Poll: 17% of Black Americans Support Donald Trump, Up 9 Points from 2020

MIAMI, FLORIDA - JUNE 13: A Trump supporters gather outside the Wilkie D. Ferguson Jr. Uni
Miguel J. Rodríguez Carrillo /Getty Images
Wendell Husebø

Former President Donald Trump’s support among black Americans is surging ahead of the 2024 election, polling from GenForward shows.

The black vote is a key demographic that has heavily favored Democrats for the past 50 years. Trump won 8 percent of black voters in 2020.

GenForward polling found:

  • 17 percent of black Americans currently support Trump
  • 20 percent of black Americans said they would vote for “someone else” other than Trump or Biden

Trump also increased support among Hispanics from the 2020 cycle by 4 points:

  • 36 percent of Latinos support Trump.

Jen Salinas, Vice President of Latinos 4 Trump, takes photos with the group’s supporters after a meetup in San Antonio, Texas. (Matthew Busch for The Washington Post via Getty)

“It is possible, and we’ve seen it before, that a higher number, in particular Black men because of a kind of hypermasculinity of Donald Trump, could vote for Trump [again],” the founder and director of the GenForward project and University of Chicago political science professor Cathy Cohen told Politico.

The poll surveyed 3,448 eligible voters from November 8–30 with a 3-point margin of error.

Meanwhile, polling shows President Joe Biden has a growing problem with retaining the support of black and Hispanic voters. New York Times/Siena College polling in November found the president’s support among nonwhite voters sank 33 points compared to 2020 election results:
  1. Only 72 percent of black voters support Biden, along with only 47 percent of Hispanic voters.
  2. Democrats lost ground among black and Hispanic voters in nearly every election in the last ten years.
  3. Biden is in the worst position among nonwhite voters since Walter Mondale in 1984.

Drilling down, Nate Cohn, the New York Times’ chief political analyst, analyzed the rapid decline of Biden’s support among nonwhite voters and how Trump could benefit from the desertions:

Overall, Mr. Biden leads by 81-8 among Black voters who turned out in 2022, but by just 62-14 among those who skipped the midterm elections. Similarly, he leads by 53-33 among Hispanics who voted in the midterms, compared with just a 42-37 lead among those who did not vote.

The survey finds evidence that a modest but important 5 percent of nonwhite Biden voters now support Mr. Trump, including 8 percent of Hispanic voters who say they backed Mr. Biden in 2020.

Beyond voters who have flipped to Mr. Trump, a large number of disaffected voters who supported Mr. Biden in 2020 now say they’re undecided or simply won’t vote this time around. As a consequence, his weakness is concentrated among less engaged voters on the periphery of politics, who have not consistently voted in recent elections and who may decide to stay home next November.

Follow Wendell Husebø on “X” @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.

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