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      If Kamala Harris is trying to show she can meet the needs of Black America, she has gaps to fill | Shamira Ibrahim

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      As we enter the final 21 days of the 2024 presidential election, the euphoric sheen from the summer’s “Kamala is Brat” phenomenon, which resonated with large swaths of gen Z voters, has waned. The Harris campaign is scrambling to communicate its case for selection at the polls, with the vice-president hurriedly pushing out platforms that address lingering skepticism amongst various demographic groups. On Tuesday night, during a broadcast conversation with the radio host Charlamagne tha God, Harris turned her attention to Black men.Harris’s concern is not completely unfounded – several notable Black male celebrities, such as the rapper 50 Cent and the sports personality Stephen A Smith, have expressed their receptiveness to the Trump campaign. On the aggregate, there has been a dip in support: a New York Times/Siena College poll of likely Black voters reported that 78% of all Black voters expressed an interest in voting for Harris, which would be a significantly smaller turnout than the 90% of Black people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020. The most pronounced drop comes from Black men, 85% of whom turned out for the US president in the last election and just 70% of whom now say they would vote for Harris.In the hour-long interview, Charlamagne, whose daily morning show The Breakfast Club reaches a predominantly Black audience of 8 million listeners monthly, prodded Harris on topics spanning reparations, criminal justice reform, economic inequality and the fearmongering of the Trump campaign. Harris homed in on her consistent talking points about the necessity of voter participation, a proposed influx of capital for the middle class and misinformation, responses that felt stale and limited. But at other times, her replies landed with impact: when asked about issues specific to Black people that she would prioritize, Harris stressed initiatives around Black maternal mortality and the child tax credit as long neglected needs.In a few cases, Harris’s answers felt like fitting a square peg into a round hole. When asked by a caller how she intends to address the homelessness crisis in the US when the current administration seems to overemphasize foreign interests such as the Israel-Gaza war, the Democratic nominee deflected, punting back to her well-tread lines on home ownership and small business loans.The full exchange, which aired on iHeartRadio’s podcast platform and was simulcast on CNN, both reflected Harris’s best assets and underscored her biggest flaws as a candidate. She remains unflappable on her key points – including the idea that Trump is an existential threat to democracy and Black advancement – and she’s deft at articulating the possibilities and limitations of the government.But her inability to veer away from her entrenched positions or to adequately explain how they could substantively apply to the poor and working class, where Black communities are disproportionately represented, leaves much to be desired. If Harris’s aim is to squash the nagging perspective that she will be unable to meet the needs of Black America, then she still has a gap to fill. Her insistence that “we can do it all” is undercut by the reality that a large part of the Black working class is struggling with unemployment, homelessness, and other critical issues that prevent successful class migration.Yesterday, Harris’s campaign released the Opportunity Agenda for Black Men, a five-point platform focused on Black entrepreneurship, mentorship, marijuana legislation, and cryptocurrency. The platform came on the heels of a contentious lecture from Barack Obama to Black men in Pittsburgh, where the former president alleged that they “just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that”.Whether misogyny is a factor in Harris’s current polling numbers or it isn’t, the emphasis on Black men feels overstated. The Black population accounts for barely 13% of the country, with high distribution in metropolitan areas that skew predominantly Democratic, while white and non-Black populations have voted for Trump at significantly higher rates.Despite this disconnect, the Harris campaign has responded with an aggressive media blitz of interviews and campaign stops directly targeted at Black communities. As a result many Black voters are ultimately left with the idea of voting as a means of harm reduction and not one of enthusiasm. For all of Harris’s insistence that the Trump campaign thrives on driving fear, the most animating influence on her campaign’s push to get Black voters to the polls seems to be fear as well. More

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      Trump bizarrely claims Democrats want to ban cows and windows in buildings

