by On Monday night, more than 53,000 Black men joined a virtual conference, Win With Black Men, to rally behind the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris. During the four-hour call, organizers said the group raised more than $1.3m for Harris’ campaign and grassroots voter organizations focused on Black men.
The success of the call, which was inspired by the Win With Black Women call the night before, goes against the story shaped by a recent election poll which indicates that 30% of Black men are planning to vote for Donald Trump. “Don’t let anyone delay us in asking the question: ‘Can a Black woman be elected president of the United States?'” said Raphael Warnock, who represents Georgia in the US Senate, 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 consistently been a key voting bloc for Democrats, but experts say inaccurate polling of Black men in particular may be creating false narratives about their biases this election cycle, mainly the idea that there is a massive shift of Black voters to the Republican party. . Win With Black Men, hosted by journalist Roland Martin, said it is working to dispel stereotypes about changes in the voting habits of Black males, who refuse to support a female candidate and who are not they are willing to mobilize politically.
“People are making a lot of assumptions without talking to a large enough sample of Black people to be able to say exactly what they’re making,” said Andra Gillespie, an associate professor of political science at Emory University. . . “You will not be able to perceive what is likely to be no more [than] a one to three point swing in favor of Donald Trump based on changes in surveys where you’re talking to 200 Black people at a time. I can’t say with any statistical certainty that that three-point transition is real or not.”
Unrepresentative polls can also have a negative impact on voter habits. People tend to vote if they see an election close, Gillespie said. So polls that suggest that Trump will win easily and that even Black people will vote for him in droves may distort people’s understanding of reality. It is vital to ensure that the public is aware of possible polling inaccuracies.
“These stories are also used to confuse Black voters themselves, which can reduce the Black vote and reduce turnout,” said Christopher Towler, founder of the Black Voter Project (BVP), an initiative national poll. “It can be used as a voter suppression mechanism, knowing that Black voters will play a key role in this election.”
Although Gillespie said it will take a few days for a new poll that specifically examines how Harris is performing with Black voters, recent mobilization around Harris suggests that stories of this bloc’s exodus from the Democratic party may be overblown. early
The problem comes down to sample size. In surveys of 1,000 to 1,500 voters, subsample sizes of Black voters may be anywhere from 150 to 300. In some cases, all people of color are conflated into one demographic group. Surveys with such a sample size create large margins of error.
“The issue is the level of accuracy with which we can make certain types of announcements when you’re talking to that few people,” Gillespie said. “The number that comes out in the survey is the midpoint of a range of possible numbers that we think are in the real population due to statistical analysis.”
If the subsample size is less than 100, she said, the margin of error is plus or minus 10. So if a survey says 20% of Black voters are going for Trump, the true number is based on the subexample. between 10% and 30%.
Towler, of the Black Voter Project, said he began noticing the issue of absentee voting years ago. He started BVP by “reacting to the industry standard of tapping a few hundred Black responses to a general survey” and using that small sample as the whole picture.
“It’s really unscientific,” Towler said. “So I’ve worked for years to try to create data that is reliable, accurate and representative of the Black community.”
This year, BVP released a large, multi-wave, national public opinion survey that focused on gathering representative data on Black Americans. Between March 29 and April 18, with 2,004 Black Americans interviewed, the survey collected a nationally representative sample of respondents from all 50 states. The BVP study found that 15% of respondents would vote for Trump if the election were held at the time of the survey, a much lower figure than reported by other polls with smaller sample sizes. It’s important to survey the BVP scale to get an idea of what the Black voting population looks like and the U.S. Black voting population, Gillespie said.
But mainstream polling companies tend to lack Black leadership, so accurate polling of Black communities is not a priority, Towler said. In addition, some pollsters don’t see the value in spending more money to survey a population they think will already vote solidly Democratic.
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 lead to polls that do not adequately capture the political behavior and opinions of excluded groups.
“Many people who study race are not considered mainstream political scholars,” he said. “This has big ramifications for the kind of reporting that’s happening, the kind of news stories that are coming out, the way you describe what’s happening in these communities.”
Towler said pollsters should create surveys that are culturally competent and ask questions in ways that don’t create misleading opinions. “It’s important when you’re looking at Black polling, not only to make sure you have polls designed to accurately measure Black opinion, but to have pollsters who study and understand the Black community,” said he.
While 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 allegiances clear.
“Let’s protect Kamala. We will be with her because she was there for us,” former South Carolina representative Bakari Sellers said on the call. “We’re going to disagree a lot. But let’s put the petty bickering aside. Let’s stand up and Black men are the ones who change this country. We built this country. I’m ripping with Kamala.”
