Jamaal Stokes’s quality of life in Milwaukee has declined over the past decade, just as it has for many other Black residents.
He lost his well-paying factory job in the mid-2010s, when his company left town. He spent the next several years toiling in temporary jobs as he searched for stable employment. Mr. Stokes, 44, now works as a security guard at a local supermarket, even as he struggles to afford groceries himself.
This presidential election, he paid little attention to Donald J. Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris, because national politics are “not the answer.”
“So what’s the point?” he asked. “I’m just kind of over it all.”
In the final weeks of the campaign, many Democrats hoped that signs of crumbling support among Black voters would not materialize at the polls.
The historic nature of the campaign, with the possibility of the country electing a Black and Indian American woman as its leader, inspired some confidence.
There was also an expectation that Mr. Trump’s baggage would be poisonous, as he was heavily criticized for trying to discredit Ms. Harris’s racial identity, spreading vicious disinformation about Haitians eating pets and accusing immigrants of taking “Black jobs.”
And for an overwhelming majority of Black Americans, those reasons were more than enough to justify supporting Ms. Harris. But her loss has illuminated a percolating sense of dissatisfaction and an increasingly conspicuous divide within the Black community, as a segment of Black voters rejected her campaign and the message of the Democratic Party more broadly.
Some of those voters, namely working-class Black men, said they doubted their circumstances would fundamentally change, regardless of who won. The dissatisfaction — evident in urban centers in swing states, like Milwaukee and Philadelphia, as well as remote reaches in the Mississippi Delta — was potent enough to depress turnout in some Democratic strongholds and even flip some majority-Black counties to Mr. Trump.
The outcome was less of a reflection of enthusiasm for Mr. Trump and more of an indication that some Black voters were questioning what dividends, if any, have come from their loyalty to the Democratic Party.
“I think the Democrats have abused us for years,” said Vincent Genous, 50, who lives in Yazoo City, Miss., and followed the guidance he grew up hearing — that the party was his only realistic choice — before he was swayed by Mr. Trump in recent elections.
Even some Harris voters were not enthused. In Philadelphia, David Childs, a 40-year-old vendor in the city’s downtown shopping district, said he would reluctantly vote for her, but that neither candidate really spoke to his concerns, and that he mostly heard about abortion and the southern border.
“Neither one of them is going to affect us down here directly,” he said.
Mr. Childs said he has not seen any money or direct assistance for small businesses like his and that the Biden administration did not do enough to help people like him.
For many Black Americans, the election was “not really a question of a choice between Harris and Trump,” said Christopher Towler, an associate professor of political science at Sacramento State and the director of the Black Voter Project, which studies political attitudes and engagement.
“It was a choice between participating at all or staying home,” Mr. Towler said.
For example, in Milwaukee, the heart of the Black population in Wisconsin, the city’s crucial base of Democratic voters seems to have steadily lost enthusiasm for the party.
The city’s majority Black wards saw a minor partisan shift away from Democrats in recent election cycles, said John D. Johnson, a researcher at Marquette University Law School. But those wards have seen a precipitous drop in turnout, which fell to 58 percent when President Biden ran in 2020 from 77 percent during Mr. Obama’s 2012 re-election.
Turnout for Ms. Harris did not appear to plunge even further, according to an initial analysis of election data from Mr. Johnson. But she also did not appear to make up much lost ground.
Mr. Stokes, the security guard, chose to stay home. “I said ‘Let the chips fall where they may,’” he said. “Nothing changes for Black folks, really.”
Some Black voters also voted — or considered voting — for Mr. Trump. In Nash County, N.C., a largely rural county east of Raleigh where roughly 40 percent of residents are Black, voters have sided with the winner of the last four presidential elections — including with Mr. Trump this month.
Linwood Yarborough, 43, who works part time fixing cars, said he thought Ms. Harris was “more for the people.” And he had a boss and others who lobbied for her.
But an uncle, a truck driver in the same county, revealed that he planned to vote Republican. Mr. Yarborough said that his uncle told him that life for Black people had been far better under Mr. Trump’s leadership than it was under President Biden’s.