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      Donald Trump over the weekend told supporters of his campaign for a second presidency that his Democratic opponents want to ban cows and windows in buildings, inviting another round of questions about his mental fitness.“They just come up, they want to do things like no more cows and no windows in buildings,” the Republican White House nominee said during a campaign event with Hispanic voters in Las Vegas on Saturday. “They have some wonderful plans for this country.“Honestly, they’re crazy, and they’re really hurting out country, badly.”Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign subsequently reacted to the remarks on social media by writing, “a confused Trump goes on a delusional rant”.Other Trump critics echoed the Democratic vice-president’s observation, describing the rant as “stunningly senile” and “incoherent”.Nevada’s Democratic party also criticized the former president, writing: “Trump came to town and questioned Nevadans’ values and rambled about cows and windows.”Saturday was not the first time that the former president has accused Democrats of wanting to get rid of cows.

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      During a rally earlier this summer, Trump said that Harris would pass laws to outlaw red meat if elected. He added: “You know what that means – that means no more cows.”Trump has also said over the last several years that the Green New Deal, an expansive climate plan introduced and supported by progressive Democrats, would “take out the cows”.The Green New Deal, he said in 2020, “would crush our farms, destroy our wonderful cows”.“I love cows. They want to kill our cows. You know why, right? You know why? Don’t say it. They want to kill our cows. That means you are next,” he said.The Green New Deal, introduced in part by the progressive Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, outlines broad principles of a plan to fight inequity and tackle climate change while aiming to begin reducing the US’s reliance on fossil fuels that are fueling destructive global warming.The resolution does not call for eliminating animal agriculture. But it calls for “working collaboratively with farmers and ranchers in the United States to remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector as much as is technologically feasible”.Though it suggests reducing emissions from agriculture, that “doesn’t mean you end cows”. Ocasio-Cortez said in 2019.According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, about 10% of total American greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, including cows, soils and rice production.Trump’s confusing comments about Democrats wanting to get rid of cows and windows on buildings on Saturday came just two days before another bizarre moment from this campaign cycle.On Monday, at a town hall in Oaks, Pennsylvania, Trump stood on stage swaying and bobbing his head for about 30 minutes while music played after medical emergency-related interruptions.At the same event, although his election against Harris is on 5 November, he told the crowd to get out and vote on “January 5 or before” – prompting critics online to again comment on Trump’s cognitive health.Harris released a medical report which found that the most notable aspects of her health history were seasonal allergies and hives. “She possesses the physical and mental resiliency required to successfully execute the duties of the presidency” if she is elected in November, the report said.A senior aide to Harris, 59, stated that the vice-president’s advisers saw the release of her health report and medical history as a chance to call attention to questions about Trump’s physical fitness and mental acuity.On Sunday, more than 230 doctors, nurses and healthcare providers, called on the 78-year-old Trump to release his medical records, arguing that he should be transparent about his health as he seeks to become the oldest president elected.“With no recent disclosure of health information from Donald Trump, we are left to extrapolate from public appearances,” the doctors wrote in a public letter. “And on that front, Trump is falling concerningly short of any standard of fitness for office and displaying alarming characteristics of declining acuity.”Trump has consistently declined to disclose detailed information about his health during his public life. On Tuesday, the former president went on his Truth social media platform and published a post claiming his health “IS PERFECT – NO PROBLEMS!!!” More

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      Pelosi says she still hasn’t spoken to Biden since pressuring him to drop out

