Trump Registers 0% Support with Detroit’s Black Voters

DETROIT, MI — If Donald Trump wins the White House, it won’t be with the help of black voters in Detroit, according to a new Michigan poll.

Despite the Republican presidential nominee's outreach efforts to African-American voters in Detroit, Trump polled at zero percent among voters in the predominately black city in a poll released Thursday and commissioned by The Detroit News and WDIV-TV. Democrat Hillary Clinton polled at 89.7 percent in Detroit.

The poll of 600 likely voters, conducted Sept. 27-29 by the Glengariff Group Inc. after the first nationally televised presidential debate, also showed Trump losing ground among all Michigan voters, trailing Democrat Hillary Clinton by 7 percentage points.

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There’s a caveat, though, and it's important.

The overall sample size is large enough to yield meaningful results, but it included only 39 Detroit residents, so the margin of error is high in Michigan’s largest city, WDIV said.

Still, the poll mirrors an earlier NBC News poll measuring Trump’s support among black voters in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Nationally, polls show Clinton’s firewall of support among black voters isn’t entirely impermeable, however.

A USC Dornslife/Los Angeles Times “Daybreak” tracking poll, showed that 74 percent of African-Americans nationwide back Clinton — but the 26 percent who don’t support her strikes at assertions Trump has made that Clinton’s advocacy for African-Americans is weak and that she takes their votes for granted.

The black vote is important, and candidates can’t win elections without it, former Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder — the first African-American governor since Reconstruction and the first ever in his state — told the Washington Post.

“You cannot win this election without the African American vote,” Wilder told the newspaper last week. “Hillary obviously has the necessary qualifications. … But tell me how what you’ve done relates to what (the black community) needs.”

Wilder, a Democrat who hasn’t hesitated to criticize members of his party, gave Trump kudos for his outreach to African-American voters.

“Whether it’s genuine or legitimate or not, at least he’s doing it,” Wilder told the Washington Post. “Either way, I think it’s good.”

Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr Commons