Harris is trying to reverse a steep decline in Black turnout in Wisconsin
"MILWAUKEE — Like many voters here, Kamar Carter has been inundated with political ads and campaign literature from Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
But Carter, 49, the owner of an herbal supplements store, can’t shake the feeling that his vote won’t really matter.
Carter has voted for both Republicans and Democrats in the past but didn’t cast a ballot in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, part of a sharp plunge in Black turnout in the state since 2012, when President Obama ran for reelection — the largest such drop anywhere in the country.
The steep decline in voting by one of the most loyal Democratic constituencies in recent elections presents a challenge to Vice President Kamala Harris, who will need to maximize turnout among Black voters to win this essential swing state. President Joe Biden carried the state in 2020 by only about 20,000 votes, less than one percentage point.
For decades, Wisconsin’s Black community has had among the highest turnout rates in the country. In 2012, with Barack Obama on the ballot, 78.5 percent of the state’s Black voting-age population went to the polls, according to census data. But that rate began to plummet in 2016 when 46.8 percent of the state’s Black voting-age residents cast a ballot, falling to 43.5 percent in 2020.
Meanwhile, between 2012 and 2020, White Wisconsin voter turnout slightly increased from 75 percent to 77 percent, and Hispanic turnout leaped from 44 percent to nearly 60 percent.
The causes for the drop in turnout are complex, experts say, ranging from deepening frustration with the lack of economic progress, to a growing number of younger Black voterswho are less interested in politics than their parents and grandparents who lived through the civil rights era and saw voting as the hard-won fruit of those battles. For voters like Carter, there’s also a fundamental despair.
“I feel like both parties treat us horribly and until one of them shows me something different, that’s how I’m going to feel,” he said.
Harris is currently leading in the state by 3 percentage points, within a normal-sized polling error, according to an average of recent polls.
Democrats are hoping Harris, who is Black and Indian American, can generate the same kind of enthusiasm among Black voters as Obama’s historic elections. A Harris campaign official said efforts were focused on increasing turnout in Milwaukee’s north side, home to the state’s largest concentration of Black votes, bringing in celebrities to energize potential voters and investing in an extensive get-out-the-vote machine.
The Harris campaign opened its Wisconsin headquarters in Milwaukee instead of the wealthier, predominately-White city of Madison, the state capital, the first time in two decades a major party candidate has done so, the official said. Harris has held two major rallies in the Milwaukee area since launching her campaign in July. And her campaign hired a full-time staffer dedicated just to Black media outreach in Wisconsin, according to the campaign official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal campaign strategy.
Asked about former president Trump’s efforts in the state, a campaign spokesperson noted that Republicans, who held their national convention in Milwaukee in July, have also established a presence on the north side, including opening a Black community center in 2021.
“The RNC has made a dedicated effort to engage with the Black community year-round — not just a few weeks before a presidential election,” then-RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel said when the center was opened.
But experts say there is a deeper issue affecting turnout: the dismal conditions facing Milwaukee’s Black communities.
The Milwaukee region, where the vast majority of the state’s Black voters live, has the lowest median income for Black residents and the highest Black poverty rate in the country’s 50 largest metropolitan areas, according to 2020 a study by Marc Levine, a professor at University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee, which found “Black median household income in Milwaukee, adjusted for inflation, has declined by an astonishing 30 percent since 1979.” The unemployment rate for Wisconsin’s Black residents hit 5.6 percent during the second quarter of 2024, nearly double the state’s overall rate of 2.9 percent.
The financial news website, 24/7 Wall St., has consistently named Wisconsin the “Worst State for Black Americans” in its annual rankings, pointing to government data that shows the state has the widest gaps in income and homeownership between Black and White residents. Meanwhile, The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit criminal justice reform advocacy group, found that Wisconsin imprisons its Black residents at the highest rate in the country, and while Black residents represent just 6 percent of the state’s residents, they comprise 42 percent of the Wisconsin prison population.
In recent interviews, more than a dozen Black residents across the city’s north side said they weren’t convinced electing Harris or Trump would lead to the kind of transformation their neighborhood needs.
Many people were disappointed that the Obama administration failed to deliver an economic revival of the community, said Kitonga Alexander, a lifelong resident of Milwaukee and co-executive director of Milwaukee Bronzeville Histories, a nonprofit that seeks to document Milwaukee’s Black history.
“Black people in this city turned out in huge numbers to vote for the ‘hope and change’ that President Obama was promising,” said Alexander, referring to Obama’s celebrated 2008 campaign slogan. “But people didn’t see changes in their neighborhood and they didn’t see changes to their paychecks, and I think that disillusioned a lot of people.”
The Harris campaign official said it’s trying to turn that around. Harris — and Black surrogates such as Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.), Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Rep. James E. Clyburn and Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) — can frequently be heard on Milwaukee’s Black-owned radio stations. The campaign also has invested in TV spots targeting Black voters, airing during the NFL season opener as well as during shows popular with Black audiences like “Sherri” and “The Jennifer Hudson Show.”
The Harris official said the campaign has reached about 30,000 voters in Milwaukee, many of whom they had not been able to reach through traditional door knocking or phone banking in prior cycles, by having friends and family members contact them instead.
The campaign has also tapped volunteers like Lorenzo Davis, the 38-year-old owner of the Zoe’s Barber Elite & Beauty Salon on the north side, to make one-on-one pitches to skeptical potential voters.
Growing up, Davis said, his older family members often told stories about the civil rights-era fight many endured for Black Americans to win the right the vote. That helped make him a dedicated voter.
“I remember my grandmother, on the night that Obama was elected, she cried,” said Davis, as he cut 42-year-old Qadir Carter’s hair.
“I asked her why see was crying, and she said she was crying for all the Black people who died just trying to vote. I will always remember that.”
Carter, who is not related to Kamar, heard Davis out, but said he still doesn’t believe that voting will change things in their community.
“If we want a good neighborhood here, we are going to have to build it ourselves,” said Carter, a small-business owner with a day-care center and rental properties. “We have to come together as Black folks and take our community back because no politician is going to come from the outside to save us.”
As the election approaches, Kamar Carter, the owner of the herbal supplements company, said he is ready to start voting again.
When he started his company in 2019, he sold his products at pop-up events across the neighborhood. Business was brisk and so last year, he opened a storefront in Sherman Phoenix Marketplace, a shopping center set up in a former bank building burned during 2016 protests sparked by the police shooting of Sylville Smith, a 23-year-old Black man.
He recently quit his job to focus on his supplements business full-time. But without employer-provided health care, he’s worried about the cost of insurance affecting his ability to grow his business, Carter said.
He said he’s planning to cast his ballot for Harris, though he is not convinced she would be able to transform his community.
More of his neighbors have been talking about the election since Harris became the nominee, Carter said. There is a level of enthusiasm he last saw during Obama’s historic election as the first Black president, he said.
But his expectations are more tempered this time around.
“At the end of the day, her being Black isn’t going to put money in your pocket or put no food on the table,” said Carter."
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