Podcast: Trump Ignored Black Voters. But Has Clinton Earned 91% of Their Support? - The New York Times

"Mr. Blow discusses the difficult choice this election. “One party approaches you with a philosophy of pain, and the other approaches you with a philosophy of pity,” he says. “And most black people, I would venture, don’t want either.”



But he warns about false equivalency. “Have Democrats been perfect? Of course they haven’t. But there are actual attacks on individual people of color in this country,” he says, speaking of efforts to enact stricter voter registration laws. “Everyone knows the net effect of them will be a disproportionate impact on poor people and minorities and, in particular, black people,” he said, “and those are, for the most part, Republican legislatures doing that.”



Despite not being perfect, as Mr. Blow says, the Democratic Party — Hillary Clinton in particular — has overwhelming support from black voters. A recent poll shows Mrs. Clinton with 91 percent of the black vote, compared to 1 percent for Mr. Trump. I ask Ms. Alcindor whether Mrs. Clinton has earned that. She thought back to what she heard while covering Bernie Sanders.



“Bernie Sanders would say this thing: ‘People don’t know me, which is why they’re not flocking to me. African-Americans don’t know me,’ ” she recalls. “I think that the voters that Bernie Sanders thought were ignoring him because they didn’t know him — I think they knew who Bernie Sanders was.



“African-Americans that I interviewed, they knew exactly who Bernie Sanders was,” she says, “and they weren’t picking him. They were picking Hillary Clinton.”



Podcast: Trump Ignored Black Voters. But Has Clinton Earned 91% of Their Support? - The New York Times