Obama's scolding won't change the populist-elite divide that's replaced racial politics

National Post ^ | Oct 19, 2024 | J.D. Tuccille

[MinorityRepublican]

Last week, former president Barack Obama dressed down Black men for failing to support Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris with the numbers he thinks she deserves.

“Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that,” Obama complained.

Despite his continuing popularity, the former president’s message was laden with the usual condescension and sparked an immediate backlash, earning him the title “scolder in chief.” But Obama was on to something. While Black and other minority-group Americans continue their traditional support for Democratic candidates, they’re doing so in declining numbers as voting patterns shift, breaking along lines of class rather than skin colour. The erosion of racial politics, and their replacement by a populist-elite divide, could be seen as relatively healthy, but it frustrates politicians who still build their campaigns on old expectations.

Obama’s lecture was motivated by surveys finding that historically surprising numbers of Black men — 26 per cent of those under 50 — support Republican Donald Trump for president. That doesn’t sound like much, until you consider that Black men gave 95 per cent of their vote to Barack Obama in 2008, 87 per cent to his reelection in 2012, 82 per cent to Hillary Clinton in 2016, and 80 per cent to Joe Biden in 2020.

Each of those percentages are enviable results for any candidate, taken in isolation. Together, though, the trend line demonstrates that voting patterns are changing.

[SMARTY]

I think that O’Bozo got about as much mileage outta his ‘Robespierre’ shtick that he is going to get!

[No name given]

I’d like to see Obeyme deported back to Kenya 🇰🇪 where he belongs.

[SaxxonWoods]

Obama has no idea how to talk to black people and that’s a great thing.

[MinorityRepublican]

Obama has no idea how to talk to black people and that’s a great thing.

Obama was a mirage. Now Black voters are just finding that out.

Trump is the perfect person for them to say "okay, we can vote for the Republican this time."

[Thank You Rush]

““Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that””

Is that the best he could do?
“makes me think”
“feeling the idea”.....

What language is that anyway?

[Ann Archy]

“That’s not acceptable”!!! He thinks he OWNS THE BLACK MEN! OWNS THEM!! OMG!!

[DPMD]

Any one of those men he spoke to has more black blood and black-through-experience in his pinky that this phony poser whose upbringing was likely whiter than Trump’s.