Former President Barack Obama posited in an interview more black male voters supported President Donald Trump in 2020 partially because of his “macho” persona.
“If there are some in the hip-hop community who are constantly rapping about bling and depicting women in a certain way, and then they hear Donald Trump basically delivering the same version of it, they might say, ‘Yeah, that guy, that’s what I want. That’s what I want to be,’” Obama explained.
Obama spoke about the increase of black men supporting President Trump in an interview with Peter Hamby, the host of Snapchat’s “Good Luck America.” Hamby noted that 95 percent of black male voters supported Obama, but that only 80 percent of black men voted for former Vice President Joe Biden.
Exit polls in 2020 by Edison Research showed Trump actually improved his support from black voters by four percentage points.
Obama said the pop culture values of wealth, power, and greed appealed to American men of every race.
“I think men generally are more susceptible to public figures who act tough, sort of a stereotypical macho style,” Obama said. “I don’t think Black men are immune to that any more than white or Hispanic men are.”
But the former president noted the black community was more complex and that there were a lot of progressive black men.
“Those of us who are progressive, who think, for example, that women should be treated with respect and dignity or wealth isn’t the measure of worth, we should have a more equitable society, we can’t take for granted any group,” he said.
He noted some black neighborhoods still had “a bunch of folks who are churchgoing folks” that still had “pretty conservative views about a lot of things.”
He said that Democrats should never believe that they had the black or Hispanic votes “locked up” and should never assume they could not appeal to white men.
“[T]he one thing that the presidency taught me is the country’s complicated,” he said.