Kamala Harris Gets Bad News From Georgia’s Black Voters

Less than three-quarters of Black likely voters in Georgia plan to vote for Kamala Harris in November, down substantially from what Joe Biden achieved with this demographic in 2020, according to a new poll.
An Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll conducted by the University of Georgia’s survey research center found that of the Black voters in the Peach State surveyed, 73.8 percent said they would vote for Harris in the presidential election, against 7.6 percent who plan to back Trump, with 17.6 percent undecided.
This is a notable decline in a Democratic candidate’s position since the 2020 election, when 88 percent of Black Georgians voted for Joe Biden, according to a CNN exit poll. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll also gave Trump a nearly four-point lead with all likely Georgia voters, placing him at 47 percent of the vote against 43.4 percent for Harris.
Harris has suffered polling blows in key states over the past week; however, according to a major polling aggregation website, she remains ahead nationally. A recent InsiderAdvantage survey gave Trump the lead in the swing states of Arizona and Nevada by 2.5 points and a wafer-thin 0.2 points, respectively.
A study of recent polling by the election website FiveThirtyEight published on Monday gave Harris a 1.8-point national lead, substantially down from her 2.4-point lead on October 14. FiveThirtyEight now narrowly favors Trump to win the overall contest. Due to the Electoral College system, Harris could get the most votes but still lose to Trump, as Democrat Hillary Clinton did in 2016.
The University of Georgia’s survey research center polled 1,000 likely voters in Georgia between October 7 and 16, with a 3.1-point margin of error. While it gave Trump an overall lead of 3.6 points, the pollster said such a slim lead amounts to “a statistical tie.”
According to the survey, Trump led Harris with white voters by 66.1 percent versus 28.4 percent. However, the Democratic candidate was also ahead with “other” races, who didn’t identify as Black or white, by 52.7 percent of the vote against 39.2 percent. The poll also found a substantial gender difference, with Trump ahead among male voters by 59.3 percent to 28.3 percent but behind women by 37.2 percent against 55.4 percent.
Newsweek reached out to the Trump and Harris campaigns for comment via email on Tuesday outside of regular office hours.
Howard University’s Initiative on Public Opinion polled 981 Black likely voters in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin between October 2 and 8. Of those surveyed, 83 percent said they planned to vote for Harris against 8 percent for Trump. The survey has a margin of error of +/- 3.2 percentage points.
Similarly, a YouGov poll conducted for CBS News between October 8 and 11 found that 87 percent of Black voters were likely to support Harris versus 12 percent for Trump. A 2021 report by Catalist, a Democratic Party-linked data firm, concluded that in 2020, Biden took 90 percent of the Black vote nationwide.
Trump has made significant efforts to woo Black voters, and in particular Black men, to his camp. Last week, Harris launched her “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men,” which included up to one million forgivable loans of up to $20,000 for Black entrepreneurs.
If elected in November, Harris would be the first Black woman and the second Black person overall to hold the office of U.S. president.