There is massive policy contradiction at the heart of this GOP strategy: Sometimes Biden’s record is described as too pro-prison and he’s allegedly responsible for thousands of young Black men going to jail because of the harsh provisions in the 1994 Crime Bill, which Biden helped draft. At the same time Trump said Thursday that Biden will increase crime by “immediately releasing 400,000 criminals onto the streets and into your neighborhoods” and then “defund police departments all across America” until “no one will be safe in Biden’s America.”
But despite this inconsistency — not to mention the difficult to fathom idea that Trump could win a higher percentage of Black voters in the current climate — there are serious analysts, like Shor, who see the defection of some working-class Blacks to the right as in line with trends in other democracies where the education divide can be more determinative of voting patterns than racial or ethnic divides.
To add yet another contradiction into this strategy, Trump’s pitch to the first group, white suburbanites, is based on an explicitly racist narrative about Black protesters. So far it hasn’t worked. But over the last two weeks, and especially since the unrest in Wisconsin following the shooting of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man who was paralyzed after he was shot in the back seven times by a white place officer in Kenosha, Democrats have been increasingly fearful about the trends. (One recent poll of Wisconsin voters found that approval for Black Lives Matter protests dropped from 61 percent in June to 48 percent in August, and all of the change came from whites.)
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