Will black voters forgive the Democrats? They're tired of being told what to do

Across the bay from San Francisco, Oakland is the African-American cultural capital of the West Coast. As the birthplace of the Black Panther Party, its politics are famously Left-wing. Kamala Harris was born here and claims it as her hometown. She even kicked off her 2020 presidential campaign in front of Oakland City Hall.

Yet from what I can tell, among black voters in Oakland, there’s never been an overwhelming sense of loyalty to Harris. I interviewed black Oakland residents both before and after she became the presidential nominee. Since she lost the election, I’ve interviewed several more. The lack of enthusiasm she inspires among black voters speaks to her weakness as a candidate. But more importantly, it indicates the long-growing disillusionment of black Americans with the Democratic Party, which was borne out in Donald Trump’s successful courtship of the working-class black vote during the election. In particular, Trump doubled his support from young black men.

“I don’t care about Kamala. Who’s Kamala? She’s just a woman,” a young woman in West Oakland named Sakai told me. She voted for Trump, and insisted that gas and grocery prices were already going down as a result of the election. “Life is going to go back to what it was before 2020 took place.”

Even the black Oakland residents I spoke to who had voted for Harris had done so without much enthusiasm. Dionne, a middle-aged black woman who works at an OB-GYN clinic in East Oakland, voted for Harris despite aligning more closely with Republican values — especially when it came to abortion. “I feel like [the Democrats are] leaning way in a direction that I’m not ready for,” she told me. When I asked her what issues she had in mind, she spoke of the Democrats allowing biological men to use the women’s restrooms, and how that could open the door for predators to go after kids.

But the most immediate factor driving black voters away from the Democrats is the one driving voters of all races away: immigration.

Michelle Hailey is a 60-year-old black woman who grew up in Harris’s neighbourhood in Berkeley before moving to Oakland at the age of eight. She’s deeply involved in local politics. And over the years, she has gone from being a lifelong Democrat to  a Trump supporter. “We’ve always had a messianic complex,” she said of black American voters and their loyalty to Democrats. “There were always figures who could dazzle us with bullshit.”

The final straw for Hailey was the Democrats’ “insane” policies on immigration. Democratic politicians “blatantly drop like 10 or 15,000 immigrants into a black neighborhood, blatantly giving them resources they don’t give us,” she said. The wave of new immigrants under Biden, she believes, is driving down working-class wages. Moreover, she said, “a lot of the young males are dangerous”. She knows older immigrants who have been in Oakland for decades who feel the same way about the new arrivals.

Marquise felt a similar way. When I asked him why he doesn’t support the Democrats, he replied: “To tell the truth: immigrants.” “There’s too many in California.” He said that there are no jobs available. The woman in the passenger seat agreed, describing overcrowded classrooms filled with immigrant children who weren’t required to be immunised. She complained about teachers “speaking Mexican” in class.

When I asked Marquise what he liked about Trump, he replied that the President-elect would “get rid of all the Mexicans”. He also believed that Trump would let a lot of people out of prison. “He’s an asshole, but not that bad,” he explained.

There’s another, more subtle factor eroding loyalty to the Democrats: the party’s failure to improve economic conditions for working-class black Americans. The Democratic Party’s long history is littered with broken promises to black voters. The disappointments span the decades, from Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society to Barack Obama’s promise of Hope.

Hailey’s older brother, Cardell Watkins, doesn’t particularly like Trump. But when he heard Trump speaking in 2016 about how bleak conditions were for black Americans under Democratic governance, his ears pricked up. “You’re living in poverty,” Trump riffed. “Your schools are no good. You have no jobs. Fifty-eight percent of your youth is unemployed.” The speech touched a nerve.

Watkins, 62, has been a longshoreman for two decades. He currently works at the Port of Oakland. We, longshoremen, he said, “work ourselves to death”. The average longshoreman retires at about 70 years old, he said, and only lives to the age of 73 or 74. His granddaughter is a longshoreman, too. He’s constantly telling her to get out and go to school.

That said, as a union worker, Watkins has done well for himself. He’s been making about $150,000 a year for the better part of the last decade, with only a high-school diploma. He moved out of Oakland and now lives in Fairfield, a Bay Area suburb. “I’m around white people,” he told me. “I’ve never been so happy in my life. The front yards are clean, there’s no constant blaring of sirens.”

