The following review was published on Amazon today. If you find it “helpful,” please take the link in the previous sentence and rate it accordingly.
Vernon Robinson III and Bruce Eberle, Coming Home: How Black Americans Will Re-Elect Trump, New York, Humanix Books, 2020.
Mention the Black Republican vote, and a certain smugness (or despondency) almost always colors the conversation: it never cracked 20%, so goes received opinion; it never will. But one liberal pundit on FoxNews confessed that the African-American outreach of President Trump’s re-election campaign keeps him up at night. Coming Home lays out reasons for liberal concern and conservative hope in sixteen engagingly written and information-packed chapters.
Conservative activists Vernon Robinson III and Bruce Eberle, who were at first skeptical of Trump, don’t overstate the increase in Black support for the GOP in general and for Trump in particular. They do, however, show how it put him over the top in 2016 in Pennsylvania, a swing state, garnering 20 electoral votes: 140 thousand Black Keystone Staters gave him his margin of victory. That gets the skeptical reader’s attention.
Blacks may be only 12% of Pennsylvania’s population, but more than 20% of them voted for Trump. That was “not supposed” to happen; he was “not supposed” to be the Republican nominee; once nominated, “not supposed” to win the general election. Should Trump replicate this inroad across America by election day 2020, the authors argue, he’ll win re-election in a landslide. (All things being equal, of course, which COVID-19 ensures are decidedly not). To beat him, Democrats will have to do more than intone, “But that’ll never happen.” Republicans need shave only a few points off the Black voting bloc to reduce the Democrats to minority-party status.
Continue reading “Black Americans and the GOP: An Inflection Point?”