Remember …..
Hillary Clinton lost several state by less than 100,000 votes….
If Black …and White Obama voters HAD shown up in those states on election day 2016 that Clinton lost to lose the electoral vote?
The fact that Barack Obama was the first ‘black ‘ (mixed) race President WAS a large factor in who came out to vote…..
2016 was an election cycle in which Trump’s margin of victory was one of the narrowest in U.S. history. It came down to about 78,000 votes in three states, including Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It’s hard not to wonder, then, how the decrease in turnout among black voters might have affected the outcome. In Michigan, where 14 percent of residents are black, Trump won by 10,704 votes of 4.8 million cast. In Pennsylvania, he won by 44,000 of 6.2 million cast — with blacks making up more than a tenth of the population. Clinton wins those states, and the 2016 race is essentially a tie.
Again: The analysis published by the Times, and conducted by Sean McElwee, Jesse H. Rhodes, Brian F. Schaffner and Bernard L. Fraga, shows that more white Obama 2012 voters than black voters stayed home. But we also know that the black vote was targeted by suppression efforts from Russian trolls (as made clear in ads released by social media companies) and, according to Bloomberg News shortly before the election, by the Trump campaign itself.
Clinton’s “1996 suggestion that some African American males are ‘super predators’ is the basis of a below-the-radar effort to discourage infrequent black voters from showing up at the polls — particularly in Florida,” Bloomberg’s Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg wrote in October 2016.
2016 was also the first election since the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act in 2013. New voting restrictions were implemented in a number of states that had the almost-certain effect of driving down turnout among groups that tend to vote Democratic — including among black voters.
There is another reason that black turnout might have declined from 2012 to 2016. In 2008 and 2012, the Democratic presidential candidate was Obama, the first African American president of the United States. Without Obama on the ballot in 2016, turnout fell. That is not the only time that effect was apparent. In 2008, 69 percent of registered black voters cast ballots, compared with 65 percent of whites, according to the U.S. Elections Project. In 2010, with Obama not on the ballot, 45 percent of whites voted, a drop of 20 percentage points. Only 42 percent of black voters did — a decline of 27 points….