Why the Election Could Come Down to Black Men in a Few States

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s Politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.

Raphael Warnock arrived on Detroit’s Avenue of Fashion in his SUV, rocking blue jeans and a muted olive vest, ready to make his pitch to the predominantly Black audience. The Democratic Senator from Georgia is among a group of high-profile advocates for Kamala Harris working nonstop to turnout the Black male voters they fear could cost her the election—not so much by backing Donald Trump, but by not bothering to vote at all.

“We cannot afford to stay home. That’s the real threat,” Warnock said in a storefront hastily remade into a field office for Democrats. “There’s no such thing as not voting. If you do anything other than vote for Kamala Harris, then you are putting that man closer to the White House, and we cannot afford for him to be back in.”

Warnock’s words were similar to his message earlier that day at a magnet school with a student body that is three-quarters Black and counts Diana Ross as an alumna. It’s the same warning he’s delivering daily up until Election Day in swing states, on talk radio, on TV, at HBCU homecoming Games, everywhere, really—in hopes that the outcome isn’t dictated by a lack of enthusiasm from low-propensity voters, especially Black men.

“I don’t believe that there are going to be huge swaths of Black men voting for Donald Trump. I don’t believe it,” Warnock told a crowd at a downtown high school. “We’re not a monolith, like anybody else. There will be some; there have always been some.”

Low-propensity voters—those who are registered but far-from-guaranteed to show up on Election Day—have become the entire prize for Democrats at this late hour. Harris’ advisers are making the strategic bet that her hardcore supporters have already banked their votes early where possible and that most of those inclined to back Trump aren’t persuadable. Instead, the focus in the final push has been for those low-likelihood voters with knocks to their doors, with digital ads aimed at specific demographics, and unrelenting phone calls. On Saturday alone, Harris’ campaign said they had volunteers in Pennsylvania knocking on 2,000 doors—each minute.

The Harris team has not tried to hide the aggressive effort to boost voter turnout—especially among Black men. And that effort is especially strong in key cities in the very, very white Blue Wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—all of which look poised to be narrowly decided. Special effort has been made in markets like Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee. Black voters are the spine of the Democratic Party, but efforts to ensure their support had, frankly, languished when Democrats thought they were stuck with President Joe Biden running for a second term. Once Harris took over the ticket in July, the team she inherited and then augmented went into overdrive to make up for the lost ground.

In 2020, Biden dominated in the Blue Wall states among Black voters, winning 92% each in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. But they’re only between 6% and 12% of the overall electorate, meaning a couple thousand Black voters who stay home can actually be the whole ballGame for Democrats. To keep those states, Harris requires turnout and discipline.

In the Southern states in play, it’s more urgent; roughly 30% of the electorate in Georgia is expected to be Black, and 25% in North Carolina. Neither state is a must-win, but they’re part of the seven-state constellation that is the most realistic map of battlegrounds. And in the last presidential race, Biden carried 88% of Black voters to win Georgia in 2020 but the 92% he won in North Carolina proved insufficient.

For her part, Harris has hardly played hard-to-get: she has released an Opportunity Agenda for Black Men and flooded Black media outlets and personalities. Aides have assembled events like a Black Men Huddle, Black Men For Harris, a barbershop tour called Cuts and Conversations, and targeted canvasses branded Step, Stomp, and Stroll. Musical acts like Beyoncé, Usher, John Legend, Lizzo, and Cardi B all have joined Harris events in the last month. Oprah, Stevie Wonder, and Magic Johnson have also been on hand. Actress Kerry Washington practically lives on the campaign trail these days, and the Congressional Black Caucus has been a roving roadshow for the campaign.

Oh, and a certain former President named Barack Obama and a First Lady named Michelle have come off the sidelines in major ways.

It’s one of the most transparent and targeted efforts to reach these potential voters in recent years, and it still may come up short. Black men “are not in our back pocket,” Harris told the National Association of Black Journalists in September. Trump’s strategists, of course, understand this and have been surgical in their campaign for young male votes across all racial groups. It’s set in motion one of the most unexpected side-plots of the 2024 campaign.

“What you're seeing is the recognition by Kamala Harris—to her credit—that you can't take anybody for granted,” Warnock tells me in a parking lot after one of many pep talks in Detroit. “She knows that she's got a fight to earn the votes of Black men and white women and white men and every other constituency. And she's fighting to do that.”

Celebrity and identity Politics can matter in voter registration and mobilization among low-propensity voters, for sure, but ultimately there has been a product beyond the packaging. Harris certainly does not lack for substance, but the energy radiating from her campaign at in-person events often fails to be felt from those consuming that content in clips and soundbytes. Her rally in Houston late last month rivaled any recent sporting or musical event in my mind, summoning memories of Obama’s 2008 acceptance speech in Denver. (Beyoncé’s introduction of her didn’t hurt, either.) But from the outside, such moments can get drowned out by the daily buffet of Trump’s outrageous bombast.

Still, the messaging toward these voters has been a little disjointed at times. Many in Democratic circles questioned the wisdom of Barack Obama calling out Black men for being lukewarm on Harris out of latent sexism. (“Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as President, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that,” Obama said in Pittsburgh.)

Sitting at a day before Election Day, Harris has strong footing in the polling. The final NBC News poll shows an 87%-9% split among Black voters, a blow-out for sure. But then it’s worth remembering that Hillary Clinton had an 89%-8% lead among Black voters in 2016, too.

“If she doesn’t win, it will be because of racism. It’s that simple,” says Keith Williams, the chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party Black Caucus and a former Wayne County Commissioner. “She’s running against a convicted felon who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and it’s still close. There’s only one way to explain that.”

Retired engineer John Watkins, who took a minute out of his Friday to hear from Warnock and to pick up Harris yard signs, had a slightly different opinion. “People aren’t taking Trump seriously around here,” the 67-year-old Detroit resident says. “Half of the country is just not going to vote for a Black woman. We have to remind ourselves of that reality and work twice as hard.”

Democrats remain skittish about the Black male vote, but are less worried than they were around Labor Day. An NAACP poll released last week found Black men under age 50 were coming home to the Democratic Party; Trump’s support fell from 27% to 21% from a month earlier. Meanwhile, Harris’ support climbed from 51% to 59%—still a challenge in a voting bloc that any Democrat need to run up tallies. 

Overall, among all Black voters, Harris enjoys about 73% support in the NAACP poll—also up from a month earlier by about 10 points. By comparison, Biden earned the vote of about 90% of Black voters in 2020, and Obama won about 95% of those ballots in his two campaigns.

“It’s better, but not good,” says one veteran strategist cheering his friends from outside the Harris campaign. “We are out of the Biden danger zone but this is still going to come down to what our aunties say at church that last weekend.”

So, as Warnock—like so many other Harris allies in the campaign’s final days—repeats his pitch to every group of potential voters he can find, it’s one rooted as much in aspiration as pragmatism. 

“You will not see waves of Black men voting for Donald Trump,” Warnock insisted. “The real threat that we face, the real thing that we’ve got to address is apathy.”

That, right there, is why Harris’ team has spent the last weeks of the campaign in overdrive, and will stay there until the last polling locations close in just a few hours. They aren’t looking for the die-hard partisans, they’re looking for the indifferent Americans who might not even know Election Day is finally upon us.

Make sense of what matters in Washington. Sign up for the D.C. Brief newsletter.