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— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) January 29, 2020
A new Rasmussen poll shows black voter support for President Trump has doubled in the last year to an astonishing 42%.
In November, polls by both Rasmussen and Emerson showed Trump had a remarkable 34% approval rating among black voters, compared to the 8% he received from blacks in the 2016 election.
An analysis by the Washington Examiner in November showed the dramatic rise in support by blacks could make the difference in the 2020 election.
Boosting his percentage among blacks in November to between 10% and 15% could be enough to put him over the top, said pollster Jonathan Zogby of Zogby Analytics at the time.
Zogby found at that time that Trump was receiving 12% of the black vote against Joe Biden, 14% against Sen. Bernie Sanders and 17% against Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Those levels are the best for a Republican president or presidential candidate since 1968.
New perspective
Senior Trump campaign official Katrina Pierson said in November that Trump’s support among blacks is “going in the right direction.”
Pierson noted Trump had respect in the black community long before he ran for president, with Don King and Jesse Jackson counted among his friends.
But when he ran for the presidency, she said, the Democrats smeared him as a “racist,” and it has taken time to overcome that.
“He couldn’t understand it at first, and it’s very frustrating,” said Pierson. “But it came with the baggage of running as a Republican.
“It went through a couple of years, during the campaign, where Trump’s a racist, he hates brown people, but yet he’s doing all of these things that the first black president never did for black people, and so you kind of have this new perspective on who Donald Trump is,” she said.
The Kanye factor
In November, after confirming his faith in Jesus Christ, superstar rapper Kanye West affirmed his support for Trump and advised black Americans in an appearance in New York City not to vote Democrat.
“Own your power. Your power is not to just vote Democrat for the rest of our lives. That’s not the power,” he said, the New York Post’s Page Six reported.
In an interview one week earlier, he said black Americans have been “brainwashed” by Democrats who are making them abort their children.
West was asked about his support for Trump.
“I’d rather deal with somebody who call me the N-word to my face than a person that signed me for a lifetime deal on a 255-page contract,” West replied. “I’d rather know what I’m dealing with.”
The radio host asked if he was worried his support for Trump could be viewed as endorsement of “racism.”
“The most racist thing a person can tell me is that I’m supposed to choose something based on my race,” West said.