“I don’t want my grandchildren growing up in Oakland,” he said. “All the trash on the street, all the undocumented people coming in, all the lies.” He said he understands “white flight” now.

Watkins believes that local politicians, who are almost entirely Democrats, “have failed us”. “The Nancy Pelosis. Do you know how wealthy they are now?” The Democrats inherited San Francisco and Oakland, two cities with thriving maritime industries, he said, and “[ran] them into the ground”.

“They’re not interested in changing, in making America better. They’re interested in power and influence. They can live on Martha’s Vineyard, they can move to Switzerland, where there’s no crime or dirt in the streets. Once you become infinitely wealthy, the whole world is your neighbourhood.”

When he was a kid, Watkins was raised to believe in Democratic leaders such as Jesse Jackson, Ralph Abernathy, and Andrew Young, who had marched with Dr. Martin Luther King. “They were able to tell us who to endorse and support,” he said. “We were in lockstep.”

But over the years, he saw those leaders betray ordinary black Americans, putting their careers before their constituents. “Once they got what they wanted from us, they didn’t have our best interests at heart,” he said. “We were being used.” His sister, Michelle Hailey, agrees.

When Obama first came on the scene, the siblings were exuberant. Hailey described Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention as “magic”. But by the end of his presidency, they felt used all over again. By then, “[Obama] didn’t even really believe the shit he was saying no more,” said Hailey.

Hailey recalls the moment she lost faith in the Obama project. It was during the Great Recession, when Hailey was doing loan modifications for a bank called World Savings, trying to help homeowners avoid foreclosure. At the time, Senator Elizabeth Warren favoured a policy called “cramdown”, which would have allowed bankruptcy judges to reduce people’s mortgage debts to bring them into line with the reduced values of their homes. “This was going to be a lifeline,” Hailey said. “It could have saved so many people.” She believes that Obama killed it, helping the banks facilitate what she described as “the greatest transfer of black wealth in the history of the country”.

These days she sees Obama as just another condescending politician. “He’s made a cottage industry of always talking down to black people.” “He’s uplifting for every other race. But always kind of negative toward black people.”

This year, both Hailey and her brother thought Kamala Harris was just more of the same. “She doesn’t care about black people,” Watkins told me. “She just wants to be president — another Rolex in her jewellery box.”

Such scepticism was widespread among the voters I spoke to, but it was especially pronounced among the younger ones. Watkins and Hailey’s generation was raised in the shadow of the Civil Rights Movement. Its heroes became elected leaders who basked in history’s heroic glow as they operated the levers of the Democratic machine. Yet the lives of younger black Americans today have been shaped by what that movement failed to reverse: enduring, racialised poverty; urban blight; and endemic violence.

Hailey’s support for Trump has made her somewhat of a pariah among African Americans of her generation. But she believes that among younger black people the partisan loyalty that was so deeply ingrained in her is entirely absent. “The Democratic Party has lost the young black generation,” she told me. “They’re gone. And that’s in liberal Oakland. They want no part of it.”

Marquise’s views confirm her suspicions. “She full of shit,” Marquise said of Harris. When Harris kicked off her campaign, her team seemed to assume that young voters would flock to her. When Charli XCX tweeted that Harris was “brat”, her campaign revelled in the approval, rebranding her online presence to match the pop artist’s album cover.

But on the topic of Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion performing alongside Kamala during her campaign, Marquise said “It’s hella ghetto. Unprofessional.” He marvelled that Kamala Harris would put someone like Cardi B on stage with her while Trump was campaigning with Elon Musk.

The only reason the Democrats selected Harris, Marquise believes, was because she was a “minority”. But for black voters like him, appeals to identity politics are no longer enough to ensure their loyalty. Instead, they want to see real change — Hailey pointed to things like student reading scores, poverty, and crime. She said that the Democrats’ appeal to black voters was always “emotional, never practical”. She was tired of the “paternalistic attitude the party has taken toward black people”.

Nowadays, Watkins said that the workers at the union hiring hall, who are mostly black and Latino, are “flying their colours” for Donald Trump. Like him, they’re tired of being told what to think and who to vote for.

“I don’t have anything against her or anyone else,” Watkins said of Kamala Harris. “Just don’t tell me I have to support her, or that Trump’s been associated with white supremacy so I can’t vote for him. I’m tired of the bullshit. If it takes a white supremacist to get things done, so be it.”

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Leighton Woodhouse is a journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Oakland, California.

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