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      Nancy Pelosi has admitted she still has not spoken to Joe Biden since her crucial intervention in July led to his decision to drop out of the presidential race, following a disastrously frail performance in a debate against Donald Trump.The former speaker of the House told the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland on the Politics Weekly America podcast that although she continues to regard the US president as a great friend and longtime political ally, she felt a cold political calculation was necessary after the evidence of Biden’s failing mental acuity.“Not since then, no,” she said when asked if she had spoken to Biden since. “But I’m prayerful about it.”She added: “I have the greatest respect for him. I think he’s one of the great consequential presidents of our country,” she said. “I think his legacy had to be protected. I didn’t see that happening in the course that it was on, the election was on. My call was just to: ‘Let’s get on a better course.’ He will make the decision as to what that is. And he made that decision. But I think he has some unease because we’ve been friends for decades.”“Elections are decisions,” she added. “You decide to win. I decided a while ago that Donald Trump will never set foot in the White House again as president of the United States or in any other capacity … So when you make a decision, you have to make every decision in favor of winning … and the most important decision of all is the candidate.”Pelosi admitted that some in Biden’s campaign may not have forgiven her for her role in limiting Biden’s legacy to one term, but that a Trump victory would have equally reflected terribly on his legacy.Known as a uniquely influential House speaker, particularly during a Biden administration that passed major legislation on infrastructure and climate, Pelosi was widely seen as a senior Democrat willing to indicate that Biden should reconsider his bid for re-election when the polls showed Trump beating him badly.After Biden did step aside, Pelosi then encouraged the party to endorse Kamala Harris – and scored yet another victory when the vice-president named former congressman Tim Walz as her running mate.Pelosi has also been a longtime thorn in Trump’s side, frequently antagonizing him into posting long rants about her on social media, and publicly ripping up his State of the Union speech in 2020 on the podium of the House of Representatives, calling it a “manifesto of mistruths”.Explaining her unique ability to hold together a fragile coalition of centrist and progressive Democrats, Pelosi explained that she thought “leadership is about respect, about consensus building”, while deriding Trump’s ability to do anything of the sort, particularly with his hateful rhetoric towards immigrants, who he has described as “poisoning the blood of this country”.“I hardly ever say his name,” she says of Trump, instead describing him as “what’s-his-name”.“I think [Trump is] a grotesque word … You just don’t like the word passing your lips. I just don’t. I’m afraid, you know, when I grew up Catholic, as I am now, if you said a bad word, you could burn in hell if you didn’t have a chance to confess. So I don’t want to take any chances.“It’s up there with like, swearing.”In her new book, The Art of Power, Pelosi describes being the first woman speaker of the House, and her disappointment at the failure of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president in 2016, but says she remains optimistic that Harris will make history where Clinton could not.“I always thought America was more ready for a woman president than a woman speaker of the House,” she told the Guardian. “The Congress of the United States is not a glass ceiling there. It’s a marble ceiling. And it was very hard to rise up there. But the public, I think, is better disposed … In Congress, they would say to me: “Understand this, there’s been a pecking order here for a long time of men who’ve been waiting for openings to happen and take their turn.” And I said: “That’s interesting. We’ve been waiting over 200 years.”She praised Harris, however, for not running as “the first woman or first woman of color. She’s running on her strength, her knowledge of policy and strategy and presentation and the rest. And I think that’s a different race than Hillary Clinton ran.”Noting that more women support Harris and more men support Trump by considerable margins, Pelosi said: “The reason that there’s such a gender gulf is because there’s such a gulf in terms of policies that affect women.”“A woman’s right to choose is a personal issue. It’s an economic issue, but it’s also a democracy issue. This is an issue about freedom, freedom to manage your own life.”“What is a democracy? It is free and fair elections. It’s a peaceful transfer of power. It’s independent judiciary and is the personal freedoms in the bill of rights of our constitution. And he is assaulting those by particularly harshly on women, harshly on women. Did you see the other day? He said Kamala Harris was retarded. This is a person running for president of the United States.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Has he no respect for the office? Has he no decency about how to communicate?”Pelosi spoke about her fear of political violence, noting that misinformation spread by Trump had caused an atmosphere in which US disaster response agency Fema had to withdraw rescue workers from parts of North Caroline hit by a hurricane after reports of trucks of militia saying they were hunting Fema workers.“This is springing from the top,” she said of Trump’s role in fomenting political violence. “He’s taking pride in doing it. Don’t take it from me, take it from him.”After an armed assailant attacked her husband, Paul Pelosi, in their home after breaking in with an intent to harm her, many Republicans made jokes – including Trump’s son Donald Jr, who suggested he would dress as Paul Pelosi for Halloween.“When it happened, what was so sad for my children and grandchildren was that [some Republicans] thought it was a riot – they were laughing and making jokes … his son, all those people making jokes about it, right away. We didn’t even know if he was going to live or die.”Asked if she agreed with the recent remarks of the former chairperson of the joint chiefs, Mark Milley, a Trump appointee, that Trump was “a fascist to the core”, Pelosi said:“Yes, I do. I do. And I know it’s interesting because Kamala Harris says, I’ve prosecuted people like Trump. I know men like that. No, I know him,” she said, stressing Trump.“There’s one picture of me leaving the Roosevelt Room at the cabinet meeting. And I’m pointing to him and I’m saying, I’m leaving this meeting because with you, Mr President, all roads lead to Putin. [Milley’s] comment, ‘fascist to the core’, speaks to the actions that he has taken. Trivialize the press, fake news – that is a tactic of fascist governments.”She added that a possible repeat of January 6 was a key reason for the importance of Democrats at least winning the House in 2024. “Hakeem Jeffries must have the gavel, which means that we have the majority of the votes to accept the results of the electoral college for the peaceful transfer of power.”‘“Nobody could have ever seen an insurrection incited by the president of the United States. But an outsider, as a loser in this election, once again, he might try that.”Later in the interview, Pelosi said Trump’s name, then caught herself. “I said his name. Oh my gosh. I hope I don’t burn in hell.” More

