Republican Congressional candidate Kimberly Klacik’s viral video about the failure of Democratic leadership to improve Baltimore over the past half-century may help her long-shot chances to win the 7th Congressional District in November, but her biggest impact may be in increasing the black vote for Trump around the country.
Recognizing her star quality and potential national impact, the Trump campaign moved quickly to name Klacik as a headline speaker at Monday’s first evening of the Republican National Convention.
While Trump received the support of only eight percent of black voters in the 2016 presidential election, some 2020 polls indicate that he may significantly increase that percentage in 2020. Any increase in support for Trump among black voters in 2020 would have a substantive impact on his ability to defeat Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
Klacik, 38, who is married and the mother of a three-year-old, is also the founder of a non-profit whose purpose is to help launch low-income Baltimore residents into the job market. She lost to former Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D-MD-7), 71, by 49 percent in the April special election to replace the late Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD-7), who died in office in January.
Mfume decisively defeated Klacik in the April 28 special election, 74 percent to 25 percent. Mfume received 111,955 votes to Klacik’s 38,102.
The outcome was not surprising. The 7th Congressional District, which “contains portions of Howard and Baltimore counties and parts of the city of Baltimore,” is rated by the Cook Partisan Voting Index as Democrat +26, which places it among the top ten percent of the most Democratic districts in the country (out of 435 total districts in the House of Representatives).
Mfume previously represented the area in the House of Representatives from 1987 to 1996, when he resigned to become the president of the NAACP. He was succeeded by Rep. Cummings, who represented the area from 1996 until his death in 2020. During that 24-year period, Cummings was easily reelected every two years, never receiving less than 69 percent of the vote in the general election.
Klacik’s prospects for pulling off a long-shot win in the 7th Congressional District rematch with Mfume in November brightened when the two-minute, fifty-second video featuring her walking in a red dress and red shoes through a devastated part of Baltimore went viral after its launch this month. In the video, Klacik destroys the Black Lives Matter and Democratic Party’s narrative with a fact-based point by point rebuttal.
The video has recorded more than 11 million views in the week since its launch on August 17.
You can watch the video here:
Democrats don’t want you to see this.
They’re scared that I’m exposing what life is like in Democrat run cities.
That’s why I’m running for Congress
Because All Black Lives Matter
Baltimore Matters
And black people don’t have to vote Democrat
Help us win https://t.co/CSOjc9aQlS pic.twitter.com/XnEDTaDDIG— Kimberly Klacik (@kimKBaltimore) August 17, 2020
Klacik’s fresh message provides a stark contrast to the oft-repeated Democratic narratives about race.
Indeed, more than 55 years after the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law, the most notable theme of last week’s Democratic National Convention is the claim that “systemic racism” continues to exist in the United States.
Mfume, who was first elected to Congress at the age of 37 in 1986, is a longstanding member of the Democratic establishment who has advanced that narrative for more than 40 years.
The point of Klacik’s video and her message is that half a century of Democratic control and the same narrative has done nothing to improve the lives of the people who live in the 7th Congressional District, especially its black residents.
While that message may not be enough to boost her to a victory over Mfume in November, it may play a big role in helping Donald Trump win reelection to the presidency.
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