Black swing-state voters overwhelmingly back Harris — with key divides on age and gender, Howard poll shows

An overwhelming majority of Black likely voters in battleground states said they’ll vote for Vice President Kamala Harris in November — though she needs to close the deal with some skeptical undecideds to reach President Joe Biden’s 2020 margins among Black voters.

The data, from a new Howard University Initiative on Public Opinion poll of 963 likely Black voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — the seven core battleground states in the election — show 82% say they’ll vote for Harris, while 12% say they’ll vote for former President Donald Trump. Another 5% are undecided, and 1% plan to pick another candidate.

The findings are in line with 2020 exit poll results across the same battleground states, where 89% of Black voters supported Biden and 9% supported Trump, as well as other post-election research studying the 2020 vote.

Yet while Black swing-state voters are largely lined up behind Harris, there are some important differences among subsets of the Black vote.“We have 100% Black voters in the poll, and that creates opportunities for us to drill down on the diverse representations of thought in Black communities,” said a co-director of the Initiative on Public Opinion, Dana Williams, dean of the Graduate School at Howard University.

“It’s important for the range of Black voices to be heard and to be known,” Williams added. “I think part of the responsibility of the mainstream media is to reflect the population, and as one of the largest-growing populations of voters, we need to spend a lot more time thinking about what’s on their minds so that legislative agendas, presidential agendas, messaging on all of those fronts don’t ignore a significant voting population.”

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