‘I’m in great shape with Kamala’: Black men defy flawed polls by running for Harris campaign | US Election 2024

OOn Monday night, more than 53,000 black men participated in a virtual conference, Win With Black Men, in support of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. During the four-hour call, organizers said the group raised more than $1.3 million for Harris’ campaign and local voter organizations focused on black men.

The success of the call, inspired by the Win With Black Women call the day before, runs counter to the narrative shaped by recent election polls indicating that 30% of black men plan to vote for Donald Trump. “Don’t let anyone slow us down by asking the question, ‘Can a black woman be elected president of the United States?’” Raphael Warnock, who represents Georgia in the U.S. Senate, said on the call. “Kamala Harris can win. We just have to show up. History is watching us and the future is waiting for us.”

Black voters have historically been a key voting bloc for Democrats, but experts say inaccurate polling of black men in particular could create false narratives about their leanings this election cycle, primarily the idea that there is a massive shift of black voters toward the Republican Party. Win With Black Men, hosted by journalist Roland Martin, said it is working to dispel stereotypical ideas about changes in black men’s voting habits, their refusal to support a female candidate and their reluctance to mobilize politically.

“People are making a lot of guesses without actually talking to a large enough sample of black people to be able to say things with the precision that they’re saying,” said Andra Gillespie, an associate professor of political science at Emory University. “You’re not going to be able to detect what’s probably only going to be a one- to three-point swing in favor of Donald Trump based on changes in polls when you talk to 200 black people at a time. I can’t say with statistical certainty whether that three-point shift is real or not.”

Unrepresentative polls can also have a negative effect on voter habits. People tend to vote if they perceive the election to be close, Gillespie said. So polls that suggest Trump will win easily and that even black people will vote for him in droves can distort people’s perceptions of reality. Ensuring the public is aware of potential polling inaccuracies is critical.

“These narratives are also used to confuse Black voters, which in turn can drive down Black voting and voter turnout,” said Christopher Towler, founder of the Black Voter Project (BVP), a national polling initiative. “This can be used as a voter deterrence mechanism, knowing that Black voters will play a key role in this election.”

Although Gillespie said it will be a few days before a new poll specifically examines Harris’ performance with black voters, the recent mobilization around Harris suggests that stories of a potential exodus from that bloc of the Democratic Party may have been premature.

The problem is sample size. In surveys of 1,000 to 1,500 voters, subsamples of black voters can be as large as 150 to 300. In some cases, all people of color are lumped into a single demographic group. Surveys with such small samples create large margins of error.

“The problem is the level of precision with which we can make certain kinds of statements when we talk to such a small number of people,” Gillespie said. “The number that comes out of the survey is the midpoint of a range of possible numbers that we think are in the real population because of the statistical analysis.”

If the subsample size is less than 100, she said, the margin of error is plus or minus 10. So if a poll says 20% of black voters are voting for Trump, the actual number based on the subsample is between 10% and 30%.

Towler, of the Black Voter Project, said he began noticing the problem of unrepresentative polling years ago. He started the BVP to “defy the industry norm of taking a few hundred black responses to a general survey” and using that small sample as a complete picture.

“It’s not scientific at all,” Towler said. “So I’ve worked for years to try to create data that is reliable, accurate, and truly representative of the black community.”

This year, the BVP released a large, multi-wave national public opinion survey focused on collecting representative data from Black Americans. Conducted from March 29 to April 18, the survey collected a nationally representative sample of respondents from all 50 states, and included 2,004 Black Americans. The BVP study found that 15 percent of respondents would vote for Trump if the election had been held when the survey was conducted, a figure far lower than other polls with smaller samples have reported. A BVP-wide survey is important to get a sense of what the Black population and the Black voting population in the United States really looks like, Gillespie said.

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But the major Beltway polling firms generally lack black leaders, so accurately polling black communities is not a priority, Towler said. Moreover, some pollsters don’t see the point in spending more money to survey a population they already believe will vote solidly for Democrats.

Black and brown communities are marginalized in American politics, said Emmitt Riley, president of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. The biases of mainstream political scientists cause pollsters to fail to adequately capture the political behaviors and views of excluded groups.

“A lot of people who study race are not considered traditional policy scholars,” he said. “That has profound implications for the kind of reporting that gets done, the kind of articles that get published, how we describe what’s happening in these communities.”

Towler said pollsters should create surveys that are culturally competent and that ask questions in a way that is not misleading. “It’s important when you’re looking at polling of black people to make sure not only that the polls are designed to accurately measure black opinion, but also to have pollsters who study and understand the black community,” he said.

As polls continue to try to determine where black men will place their political support, groups like Win With Black Men and Black Men for Harris are making their loyalties clear.

“Let’s protect Kamala. Let’s be with her like she’s there for us,” former South Carolina Rep. Bakari Sellers said on the call. “We’re going to disagree on a lot of things. But let’s put aside petty arguments. Let’s stand up and be the black men who change this country. We built this country. I stand with Kamala.”