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      Harris calls Trump a ‘risk for America’, after former president’s ‘enemy within’ remarks

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      Kamala Harris has said a second Trump term would be “a huge risk for America”, in a renewed effort to paint her Republican opponent as a threat to democracy, after the former president threatened to use US armed forces against those he has branded “the enemy within”.At her own campaign rally in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, the US vice-president showed a montage of clips of Trump, including the former president saying “those people are more dangerous – the enemy from within – than Russia.”At a speech in Coachella in California on Saturday, Trump referred to Democratic opponents as “the enemy within”, saying they posed a bigger threat to the US than the country’s foreign foes, and targeted Adam Schiff, a Democratic congressman who is running for the US Senate.In an interview on Fox News the following day, he repeated the phrase to describe those he claimed were planning to create “chaos” on the day of the presidential election. He said the military should be deployed against them.“A second Trump term would be a huge risk for America, and dangerous. Donald Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged,” Harris told the crowd in Erie, Pennsylvania, after playing the clip.She went on to say that Trump poses a danger because he believes those who do not agree with him are the enemy.At the same time, Harris’s campaign released a new campaign advert, titled The Enemy Within, featuring some of Trump’s recent ominous comments about his adversaries and warnings from two former members of his presidential administration about the danger he would pose if elected.The 30-second video, complete with footage of Trump walking in front of a row of helmeted riot officers and showing troops on the street during his presidency, tries to concentrate voters’ minds with contributions from Olivia Troye, a one-time national security adviser to Mike Pence, and Kevin Carroll, a former senior counsel in the Department of Homeland Security.“I do remember the day that he suggested that we shoot people on the streets,” Troye says in the ad, which is accompanied with a dramatic musical soundtrack.Carroll adds: “A second term will be worse. There will be no stopping his worst instincts. Unchecked power to no guardrails. If we elect Trump again, we’re in terrible danger.”Harris, who has embarked on a late-campaign round of high-profile interviews after being accused for weeks of avoiding the media, is seeking to highlight the increasingly authoritarian tone Trump has been striking at his rallies.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump’s use of extreme language has coincided with an increase in his vitriol to describe Harris, who he last week described as “mentally impaired”. He called her “retarded” while addressing Republican fundraisers in September, the New York Times reported.Harris’s campaign is also trying to draw attention to what it says a dearth of mainstream interviews given by Trump, who instead has chosen to make himself available to sympathetic interviewers, such as the rightwing radio host Hugh Hewitt.“As of today, it has been **one month** since Trump’s been interviewed by a mainstream media outlet, as he has backed out of 60 Minutes and refuses to debate again,” Harris campaign spokesperson Ian Sams posted on Twitter/X.By contrast, Harris is due to be interviewed on Wednesday by Bret Baier on Fox News, an outlet that is usually a go-to platform for Trump but unfriendly terrain for Democrats. More

