Across the city from an exuberant election rally held in Atlanta by Kamala Harris, a young black Waffle House chef who cooked for President Biden explained why he was voting for Donald Trump.
“It’s all about who’s going to benefit the people here,” said Anthony Pitts, 20, who prepared a takeaway all-star special of waffle, bacon, white toast, scrambled eggs and grits for Biden when he dropped into the 24-hour restaurant chain after his fateful TV debate with Trump at the nearby CNN studios in June.
“Why are we sending Israel $3 billion in weapons when there are homeless people here? We got to make sure we get our people off the streets and get some more affordable housing,” Pitts said. “Our president should figure out America and get America straight. When I say that, I really do think of Trump.”
Anthony Pitts says he will vote for Trump, saying he will “get America straight”
DAVID CHARTER
Pitts works the night shift from 9pm until 7am for $14 an hour. Buying an apartment seems like a distant dream. A first-time voter, he is part of a demographic that may hold the key to the election in Georgia, which is one-third black, the third-highest proportion of the 50 states.
Biden won in 2020 by the slimmest of margins, only 11,779 out of just under five million votes cast, winning 88 per cent of black voters compared with 11 per cent for Trump.
Although still reliably Democratic-voting compared with other ethnicities, national polling this year had black support for Biden as low as the 70s as it slipped mainly among men, some going to Trump but some also opting for third-party candidates. To win here, Harris needs some of them back.
“This race was always going to be about mobilisation and it was always going to be a race on the margins,” said Andra Gillespie, associate professor of African-American politics at Emory University in Atlanta.
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Biden was an average of four points behind Trump in Georgia recently, whereas the polls since Harris emerged as his replacement have put her an average of about two points behind. A Morning Consult poll for Bloomberg on Tuesday found Georgia to be a dead heat.
Kamala Harris greets supporters at Atlanta’s Georgia State University. A recent poll puts Georgia neck and neck
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“I am very clear the path to the White House runs right through this state,” Harris told her enthusiastic crowd of 10,000 in Atlanta’s Georgia State University Convocation Center on Tuesday.
Biden was increasingly concentrating on one route back to the White House by trying to hold the swing rust belt states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which would bring just enough electoral college votes to eke out a very narrow win even if Trump reclaimed the sun belt states of Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.
The Harris campaign has rebooted Biden’s infrastructure across the sun belt, including North Carolina, to give it an alternative path to victory.
“In Georgia we have 24 offices, opening three more offices this past weekend alone, while the Trump team didn’t open up their first until June,” Dan Kanninen, the battleground states director for Harris, said. “This battleground advantage will almost certainly be decisive in a race likely to be decided by just tens of thousands of votes.”
Most of Harris’s rally audience were middle-aged or older and the majority were women, reflecting the Democratic Party’s base. It was clear her campaign still had work to do to motivate younger and male support.
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“There are a lot of women, I am a bit of a minority here,” admitted Markese Sanders, a 34-year-old black man at the rally wearing a Harris T-shirt in the distinctive blue and red style of Barack Obama’s campaign.
“There’s a small percentage of black men that support Trump but I don’t think it will be enough to decide the election,” he said. “I do have friends that are into Trump but our conversations were about Biden versus Trump so now it’s a whole new game.”
Markese Sanders accepts Trump attracts some black voters, while Michael Farmer, below, cited the Obama effect
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Michael Farmer, 70, said the younger generation was less interested in voting because it did not fully appreciate the struggle of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
“I vote because it’s my obligation to vote but Obama proved that when there’s a black candidate, black people will come out,” he said. “This is the Obama effect again — she’s someone the youth can relate to, she can get the kid who may not have come out and voted for Biden.”
But even in the Obama era, more black women voted Democrat than men. W Mondale Robinson, founder and executive director of the Black Male Voter Project based in Atlanta, which aims to increase turnout, warned that the Harris campaign needed to offer more tangible reasons to vote than entertainment like the rapper Megan Thee Stallion, who appeared at Harris’s rally.
Megan Thee Stallion performing in Atlanta for Harris
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“There is a disconnect between the Democratic Party and black men and it is due to distrust,” Robinson said. “They have a right to feel that way when our lives are not changing for the better in any real way: black men still have the shortest lives of anybody in America, black men are still over-policed, still expelled from school more than anybody else. So black men have a right to be sceptical.”
Roger House, the first black male professor emeritus of Emerson College in Boston, said there was a warning from recent history in Georgia if Harris wanted to win over disaffected male voters.
The first black woman to run for Georgia governor, Stacey Abrams, ran her 2022 campaign based on “her celebrity status as a historic woman candidate … to generate turnout among men”, House wrote in The Hill.
Stacey Abrams, the first black woman to run for governor in Georgia, lost her election campaign after failing to appeal to male voters
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She mainly highlighted issues of concern to female voters and “when men failed to respond, pundits blamed it on their political shortcomings”. The Republican governor, Brian Kemp, on the other hand, successfully “appealed to working-class men … with attention to their ‘pocketbook’ concerns”.
House urged the Harris campaign to recognise the impact of migrant workers on wages and job prospects. “Social media pundits ridiculed Trump when he referred to the notion of ‘black jobs’ being taken by immigrants but he had a legitimate basis for raising the issue,” House said.
This was one message that Trump continued to hammer home during his appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists conference in Chicago on Wednesday, when he also claimed that Harris portrayed herself as Indian for many years and then “happened to turn black”.
Trump: Harris “was Indian, then turned back”
While his comments were seen by commentators as race-baiting and an attempt to drive suspicion about Harris among black voters, Trump’s messaging about “black jobs” was aimed mainly at men frustrated that migrants deny them employment opportunities.
It is part of Trump’s America First agenda that resonates with some black voters, like Kaylin, 29, a security guard at Mary Mac’s Tea Room, a Southern food institution that was visited by Biden in May for a meeting with local politicians.
“Biden has sent millions upon millions of dollars away from the country that we could use to help the people of our country,” said Kaylin, who voted for Biden in 2020 but said he would probably vote for Trump this time. “I get that there’s wars going on but we’ve still got to get America straight first because there’s a lot of problems here.
“I’m just going on what Trump stands for, which is taking care of home, taking care of the United States. Not to say I don’t care about other countries but there’s things going on here too and if we fix all that, then we can be a better help.
“In an airplane you put your mask on first before you help other people put their mask on, so save yourself then save everybody else.”
Trump and his running-mate JD Vance will hold a rally on Saturday at the same venue in Atlanta used by Harris.
