Again, we can’t emphasize this enough… VOTE

President Donald Trump openly telegraphs that he plans to suppress the vote in key swing states, and the answer of nearly half of Black voters under the age of 30 is that they do not plan to vote.

An American University Swing Voter Project survey of 1,215 African Americans in battleground states – Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida, North Carolina and Georgia – discovered that those over 60, who remain among the most reliable of Democratic voters, plan to turn out to the polls in some fashion this autumn. Those who are between the ages of 40-59 are still pretty committed to vote as well. However, only 47 percent of those Black Americans under 30, that were surveyed, plan to come to the polls to vote for the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden.

Anecdotal evidence that the data may be valid comes from the fact that roughly the same percentages lack anything positive to say when queried with what “one or two words come to mind” about the former vice president. There is little enthusiasm for Biden, in other words. The trend prophesies a dangerous repeat of the last election. While Trump’s support in the Black community ranked in the single digits, anemic African-American turnout elected him to the White House in 2016.

In Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, Trump received fewer votes than not only Barack Obama four years before, but Mitt Romney as well. Trump’s 75,000-vote margin of victory in those three states was directly attributable to the drastic decline in African-American voters going to the polls in Milwaukee, Detroit and Philadelphia from four years before. It is not so much that Trump won the 2016 election, as it is that Black voters stayed home, and they may again. In the American University poll, half of the African-American survey respondents under 30 say they don’t often vote because it “doesn’t make a difference.” Further questioning revealed a resistance to even searching for a stamp to mail in their ballot. Too much effort.

Moreover, Black turnout could decline by an even greater degree than four years ago, as the authors of the survey noted, “[T]hat number does not even take into account the turnout-depressing effects of voter suppression efforts taking place across the country, the pandemic or the heavy distrust of mail-in voting that young Black people tend to express. Only 64 percent of young people in our sample say they trust the state to report their vote accurately, and only 30 percent say they plan to take advantage of mail-in voting.”

On trusting that their postal votes might be counted, these young men and women may have a point, which is why it is substantially more important that the African-American community votes at or above white turnout, which Blacks did in both of President Obama’s elections.

On Thursday, July 30, Trump also ruminated on the very fear, which Joe Biden expressed just a few months ago – that Donald Trump would attempt to delay the election. After joking about the ridiculousness of the notion just a few short weeks ago, the president effectively tweeted his support for the idea. Even the conservative stalwart National Review called Trump’s proposal to delay the election to “be grotesque and Un-American.”

“It is a tribute,” the magazine’s editors wrote, “to our commitment to self-government that elections have occurred as scheduled on this day during the worst crises of American history – when federal troops were in the field against rebel troops who sought to destroy the nation, when the unemployment rate was 25 percent, when U.S. forces were engaged in an epic struggle to save the West from the depredations of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Trump doesn’t understand this, or doesn’t care. It is another indication of how little he’s let the institution of the presidency shape him, and how selfishly he approaches his duties.”

And this is what his allies were saying. Comments from Democrats were unprintable in a family newspaper. However, the controversy concealed the president’s true objective. Trump predicated his call for a delay upon the potential of irregularities in the postal vote. He complained that “months would go by” and no one would know who won the election.

In other words, the president just telegraphed to the nation that he intends to suppress the vote, and most reporters in the country seemingly missed the point. According to some estimates, two-thirds of mail-in ballots will come from Democrats, and will constitute the go-to voting method employed by many minority groups ravaged by the coronavirus. While Caucasian septuagenarian Republicans will instead still turn out to the polls on Trump’s orders, no matter the risk.

Therefore, the GOP – at the president’s command – will seek to invalidate hundreds of thousands of these postal votes, while Trump’s loyal electors brave the infectious polling stations. The president just revealed the audacity of his electoral strategy, and the media focused on the sensationally, legally impossible chance of a postponement than the consequential likelihood of the disenfranchisement of thousands. The only answer is for so many people to vote, rendering moot the hypothesis of the election being stolen. It starts with us! But it also is incumbent on the Democrats to actively reach out to us, in all age demographics, and tell us why you are soliciting our vote. Ignoring us, taking us for granted, as per usual, is not a winning strategy.

This article originally published in the August 10, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.