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      Kamala Harris agrees to interview with Fox News

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      Kamala Harris will do a sit-down interview with the rightwing broadcaster Fox News on Wednesday, the news channel announced on Monday, in the most dramatic moment yet in a recent media blitz by the Democratic presidential nominee.The interview with Fox News’s chief political anchor, Bret Baier, comes as Democrats have increased their presence on Fox News, part of an outreach to undecided voters and after CBS News’s 60 Minutes became embroiled in a controversy when rightwing critics have said they edited an interview to make Harris appear more succinct.In a press release, Fox said the interview with the vice-president would take place on Wednesday 16 October and hit the airwaves on Special Report with Bret Baier and be broadcast at 6.00pm.Harris’s appearance comes after weeks of criticism that she was avoiding all but the softest of sit-downs, including with Oprah Winfrey, ABC’s morning talk-in The View, with the former shock jock Howard Stern and with Late Night’s Stephen Colbert.Harris has also appeared on the podcast Call Me Daddy. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is reported to be going on Joe Rogan’s Full Send before election day.The Fox announcement comes after the Time magazine owner, Marc Benioff, complained on Sunday that Harris had denied multiple interview requests. Benioff said the denial was “unlike every other presidential candidate”, including Biden and Trump.“We believe in transparency and publish each interview in full,” Benioff wrote on X. Why isn’t the Vice President engaging with the public on the same level?”Harris’s sit-down with Fox News will be her first formal interview with the network – but not the first for Democratic campaign surrogates. With at least three times the viewership of CNN and MSNBC, candidates looking for votes often make Fox a pragmatic choice.Nielsen Media Research shows Fox News is the highest-rated network in all swing states. According to a recent YouGov poll – 54% of Republicans, 22% of Democrats and 28% of independent voters had watched the cable station in the past month.Jessica Loker, vice-president of politics at the network, told Bloomberg that the network saw ratings go up when Democrats are on. Baier told Axios: “If you build it, they will come.”It’s also well-worn path for Democrats in this election cycle. The Transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, has been on the network so often he introduced himself at the Democratic party convention in August with: “I’m Pete Buttigieg and you might recognize me from Fox News.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionButtigieg said he was proud to go on conservative outlets to speak on behalf of the Democrats because their arguments and facts might not otherwise be aired to a Fox audience.So too have the Democratic governors Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, Wes Moore and Gretchen Whitmer, and the senators Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, John Fetterman and Chris Coons also dropped in on the network.Harris appearance points to an effort to escape Democrats’ ideologically aligned media bubbles in the effort for votes.“We have so many hyper-close elections in swing states that even if you only get a point or two that you take away from Republicans and put in your column can be the 10,000 votes that give you that swing state,” the University of Virginia political analyst Larry Sabato told the Guardian last month. More

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      Trump sparks outrage after calling for army to handle enemies on election day

