It’s hard to imagine a much worse pitch Donald Trump could have made for the black vote [View all]

[cali]

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"Look at how much African-American communities are suffering from Democratic control. To those I say the following: What do you have to lose by trying something new like Trump? What do you have to lose?" he asked. "You live in your poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed, what the hell do you have to lose?"

This was not the Teleprompter Trump that we saw in Charlotte, interlacing his prepared remarks with occasional asides. This was Traditional Trump, riffing a bit more on what he wanted to say in a manner that probably didn't do him much good.

Consider: Black Americans are not "living in poverty" as a general rule. A quarter of the black population is, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, about the same as the percentage of Hispanics. In Michigan, the figure is slightly higher. Most black Americans don't live in poverty, just as most white Americans don't.

Consider: The unemployment rate in the black community is higher than that in the white community, as it has been since the Department of Labor started keeping track. Among young blacks, though, the figure is not 59 percent -- unless (as Politifact noted) you consider not the labor force but every young black American, including high school students. Many young black high school students are unemployed. This isn't a metric that Labor typically uses, for obvious reasons, but calculating the rates for young whites gives you about 50 percent, too.


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There are any number of reasons that black Americans might view Trump unfavorably, starting with his 2011 effort to cast suspicion on Obama's place of birth. Or, probably, starting with his full-page ad calling for the death penalty against five black teenagers in New York City who were accused of rape -- wrongly, as it turned out. Or perhaps thanks to the support his current candidacy is getting from people like former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/08/20/its-hard-to-imagine-a-much-worse-pitch-donald-trump-could-have-made-for-the-black-vote/