African American voters have been demonstrating considerable sophistication in the campaign to select the Democratic Party candidate for president. Polls indicate substantial black support for Joe Biden, even though there are two black candidates, Senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, who might be more sensitive to black issues. However, the major concern of blacks is to support the candidate most likely to defeat the incumbent, Donald Trump.
According to the Pew Research Center, the turnout of 66.6 percent of black adult citizens in 2012 was the greatest ethnic voting bloc in that election which gave Barack Obama a second term. Pundits now attribute the drop in the black vote to 59.6 percent of adults in the 2016 election as one of the reasons for the defeat of Hillary Clinton and the election of Donald Trump as president. Black activists are now adamant about not allowing that to happen in 2020.
Trump’s administration has moved the country in a direction that is hostile and racially divisive. Trump has demonstrated his disdain for people of color, and he also supports economic plans that are damaging to all working class Americans regardless of their race. He has taken steps to vitiate the impact of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This is the only federal agency to provide recourse for aggrieved citizens for defalcations from banks, credit card companies, insurance agencies and realtors. Trump cut taxes for the wealthy and failed to improve health insurance costs for those with moderate income.
Projections indicate an impending crisis in Social Security. The Social Security trust funds might be unable to pay full benefits in 2035. The solutions to the problem to maintain the present level of payments are opposed by conservatives. The remedies are: (1) to require tax payments on incomes greater than $132,900, (2) increase the tax rate above the present 6.2 percent, (3) or eliminate payments to recipients with substantial income from other sources.
Conservatives have opposed Social Security from the time it was established primarily because employers have to pay half of the payroll taxes. In fact, the only way it became law is that it did not originally cover farm workers and domestics, the primary employment categories of blacks. Also the mortality figures in the 1930s indicated that most blacks would not survive to the age of 65 when benefits would become available.
Conservatives have always viewed Social Security as an inappropriate institution for a capitalist system. They see it as vile socialism. When he was president, Bill Clinton proposed establishing a sovereign wealth fund with a small capital commitment from the Social Security trust fund which presently is about $2,000 billion. The idea was to generate a greater return than the present 2.3 percent from treasury funds. This idea never got off the ground because it was viewed as socialism.
According to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, about 34 percent of retirees get 90 percent of their income from Social Security. It is reasonable to conclude that blacks with lower incomes are disproportionately dependent on Social Security. With the elderly living longer with better health care, there is a growing demand for retirement funds from those who are working. No citizen can reasonably believe that Trump will be on the side of the working man or woman as these issues are discussed on Capitol Hill in the coming years.
Black voters naturally oppose Trump’s divisive racial attitudes and his defiance of the terms of the U.S. Constitution, but the impending bread and butter economic issues will also induce African American support of the Democrats in 2020.
After supporting the candidate they believe can win, blacks have to guard against dirty tricks from foreign governments in support of Trump.