Donald Trump Approval Rating Shows Gains With Black Voters Despite New Charges Of Racism, Use Of ‘N-Word’
While the approval rating numbers for Donald Trump remain at historically low levels, with Trump’s overall positive rating at only 42 percent according to the FiveThirtyEight.com weighted average of all major polls as of August 17, there is one surprising bloc of voters with whom Trump has show small but significant gains in his popularity — African Americans.
According to 2016 presidential election exit polls published by CNN, no ethnic group showed lower support for Trump than black voters, with only eight percent of those voters casting their ballots for Trump. By contrast, 28 percent of Hispanic voters and 27 percent of Asian voters made Trump their choice in 2016, while a full 57 percent of white voters cast their ballots for Trump.
Arecent Rasmussen poll showed an stunning 36 percent of black voters now support Trump, but data analysts have dismissed that poll as an “outlier,” according to The Washington Post.
“Polling firms that have interviewed far more African Americans, and that are much more transparent than Rasmussen, all show that Trump’s black approval rating is much lower than 36 percent,” wrote polling expert Michael Tesler in a Post column on Friday. “For example, Gallup has interviewed thousands of African American respondents in 2018. Its polling suggests that Trump’s black approval rating has consistently been around 10 to 15 percent through 2018.”
According to CNN polling expert Harry Enten, although Trump’s support among African American voters remains lower than among any other group, support in that voting bloc has showed small but genuine increases since 2016, while Trump’s support has declined among other ethnic groups.
“It does actually seem that Trump has gained support among African-Americans since the 2016 election. The network exit polls had Trump winning only eight percent among black voters in 2016. Hillary Clinton took 89 percent of their vote. That is, Clinton won black voters by an 81-percentage-point margin,” Enten explained in a Friday analysis. “Trump’s average net approval rating (approval rating minus disapproval rating) with blacks right now is -72 points. In other words, he’s shrunk his deficit by nine points.”
Trump’s small but noticeable gain among black voters comes even after Trump has faced continued, and even new, accusations of racism. As The Inquisitr reported, former Trump aide and contestant on Trump’s now-ended reality show The Apprentice, Omarosa Manigault Newman, claimed this week that Trump was caught on tape on the Apprentice set using the “N-word” to refer to African-Americans.
That controversy follows a series of attacks by Trump in which he has denigrated the intelligence of several prominent black Americans, including basketball star LeBron James, CNN anchor Don Lemon, and California congressional representative Maxine Waters, whom he has repeatedly characterized as “low IQ,” as Vox.com has chronicled.
