October 1, 2016 | No Comments
Hillary Clinton desperately needed to come to Charlotte.
She tried too soon, planning a trip last week on the advice of faith leaders, to stand with a community in crisis after another shooting of an unarmed black man by a police officer – only to be rebuffed by city officials who said Charlotte needed time to cool down.
But the week-long postponement prove a benefit to Clinton.
When she lands there Sunday, Clinton will arrive with the same mission – convincing young African Americans in North Carolina that she shares their anger and will prioritize the policing reforms they demand – but with an even starker contrast with Donald Trump.
On the debate stage, in front of 84 million viewers, the Republican nominee said last week that the way to heal the country’s racial divide was to “bring back law and order.” He praised stop-and-frisk, which has been ruled unconstitutional in New York. And he defiantly told the black moderator that he had nothing to say to African Americans for propagating the false claim that President Obama was not born in America.
In contrast, Clinton spoke about “implicit bias” and “systematic racism,” the language of the Black Lives Matter movement.
African-American leaders like Rev. Al Sharpton cast Trump’s language at the debate as racist “code words.” “It makes her going even more of a point for a lot of black voters,” Sharpton said in an interview. “But she’s got to say more than, ‘I feel your pain.’ It would be a time for her to say, this is the kind of Attorney General I would appoint. To come with substance at a point of contention is a way to really dramatize the point.”
Outreach to the cohort of black voters who elected Obama has defined Clinton’s campaign, from the tentative early days of the primary to her general election endgame. Her strongest speeches have been on race; some of her most powerful surrogates have been the Mothers of the Movement.
After the murder of Freddie Gray, Clinton made the first major policy address of her campaign about criminal justice reform. Following the mass shooting at a Charleston church in June of 2015, Clinton admitted, “race remains a deep fault line in America.” And she was the first candidate to visit Flint, Michigan, in February, during a water contamination crisis that was harming predominantly poor, minority families.
And yet despite it all, Clinton is still struggling to make the sale to a critical group of young black voters, who remain culturally disconnected from her and apparently deaf to her message.
Charlotte, the site of Barack Obama’s triumphant 2012 nomination, is where Clinton’s struggle to electrify his coalition of voters will meet the reality of electoral math. North Carolina is a pivotal purple state where every vote counts — Obama won it by 14,000 voters in 2008, but lost it to Mitt Romney by a small margin four years later.
The black voters outraged and heartbroken over the spate of fatal police shootings represent a critical population in a critical state where Clinton enters the final month of the campaign at a disadvantage — Trump is currently leading by three points in the battleground state, according to the Real Clear Politics polling average.
With 37 days to go, the visit to Charlotte represents an opportunity to speak directly to young black voters in crisis, who have yet to hear her message despite Clinton trying to beat the drum.
“Her story has been lost in a personality driven campaign,” explained Jill Hanauer, president and CEO of Project New America, which has conducted extensive focus groups with young black voters. Those participants said they remain unfamiliar with Clinton’s plans to reform the criminal justice system, and were surprised when informed that her priorities actually matched their own. “That further alienates the exact voters who must participate in this election, not only for her to win, but to make the change they expect from this nation and its leaders,” Hanauer said.
In Charlotte, some African-American activists said they know they like Clinton more than Trump but still wish they didn’t feel like they were simply choosing the lesser of two evils. “Our motivation to vote is that there is, in some small way, some efforts at helping us,” said John Barnett, an activist in Charlotte who founded the group True Healing Under God (T.H.U.G). “We felt connected to Barack Obama. With Hillary, we want to feel that same effect.”
Barnett said Clinton started to appeal to him last week, when she called for the police department to release video of the Scott shooting. “She got about 80 percent of the black vote in Charlotte just for doing that,” Barnett said. “Trump didn’t do that, nor did Barack Obama.”
Clinton’s visit comes after a week when she has been desperately trying to make the positive case for her candidacy, talking about debt-free college in New Hampshire with Bernie Sanders at her side, and making the case for early voting in Iowa. Her operatives in recent weeks have recognized the need to offer more than a dressing down of Trump in order to appeal to Clinton’s base.
But for the former secretary of state, a white, 68-year-old midwestern woman, recreating the passion young black voters felt for Obama — those first-time voters lacking the Democratic party loyalty of an older generation of African-Americans — is an impossibly tall order.
“She is never going to match the passion, the excitement, and the sense of symbolic empathy that Barack Obama has,” said Jason Johnson, a political science professor at Baltimore’s Morgan State University, and the political editor at The Root. “It’s like going on stage for your grammy performance after Beyonce. There’s nothing you can do. But her visit to Charlotte will demonstrate that she’s going to make young brown and tan people a priority.”
In Brooklyn, however, campaign aides are at a loss for what more Clinton can do to appeal to black voters who remain unenthusiastic about her candidacy.
“It’s been a hallmark of Hillary’s campaign—and her career—to engage directly with and listen to families and communities, to voice hard truths about systemic racism, and to focus on solutions that can bring people together and lift people up,” said Clinton’s senior policy adviser Maya Harris. “That’s what she’ll do in Charlotte.”