Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks before being presented a shirt by Detroit vs Everybody co-founders Sean Xavier Williams, left, and Tommey Walker, during a stop at Cred Cafe, a small business owned by former NBA players Joe and Jordan Crawford, in Detroit, October 15, 2024.
According to the polls, Kamala Harris is struggling among an unusual demographic: Black men, particularly younger Black men. Whereas Joe Biden won about 87 percent of this subcategory, a recent New York Times/Siena poll found just 78 percent support for Harris. A Howard Initiative poll of swing-state voters found that just 72 percent of Black men under 50 support Harris.
Hence the Harris campaign’s new outreach package to Black dudes. She would legalize marijuana, “protect” cryptocurrency assets—supposedly about 20 percent of Black men have owned crypto at some point—provide a big tax break to Black folks who start a business, and a whole lot more.
As I’ll explain below, the policies actually aren’t too bad. But leading with crypto and weed is.
Now, on one level, it is absolutely bizarre for Donald Trump to be apparently ushering in a substantial racial realignment. Trump is not only a doddering clod clearly suffering serious mental decline—at a recent Pennsylvania town hall, he abruptly stopped taking questions and instead listened to some of his favorite songs for 39 extremely weird minutes—he is also running the most racist national campaign since George Wallace in 1968 at least. Trump is constantly going on genuinely Hitler-esque diatribes about how immigrants are poisoning the blood of the country. He is having friendly meetings with outright neo-Nazis. He spreads racist lies about Haitians eating people’s pets.
It might be that these polls are not properly sampling young Black men, who were notoriously difficult to reach even before people stopped answering unknown phone calls because of the spam epidemic. This would be a bizarrely large swing not only from 2020, but even 2022, when Democrats won 93 percent of Black men. But that is what polls are saying, and it’s all anyone has to go on. Perhaps young minorities just aren’t hearing Trump’s racist word-salad diatribes.
Anyway, when I opened up Harris’s outreach package, it turned out to be better than the initial reporting suggested. Marijuana legalization is good, and Black men are disproportionately imprisoned for victimless pot crimes. Expanding student loan forgiveness is good, especially as Black folks have been victimized by for-profit colleges. Fighting racist home value assessments is good.
I’m more skeptical of providing a big tax benefit for Black men who start small businesses, given that only a tiny fraction of people ever do that, and access to credit and sales potential matter much more than tax breaks for would-be entrepreneurs, but it’s something.
The most objectionable plank, namely “protecting” crypto assets, is a short and vague gesture toward regulation to protect market participants. Now, given that the only demonstrated use case for crypto is greatly facilitating various frauds and scams, like the looming scam from Donald Trump’s own crypto coin launch, it would be more appropriate to say that Black people need to be protected from crypto, like any other kind of abusive financial institution. Payday lenders and subprime mortgage issuers, for instance, routinely victimize Black folks, and it’s a safe bet that crypto scammers are no different. But it’s only a tiny portion of the document.
The Harris campaign is not incapable of putting out a catchy, specific policy package.
The rest is a grab bag of economic policies mostly not specific to Black men, except insofar as they tend to be toward the bottom of the income distribution. The document mentions price controls, more and better jobs for people without a college degree, aid to Black farmers, cheap internet access, long-term care subsidies, and so on. That is largely to the good, but the lack of specific applicability to Black men probably explains why so much media coverage focused on marijuana and crypto, thus creating a somewhat patronizing message: “You people like to smoke weed and trade dog-themed internet funny money, right?”
This is broadly reflective of a problem I’ve noticed with the Harris campaign—not in policy, but in the packaging of policy. The Trump and Bernie Sanders campaigns in 2016, for instance, showed the value of simple, catchy slogans that encapsulate a policy agenda. “Build the wall” and “Drain the swamp” were (hugely dishonest) stand-ins for xenophobic immigration policy and anti-corruption efforts. “Medicare for All” and “Green New Deal” were stand-ins for aggressive health care reform and climate policy.
Harris does have an “opportunity agenda,” but this is both vague and clichéd to the point of meaninglessness. Opportunity usually signals some kind of opening to ambition or self-betterment, like for education or starting your own business, and Harris does indeed have programs there. But the core of her campaign platform, whether she wants to let you know about it or not, is actually a massive expansion of the welfare state for families, as she would bring back the Biden Child Tax Credit (which cut child poverty by about half) and provide a $6,000 credit for parents of new babies. This certainly would increase the opportunities available to children in poor families, but it’s much more of a poverty- and inequality-fighting initiative.
Worse, “opportunity” is one of the most overused words in American political history. Presidential candidates have been flogging this or that policy or idea as expanding opportunity for decades. Herbert Hoover used it to advocate for laissez-faire capitalism in the campaign of 1928. Voters hear the word and they tend to tune out—it means everything and therefore nothing.
The Harris campaign is not incapable of putting out a catchy, specific policy package. Recently, the campaign put out a rural agenda, led by Tim Walz, that addressed highly relevant problems like rural health care deserts, the right to repair farm equipment, the devastation that Trump’s proposed giant tariffs would wreak on crop exporters, and much more. The mass closure of rural hospitals in particular has reached crisis proportions in recent years; proposing to fix that problem will surely appeal to any swing voters who hear about it.
I would not be anyone’s first choice to write up a policy list catering to Black men. But the most obvious thing would be addressing police brutality, as the problems revealed by the Black Lives Matter movement are very much still present. Indeed, the Harris document does have a short endorsement of modest police reform measures—but all the way at the bottom, where it was not noticed by any reporting I could find. It’s reflective of the whole Democratic Party shying away from the issue as politically troublesome, which is both shortsighted and leading to a missed, well, opportunity.
At any rate, let’s hope that if Harris wins next month she will approach the implementation of her agenda more seriously than the sales pitch.