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      Donald Trump has provoked an angry backlash from Democrats after calling for the US armed forces to be turned against his political adversaries when voters go to the polls at next month’s presidential election.In comments that added further fuel to fears of an authoritarian crackdown if he recaptures the White House, the Republican nominee said the military or national guard should be deployed against opponents that he called “the enemy within” when the election takes place on 5 November.He singled out the California congressman, Adam Schiff, who was the lead prosecutor in the ex-president’s first impeachment trial, as posing a bigger threat to a free and fair election than foreign terrorists or illegal immigrants, his usual prime target for abuse.Trump’s comments, to Fox News in response to a question on possible election “chaos”, triggered an angry reaction from Kamala Harris’s campaign, which likened them to previous remarks that he would be a dictator “on day one” of a second presidency and his suggestions that the US constitution should be terminated to overturn the 2020 election result, which he falsely claims was stolen by Joe Biden.Trump and the vice-president are locked in a tight contest as election day looms. Most national polls put Harris narrowly ahead, but in the crucial swing states which will decide the election, the contest appears much tighter and offers Trump numerous paths to a potential victory.After initially saying election chaos would not come from his side, Trump launched a vituperative attack on his opponents when the interviewer, Maria Bartiromo, raised the possibility of outside agitators or immigrants who had committed crimes.“I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people,” he said on Fox’s Sunday Morning Futures programme.“It should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the national guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian and expert on fascism at New York University, told NBC that Trump was flagging up what he planned to do as president, which she compared to the “‘strongman’ ruling templates of Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi and Vladimir Putin, the leaders of Hungary, India and Russia respectively.“He’s actually rehearsing, in a sense, what he would be doing as head of state, which is what Orbán does, Modi is doing, Putin has long done,” she said.Trump also turned his fire on Schiff, who is a candidate for the US Senate in next month’s poll. He said: “The thing that’s tougher to handle are these lunatics that we have inside, like Adam Schiff.”It was his second attack in two days on Schiff, who earned Trump’s enmity when he was the ranking Democrat on the House of Representatives’ intelligence committee during his presidency, when he said there was evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia during the 2016. The House later voted, under Republican leadership, to censure Schiff over his comments.At a rally in Coachella, California – a state he has virtually no chance of winning – on Saturday, Trump mocked Schiff’s physical characteristics and labelled him a bigger threat than foreign adversaries, including the Chinese president Xi Jinping.“He [Xi] is somebody that we can handle,” Trump said. “The worst people are the enemies from within, the sleaze bags, the guy that you’re going to elect to the Senate, shifty Adam Schiff. He’s a major low-life.”He claimed, without providing evidence, that Schiff was engaged in mass voter fraud. “They send millions and million of ballots all over the place,” he said. “[In] California, you don’t have anything like a voting booth. They take ballots and they just send them all over the place. They come back and they say, oh, somebody won by 5m votes.”Schiff responded on Twitter/X by accusing Trump of inciting violence in the same manner as he was widely accused of doing on 6 January 2021, when a mob attacked the US Capitol in an effort to stop certification of Biden’s election win.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Today, Trump threatened to deploy the military against the ‘enemies from within.’ The same thing he has called me,” Schiff wrote.“Just as he incited a mob to attack the Capitol, he again stokes violence against those who oppose him.”Harris’s campaign issued a more extensive condemnation. “Donald Trump is suggesting that his fellow Americans are worse ‘enemies’ than foreign adversaries, and he is saying he would use the military against them,” campaign spokesperson Ian Sams said.“Taken with his vow to be a dictator on ‘day one’, calls for the ‘termination’ of the constitution, and plans to surround himself with sycophants who will give him unchecked, unprecedented power if he returns to office, this should alarm every American who cares about their freedom and security.“What Donald Trump is promising is dangerous, and returning him to office is simply a risk Americans cannot afford.”While Trump, being out of power, will be in no position to deploy troops on election day, his call for military power to quell political opposition is familiar, recalling his demand that soldiers be deployed in the streets of Washington DC in 2020 to disperse thousands of demonstrators protesting the death of George Floyd.Gen Mark Milley, the then chairperson of the joint chiefs of staff, reportedly came close to resigning over the demand.Milley, who has since fallen foul of Trump, is quoted in a new book by Bob Woodward – the journalist who, along with Carl Bernstein, helped to expose the Watergate scandal of the 1970s – as calling the ex-president “a total fascist” and has voiced fears that he could be recalled to service and court-martialled if he returns to office. 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      Harris reveals ‘opportunity agenda for Black men’ in efforts to shore up support