“Gas prices were down when he was in office; groceries were cheaper,” Mr. Yarborough recalled his uncle saying.
“And I agree with that,” Mr. Yarborough acknowledged.
Mr. Yarborough ended up not voting.
In red states, voters also yearned for change.
Yazoo County, Miss., where Mr. Genous lives, is 60 percent Black. It’s in the poorest stretch of one of the country’s poorest states. Health outcomes have been dire. Yazoo City’s public school system was in such awful condition that it was taken over by the state. Only 12 percent of residents hold a college degree.
And Yazoo County flipped to Mr. Trump in 2024 from Mr. Biden in 2020. In this part of the world, where an inescapable history of slavery, segregation and disenfranchisement has taught many that the promise of America was more an ideal to chase than a reality to safeguard, the arguments that Mr. Trump posed grave peril to democratic institutions could only gain so much traction.
And to Mr. Genous, those arguments were overblown. Mr. Trump said he was not a politician, and he did not sound like one. He said things that were offensive or simply unbelievable — Mr. Genous never thought for a second that Mexico would pay for a border wall. But he was blunt, raw. And more and more, Mr. Genous agreed with his message.
“I just feel like some things need to be said and Trump is going to say it,” said Mr. Genous, who works as a supervisor for a discount retail chain.
Younger generations of Black voters lack the same loyalty to the Democratic Party as baby boomers and Gen Xers, said Alvin B. Tillery Jr., a political science professor at Northwestern who founded a political action committee to focus on Black swing state voters. The allegiance of older voters was often forged through the Civil Rights Movement and from witnessing race relations in the 20th century.
Younger voters, however, need to be sold on their vote for Democrats, Mr. Tillery said, “but the campaign and the party did not do a good job of that. And that’s a big part of why they lost.”
Bobby Jackson, 28, an assistant director at a small private school in Yazoo City, Miss., was skeptical of Mr. Trump. But he was just as unsure about Ms. Harris. He did not know much about her when she entered the race in late July, and still felt as if he didn’t know her by Election Day.
He was put off by the celebrities — Beyoncé, Megan Thee Stallion, Bruce Springsteen and Oprah Winfrey — who endorsed her campaign.
He voted for Ms. Harris, but his enthusiasm for the Democratic Party has waned. He said the party was offering “a lot of promises, but not following through.”
Some younger Black men said that they were also frustrated by Ms. Harris’s emphasis on her law enforcement experience as a prosecutor — part of her appeal to moderate Democrats and disenchanted Republicans.
Ronnell Shaw, 36, lives in a section of Milwaukee’s north side, where incarceration rates are among the highest in the nation.
He said that he has cousins and friends who have faced harassment by the police. Mr. Shaw said that the focus of elected leaders should be on “making up for that history,” rather than “bragging about all the people they locked up.”
At the same time, Mr. Shaw was turned off by Mr. Trump’s brash demeanor and record. So Mr. Shaw, who said that he voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, opted to sit out of this election.
“Why should I vote for someone who doesn’t care about people who look like me?” Mr. Shaw asked about both candidates.
In a crowded shopping center in Rocky Mount, N.C., the main city in Nash County, Carson Criswell, 35, said that while he voted for Ms. Harris, he was not entirely surprised that she did not receive more support among some Black men.
Voting for a woman of color was exciting, he said. “But the world ain’t always ready for that.”
That sexism has enraged some Black women voters, who are the backbone of the Democratic Party.
Linda Arrington, 59, a longtime resident of Nash County, said that as a Black woman, she never once considered anything other than voting for Ms. Harris.
As a substitute teacher, she said, the Republican goal of eliminating the Department of Education did not sit well with her. And she was anxious about the stability of Social Security under a Trump administration.
Ms. Arrington worried, though, that some younger Black men were too laser focused on the economy. “They don’t understand what will happen with everything else: Education, health care, taxes,” she said. “They’re in for a rude awakening.”
Donna Madden, 52, who identifies as a Black Latina, said she was “terrified” of the fallout.
“It’s like a betrayal,” she said. “It just makes me so mad. Are you really doing your research? Do you understand the type of person you’re actually voting for? What in the world is going on?”
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