Black Voters Pulling Away from Democrat Party on Abortion, Education

A new announcement from the predominantly black and largest Pentecostal church in the United States and school choice polling data show black voters pulling away from the Democrat Party on two dominant issues in the 2020 elections: abortion and education.

Breitbart News reported last week that two recent polls demonstrate 34 percent of black likely voters approve of President Donald Trump’s presidency:

A Rasmussen poll released Friday showed black likely voter approval of Trump at 34 percent. An Emerson Poll showed 34.5 percent approval by the same demographic.

“Boom,” wrote black author and Trump supporter Deneen Borelli on Twitter, calling the results “Democrats worst nightmare.”

The polls are released as the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), one of the largest historically black Protestant churches in the U.S., announced in November it had unanimously passed a resolution that affirms the value and dignity of all human life and condemns elective abortion.

Writing at the Washington Examiner, Timothy Head, executive director of the Faith & Freedom Coalition and Rev. Dean Nelson, executive director of Human Coalition Action, the two leaders noted:

Something remarkable just happened in St. Louis that you probably didn’t hear about. The Church of God in Christ, a seven-million-member black denomination, unanimously passed a historic resolution affirming the value and dignity of every human life and opposing the practice of elective abortion in America.

A key excerpt from the Resolution on the Sanctity of Human Life reads:

COGIC is one of the largest historically black Protestant denominations, which also include the National Baptist Convention, the National Baptist Convention of America, the Progressive National Convention, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. Like these other groups, COGIC does not have a history of institutional involvement with causes typically associated with the Republican Party. Yet given the direction that abortion policy is moving in this country, its leaders felt compelled to act.

COGIC joined with the pro-life Human Coalition to create the Family Life Campaign, a three-year initiative that serves to save babies from abortion.

In a 2016 press release about the joint effort, Bishop Charles Blake, presiding bishop of COGIC, likened the work of pro-life Christians to Jesus’s command, “Let the little children to come unto me”:

We see an escalation in violence around the world that is troubling. Terrorism, racial tension in America, and escalating crime. Indeed, this violence worsens daily as hundreds of thousands of children are snatched from their mothers’ wombs prematurely and killed through abortion.

What we do for the preborn and the born children in our society is our way of showing the Love and Compassion of Jesus Christ.

The announcement by COGIC comes as an abortion surveillance report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that, with only 32 areas in the U.S. reporting race and ethnicity data for 2016, when the data was last collected, non-Hispanic black women accounted for 38 percent – the largest percentage of any race/ethnic group – of all abortions in the country.

“The comparatively high abortion rates and ratios among non-Hispanic black women have been attributed to higher unintended pregnancy rates and a greater percentage of unintended pregnancies ending in abortion,” noted CDC.

Head and Nelson observe American blacks “are becoming the most conservative constituency within the Democratic Party’s coalition,” particularly where religion and abortion are concerned.

New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall warned in September black voters should not be taken for granted.

“[T]he percentage of African-Americans describing themselves as moderate or conservative is almost twice as large as the percentage of white Democratic primary voters who describe themselves that way,” he wrote, adding:

In the case of abortion, the WSJ/NBC surveys show that 97 percent of white primary voters agree that the procedure should be “totally legal” compared with two thirds of black primary voters. A vanishingly small number of white Democratic primary voters — 3 percent — said abortion should be illegal, compared with a third of black Democrats.

Yet, as Maggie Astor at the Times observed last week, after surveying all 2020 Democrat presidential candidates, the group of contenders “has coalesced around an abortion rights agenda more far-reaching than anything past nominees have proposed.”

“The positions reflect a hugely consequential shift on one of the country’s most politically divisive issues,” she concluded.

Rev. Bill Owens, president of the Coalition of African American Pastors (CAAP), told Breitbart News abortion has “decimated the black community and is in opposition to our faith.”

“But the Left supports unlimited abortion policies that have led to black babies being aborted more than any other group,” he observed.

Education may present the field of Democrats with another abrupt sign of the severing of their bond with black voters, though, once again, few have bothered to notice.

Florida Angel parent Kiyan Michael drew attention to the substantial discrepancy between black voters and Democrats on the issue of school choice.

Breitbart News reported:

Michael points to one national poll, commissioned by the American Federation for Children, advocates for school choice, and conducted by Beck Research, a Democratic polling firm, that found 67 percent of voters support school choice, including 73 percent of Latinos, 67 percent of blacks, and 68 percent of whites.

Another poll released in August by Education Next found black Democrats approve of targeted vouchers, universal vouchers, and charter schools at 70 percent, 64 percent, and 55 percent, respectively, and Hispanic Democrats approve at 67 percent, 60 percent, and 47 percent.

Yet a third poll commissioned by school choice proponents Democrats for Education Reform, and conducted by the Benenson Strategy Group, found 81 percent of Democrat primary voters, including 89 percent of black Democrat primary voters, support a proposal to “expand access to more choices and options within the public-school system,” including charter schools, which are funded with taxpayer dollars but operated by private boards.

Despite these overwhelming numbers in support of school choice in its many forms, Michael observed that “do-nothing Democrats still call the policy racist because they’d rather that public school teachers win with lifetime employment while black children lose with a lifetime of underperformance and missed dreams.”

Tommy Shultz explained at the Washington Examiner “Democrats love school choice, except when they’re running for president,” presumably when they seek the backing of the teachers’ unions.

“It’s no mystery why black voters are leaving the far-left’s agenda,” assert Owens and his wife, Dr. Deborah Owens, authors of the new book A Dream Derailed: How the Left Hijacked Civil Rights to Create a Permanent Underclass.

With Trump’s presidency focused on a pro-life agenda and school choice to move low-income children out of failing public schools, the Owenses add:

President Trump asked black voters to give him a chance … and we did. Now, he’s delivering on his promises and gaining more support. The economy is doing well, black unemployment is at its lowest level yet, and he is protecting religious freedom. Based on the conversations we’ve had with other black voters, I suspect his support is even higher than the polls indicate.

They assert as well that Democrats abandoned black Americans decades ago.

“We’re tired of being taken for granted by politicians who don’t reflect our values,” they state. “The black church has long been the center of the black community. But Leftists are now actively trying to push Christians out of the public square. When they’re not trying to silence us, they’re mocking us or our values.”