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      Kamala Harris has revealed a plan to give Black men more economic opportunities, as anxiety mounts among her supporters that some in the Black community are less enthused by the Democratic presidential ticket than in recent elections, and may sit this one out – or support Donald Trump.The vice-president’s plan includes forgivable business loans for Black entrepreneurs, creating more apprenticeships, and studying sickle cell and other diseases that disproportionately affect African American men. It also includes ensuring that Black men have more access to shaping a national cannabis industry and to invest in cryptocurrency.Harris presented the so-called “opportunity agenda for Black men” on Monday, before speaking in the north-west corner of Erie, Pennsylvania, the country’s largest battleground state. It will be Harris’s 10th visit to Pennsylvania this election season.Political support among Black men for the Harris-Walz campaign has been wavering somewhat. Last week, Barack Obama suggested that some Black men “aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president”.The former president’s comments were later condemned by the Florida Republican representative Byron Donalds and Texas’s Wesley Hunt, members of Black Men for Trump, which posted a letter accusing Obama of being “insulting” and “demeaning”.“President Obama’s recent call for Black men to support Kamala Harris based solely on her skin color, rather than her policies, is deeply insulting,” the letter states. “Black Americans are not a monolith, and we don’t owe our votes to any candidate just because they ‘look like us’.”Over the weekend, the former president Bill Clinton was drafted in to speak to worshippers at a Zion Baptist church in Albany, Georgia, in support of Harris.“Uniting people and building, being repairers of the breach, as Isaiah says, those are the things that work,” Clinton said. “Blaming, dividing, demeaning – they get you a bunch of votes at election time, but they don’t work.”A poll in the New York Times placed Harris slightly behind Joe Biden among Black likely voters and showed one in five Black men support Trump. Despite alarm at the poll, the figures still show strong Black support for Democrats – but while the president won 87% of the Black vote in 2020, Harris’s numbers are lower. Seventy-eight per cent of Black voters in key battleground states polled in September said they would support the Democrat.Raphael Warnock, a Democratic senator from Georgia, warned against overestimating the shift. “Black men are not going to vote for Donald Trump in any significant numbers,” he told CNN on Sunday. “There will be some. We’re not a monolith.”Warnock predicted Black voters would remember that Trump had personally taken out a full-page ad in the New York Times in 1989 calling for the state to bring back the death penalty and to strengthen policing after the brutal beating and rape of a female jogger in Central Park.The so-called “Central Park Five” – five Black teenagers – were falsely accused of the crime and imprisoned for several years, before finally being exonerated in 2002. “Donald Trump has shown no deal of concern about what they went through, no deal, no bit of contrition about it,” Warnock added.But the South Carolina representative Jim Clyburn, who helped secure Biden’s Democratic nomination in 2020, told the network he is “concerned about the Black men staying home or voting for Trump”.“Black men, like everybody else, want to know exactly what I can expect from a Harris administration. And I have been very direct with them. And I have also contrasted that with what they can expect from a Trump administration,” Clyburn said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDemocrats have previously been accused of taking the Black vote for granted. In 2020, Biden was forced to apologize for telling the popular radio host Charlamagne Tha God that if African Americans “have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black”.Trump has sought to capitalize on wavering Black male support for Democrats who may sympathize with his “America First” policies around employment and immigration.As well as Harris’s new policy outreach to Black men, she is also reaching out to Hispanic men who might also be cool to her candidacy, via an “Hombres con Harris” outreach featuring ad buys and Hispanic celebrity events in battleground states.Three weeks out from polling day, there is some Democratic concern that Harris’s support among men broadly needs attention. Polls have found that there is roughly a 60-40 split between men and women, with men favoring Republicans and women Democrats.A Pew Research Center study released last year asked Americans how important it is to them that a woman be elected president in their lifetime. It found that only 18% of US adults said this is extremely or very important to them, with some 64% saying it was not too important or not at all, or that the president’s gender did not matter. More