by Deidre Montague
Boston University News Service
As more Republican presidential candidates are suspending their campaigns, there does not seem to be a clear strategy from either former president Donald Trump or former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley on how they plan to gain support from voters of color.
NBC News reports that current President Joe Biden secured his 2020 presidential win due to voters of color in “racially diverse urban centers and increasingly diverse suburbs” in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia voting for him.
NBC News also reports that Biden would not have been the Democratic presidential nominee without Black voters in South Carolina, as he reached 270 Electoral College votes in large part because of Black voters in these cities.
In 2020, The Pew Research Center survey data showed that the Democratic Party has held an advantage among Black, Hispanic and Asian American registered voters for more than two decades. White voters, on the other hand, have had a stable partisan balance over the past decade, with the Republican Party holding a slight advantage.
However, it appears that neither Haley or Trump have a strategy or plan for securing votes from people of color.
At a recent town hall, Haley received backlash due to failing to mention slavery as a cause for the Civil War, along with saying that “America has never been a racist country,” according to CBS News.
She later acknowledged that she should have mentioned slavery — saying that she thought that it was “a given that everybody associates the Civil War with slavery,” according to The Washington Post.
While Trump has said that he is not a racist publicly, he has had a long history of making racist and bigoted remarks.
According to Vox, some of these remarks include stereotyping a Black reporter, pandering to white supremacists after they held a violent rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, making a joke about the Trail of Tears, using racist terms to refer to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and countless others.
He seems to be continuing this pattern this week as he has repeatedly messed up Haley’s given name, Nimarata Nikki Randhawa — despite Haley going by her middle name, Nikki, according to The New York Times.
Lastly, he has not mentioned whether he plans to bring back his “Platinum Plan,” which included four main points and several promises that he planned to execute over the next four years to benefit Black Americans while he was president.
However, Politico reports that the only thing that was officially accomplished for Black Americans during his administration was when he signed the bipartisan First Step Act, which reduced the federal prison population.
While experts crediting the law and The Sentencing Project said that Black Americans made up 91% of everyone receiving reductions during that time, a Brennan Center report found that “key parts of the law are working as promised… [b]ut other parts are not,” such as expanded rehabilitation and recidivism programs, according to Politico.
