Young black men may have been shifting toward the GOP. Then Trump happened.

(Image credit: Getty Images)

published 27 October 2016

Young black women overwhelmingly voted for President Obama in 2012, but young black men did not. In fact, nearly one in five black men under 30 — some 19 percent — cast their ballots for Republican Mitt Romney, a major shift toward the GOP as compared to previous cycles. Just four years earlier, only 6 percent of the same demographic voted Republican, meaning GOP appeal to young black men more than tripled during Obama's first term.

But if that was the beginning of a significant political realignment, it may have been the end as well. Though young black voters aren't enthusiastic about Hillary Clinton, there's no way they're voting for Donald Trump. Just 2 percent of black voters under 30 say they will back Trump on Election Day.

"The Republican Party had an opportunity to cement my support for the long term," Kellen Curry, one of the young black men who voted for Romney, told Vice News. Instead, they nominated Trump. "Now Republicans have to start all over again in 2020. Now they've broken whatever juice they had in the beginning and now they've got to re-sell the product," Curry said. "Party leaders often say the party did not have a problem with race, but the problem was talking about race. What Trump has brought to the surface is that yes, the party does not only have a problem with talking about race, but also with race itself."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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