What Black voters think about Donald Trump, Kamala Harris and their top priorities

African Americans gave former President Donald Trump a 5% favorable rating, ranked economic issues as their greatest concerns and showed greater confidence in small business than in churches, according to a massive survey released Thursday that bills itself as the Black Census Project.

The Black Futures Lab, a think-tank based in Washington, D.C., started this survey project in 2018 to capture the full spectrum of Black experiences, opinions and needs, information that the organization said is often diluted or overlooked when data is collected from the broader population.

“No other survey sheds light on Black attitudes and opinions across demographics and geography like the Black Census,” said Natishia June, the field director for the lab , during a call with news media Thursday. “Every day policy is made about us, without us. We launched the Black Census to transform that.”

While the first Black Census collected a little more than 30,000 responses, more than 200,000 African Americans send in questionnaires this time around, June said. Those submissions yielded the 181,109 high-quality responses used to derive the census results.

This is the sort of grassroots effort necessary to “take the pulse on what’s happening” in Black America, said Kristin Powell, the leader of Black Futures Lab. The survey yielded Black views on political leaders, U.S. institutions and the Supreme Court, and it also revealed the issues that African Americans consider to be the nation’s most pressing challenges..

“With the 2024 presidential elections in four months, we know black votes matter. Black people do, too, Powell said. “The presidential election will come down to what black voters want and whether they think candidates can deliver.”

African Americans heavily favor Democratic Party policies

Among Black women, 75% identify as Democrats and 16% identify as independents but lean toward the Democratic Party. Black men are more likely to identify as independents, 25%, who lean toward Democratic policies. Six in 10 Black men said they were Democrats.

In a tight election year like this one, Powell said, these independent voters matter. While some past surveys have said that these independent votes are up for grabs by Republicans or Democrats, Powell said that the Black Census data and additional focus groups showed this is not the case.

“What the data says is that Black voters lean Democrat, and when they don’t feel like they’re delivered for, they then don’t vote at all.”

So, what do Black voters care about when it comes to policy?

The Black Census shows that economic issues come up most often, things like expanding the availability of affordable housing, increasing wages to a level where parents can sustain their families and reducing the cost of health care.

“Participants in the focus groups explained in their own words the role of wages in their lives,” Powell and her team wrote in their report. “They raised concerns about inflation and the rising cost of living. Even when the news and other reports show indicators suggesting the economy is strengthening, many working people have not felt the ‘relief.’ Housing, food, and transportation are expensive, and jobs do not pay well enough to catch up.”

Next on the agenda for the survey respondents: Leaders must stop police from killing unarmed Black citizens and using excessive force with African Americans. They say they want law enforcement officers held accountable for these crimes.

They want violence in their communities addressed, including white supremacist violence, the killing of Black people by vigilantes, violence against transgender women, gun violence, and violence against women.

Finally, top issues also included calls for fundamental rights and the rule of law to be restored: Respondents decried the elimination of abortion as health care, new laws or regulations that make it harder to vote and the deportation of undocumented immigrants.

How Black Census data can help get voters to polls

The Black Census data allowed researchers to dig deeply into Black needs and potential solutions, said Ranada Robinson, the research director at the New Georgia Project, a nonpartisan group working to register and civically engage a large and growing population of Black, brown and young voters in the Peach State.

This kind of deep reservoir of knowledge is crucial in influencing whether people vote, Robinson said. Her group has found that voters may like candidates but still not trust them to represent their interests. In that scenario, Robinson said, voters won’t turn out for those candidates. But if a candidate knows what voters want and can put their voting record against the other candidate, Robinson said, they can move voters off the fence.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, many voters lost their jobs, and they needed financial assistance, Robinson said, so they wanted the stimulus checks. Public protests were also erupting across the nation and world over the police killings of George Floyd and other African Americans, so racial justice was uppermost in people’s minds.

“What we did was we created ads that focused on the issue and created a choice frame,” Robinson said, “so one was about the stimulus check and we said, ‘OK, you have the choice between senators who are committed to making sure you get your stimulus check (or) senators who have already voted no and plan to vote no again.”

In another ad, Robinson’s team featured an ad about racial justice and framed the choice between Senate candidates who were committed to fighting for the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and those who had voted no and planned to vote no again.

Similarly, the Black Census survey results hold a wealth of data on how voters feel about political leaders, U.S. institutions and the Supreme Court. That information also can be used to frame choices and understand what’s driving voter sentiment.

This study was in the field before President Joe Biden announced he would no longer be running for U.S. president and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. It shows, however, that his endorsement would have played well with Black voters. Harris had the highest favorable rating, 71%, matched only by former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, scored a 4% favorability rating among the survey respondents, the only political leader to score lower than Trump. About 7 out of 10 respondents had an unfavorable view of the Supreme Court.

When it comes to institutions, the respondents showed the greatest trust – “a great deal” or “a lot” – in small business, followed by the U.S. military, labor unions, Black elected leaders and the church or organized religion.

“This survey tells us what Black people want, and really what our talking points need to be,” Powell said. “We need to be able to talk about the economy, gun violence, education, how their vote matters, what issues did their vote result in or what issues didn’t happen because we weren’t holding certain officials accountable or a vote didn’t happen.”