity Agenda for Black Men, features five main initiatives, and its unveiling is coinciding with her swing through urban locales seeking to engage the crucial bloc of voters that top Dems feel may be slipping away.
“We have not yet seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities as we saw when I was running,” Dem former President Barack Obama admitted during a stop at a Pittsburgh campaign office last week. “Now, I also want to say that seems to be more pronounced with the brothers.”
Harris’ five main proposals are: granting $1 million loans to small-business black entrepreneurs that “are fully forgivable of up to $20,000”; investing in training and mentorship programs, laying out regulations to protect black men with cryptocurrency scams, establishing a National Health Equity Initiative to tackle issues such as sickle-cell disease and legalizing marijuana.
For some, the new initiative is seen as coming too late in the game, with Election Day just three weeks away.
“Wow, it’s the last three weeks. … Ballots are in mailboxes,” said Mandela Barnes, the former lieutenant governor of Wisconsin who is backing Harris, to Politico. “We shouldn’t be here having to break the glass because we’ve reached the emergency point.”
Before Harris took over the top of the 2024 Democratic ticket, President Biden had a long-chronicled struggle in the 2024 season to excite black voters, a group widely credited with helping him survive the 2020 Democratic primary.
Now that Harris is the standard bearer, she has generally garnered decent polling numbers with black women but lagged with black men specifically, amid a widening gender gap among voters broadly.
The vice president drew 83% support from black women and 70% support from black men in a recent New York Times/Siena Poll. Overall, Harris notched 78% of black voters generally, compared to 15% who leaned toward former President Donald Trump in that poll.
Other polling has shown her faring worse with those groups, and turnout is perhaps an even larger concern.
CNN political data guru Harry Enten recently assessed that Harris has been trending toward winning black voters between the ages of 18 and 44 by a margin of 41 percentage points, which would be the lowest for Democrats since the 1960s and far below Obama’s 81-point margin in 2012.
Her new initiative comes just days after Obama was caught on camera complaining about anemic support for Harris among black men during his Pittsburgh stop.
A disappointed-sounding Obama surmised that part of the problem is concern about “having a woman as president.” Obama was the first black president. Should Harris win, she would become the second black president and first female commander-in-chief.
The Trump-Vance campaign quickly decried Obama’s “tough talk” as “demeaning” to black voters and stressed that “black Americans are not a monolith.”
Harris has previously maintained that she will need to work for the black vote. During a National Association of Black Journalists panel last month, Harris stressed, “It’s very important to not operate from the assumption that black men are in anybody’s pocket.”
As part of her Opportunity Agenda for Black Men, which the Harris-Walz campaign announced Monday, Harris and her team are planning to ramp up outreach to black voters.
This includes a town hall with “Breakfast Club” radio program host Charlamagne tha God that she will tape Tuesday. The campaign also will run “Black Men Huddle Up” event in key battleground-state cities during the election homestretch and expand related advertising and community-organizing efforts.
“While Vice President Harris is promising to equip Black men with the tools needed to pursue our dreams and aspirations, Donald Trump is promising Black in America a national nightmare,” said former Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-La.), who is a co-chair of the Harris-Walz campaign, in a statement.