Courting African Americans

In all the stories that have filtered down in the Presidential race this year, one that has not garnered a ton of attention is Mr. Trump's attempts to court the African-American vote. African-Americans have routinely voted for the Democratic ticket for the last sixty years (Mr. Obama won 93% of the AA vote) so this voting block has largely been written off by previous Republican candidates. Indeed, I would still expect Mrs. Clinton to win the vast majority of these votes. However, I thought it might be an interesting though exercise to see what the results might be if Mr. Trump managed to peel off a small chunk of these voters.

For this thought exercise, I'm focusing on three states with sizable AA populations and are considered to be in play in this election: Florida, Ohio and Virginia. I'm going to be using the 2012 election numbers as my baseline. Yes, I know that things are very wonky this year and that neither Mr. Trump nor Mrs. Clinton can expect the turnout levels to be comparable with Republican ambivalence and Bernie Democrat irritation, but the percentages are at least ballpark enough to work with. Let us see the results if Mr. Trump manages to reduce Mrs. Clinton's take of the African-American vote from 93% to 80% across the board.

Florida

Mr. Obama won Florida 50.01-49.13 with 8.47 million votes cast. The African-American population of Florida is about 17% but for math simplicity, lets say they represented 15% of the voting electorate or approximately 1,270,000 votes. This would mean that out of the 4,236,000 votes Mr. Obama won, 1,182,000 were African American votes. Reducing the percentage from 93 to 80% costs the Democrat approximately 166,000 votes. Applying that to the overall totals, the Democrat now has 4,070,000 votes to 4,161,000 votes for the Republican and that is if that lost 166,000 only stays home. If they turn out and vote for the Republican, the vote total jumps to 4,327,000 which would be a 51.08-48.05 Republican victory.

Ohio

Mr. Obama won Ohio 50.67-47.69 with 5.58 million votes cast. The African-American population of Ohio is about 12% so that gives them a voting total of around 669,000 votes. Mr. Obama's take of the AA vote would have been about 622,000 and reducing it to 80% drops it down to 535,000. This would reduce the Democratic vote total from 2,827,000 to 2,740,000 while increasing the Republican vote total from 2,661,000 to 2,748,000. In this case the Republican would need an actual flip of those African-American votes rather than a stay home or third party vote; but if that did happen, the Republican would win Ohio 49.25-49.10.

Virginia

Mr. Obama won Virginia 51.16-47.28 with 3.85 million votes cast. The African-American population of Virginia is nearly 20%, which would have given them 770,000 votes in the last election. Cutting the percentages would reduce the Democratic take of this block from 716,000 to 616,000 votes. That drops the overall Democratic vote by 100,000 from 1,970,000 to 1,870,000. The Republican take of the vote was 1,820,000 so again, the Republican can not simply have all these votes stay home or vote third party. But taking just over half of these 100,000 votes would result in a Republican victory. Taking all of them would give the Republican a 49.87-48.57 victory

If you start Mr. Trump with the same states that Mr. Romney won in 2012, he has 206 electoral votes. Ohio is the longest shot in the above scenario but if successful, Mr. Trump would gain 60 electoral votes, putting him at 266. This would still give Mrs. Clinton the victory unless he is able to peel off one additional state. Colorado or Iowa would be the most likely candidates but the African-American demographics of these states are only 4% and 3% respectively so this would require an additional appeal outside of African-Americans to flip these.

Still, one cannot understate the importance of the African-American voting block to the Democratic Party and any successful appeal to even a small part of the block could have significant results in the upcoming election. Whether Mr. Trump's strategy will be successful is another question.