Alvin Tillery has been sounding the alarm to Democrats since October 2023 after he saw the party starting to lose one of its significant voting blocs: Black voters, particularly young Black men under the age of 40. With President-elect Donald Trump heading back to the White House for a second term, Tillery says his administration will impact Black Americans.
“We did 11 tracking polls of Black voters starting in October 2023. We first began sharing our data with the Biden-Harris campaign, showing them they had this problem. Nobody believed us because they thought this couldn’t be real,” Tillery, a political science professor at Northwestern University, tells Black Enterprise.
But exit polls suggest Tillery wasn’t wrong in his assessment. According to NBC News exit polls, 77% of Black men voted for Vice President Kamala Harris.
“We calculated last fall that in order for them to win, they would need 83% to 84% of Black men to [turn out]. “Three weeks out from the election, she was only at 71% with Black men,” says Tillery. “The story of the election is that not only did young Black men vote significantly more for Donald Trump but also that Black voter turnout was down.”
There were some areas where this wasn’t the case. Tillery co-founded the Super PAC Alliance for Black Equality. He says it’s the only group that has Black male-centered content. Three weeks before the election, he placed political ads in major cities in critical battleground states: Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee. The Super Pac invested $250,000 in advertisements that targeted Black voters on the issues of policing and what policing could look like under Trump’s administration. The president-elect has been very vocal about granting police officers full immunity during his campaign and implementing the controversial policing tactic known as stop-and-frisk.
Tillery found that in the places where he targeted those advertisements, Black voter turnout was much better than in cities without the political ads.
“Just by putting a little bit of attention that she did in the last three weeks, she grew by eight points, but what if they had actually spent money to either take our ads or run them?” he says. “The point for us is that if we had been funded at the $1 million or $2 million level to put more ads out, the margin of victory for Harris is in our neighborhoods […] and they refused to invest.”
What Trump’s Second Term Could Mean For Black Americans
Tillery tells Black Enterprise that one of Trump’s priorities will be overturning the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
“[This administration] is going to reconstitute the Jim Crow hierarchy almost immediately,” says Tillery. “He has plans to overturn the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
The next four years will be critical for Democrats, as Tillery says they must strategize and prioritize Black men specifically.
“If there is [voting] in 2028, what we’re thinking about right now is trying to convince the Democrats not to abandon us […] because what the Democrats are now saying is that Harris lost because she ran on wokeness, which is not true,” says Tillery. “I think more Black and Latino men voted for Trump because they were upset about prices, and they believe he is going to bring prices down.”
Post-election, Tillery is on a mission to ensure Democrats do not go into the next election cycle abandoning the Black community, which he says is still a significant voting bloc within the party. In case Democrats abandon Black voters, Tillery says he is also setting out on an initiative to wake Black people up to realize that they may have to go alone in advocating for our priorities.
“That means consolidating power in all the places where we have the football in Blue states where we have mayorships, and we have a large representation in state legislatures in places like Illinois, California, and New York,” Tillery adds. “It also means trying to pass local laws to protect our community. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but in all the talk that governors are making about protecting freedoms, they’re not talking about protecting Black people at all. That’s very concerning.”
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