Harris’s New Plan for Black Voters Is Too Little, Too Late | Opinion

Vice President Kamala Harris released a plan this Monday tailored to Black Americans generally—and Black men specifically. It offers assistance for Black entrepreneurs to start businesses and mentorship programs, among other things. The plan itself is fine. The problem is the insincerity of rolling out a “major” initiative for Black people after realizing that Harris’s numbers are not where they need to be in that voting bloc.
It is a transparent attempt to paper over concerns that some Black voters have about the Vice President’s candidacy at the last minute. Why did they wait until October 14 of an election year to release this plan? Furthermore, why wasn’t any of this done in the last three and a half years since Harris has been in office?
Black voters did not become a focal point of Harris’s campaign until it became clear that she was losing more Black votes than she could afford to.
Just days ago, former President and top Kamala surrogate Barack Obama thought it would be a great idea to chastise any Black man who had concerns about Harris as a misogynist. After that backfired, now the Harris campaign is attempting to do what they should’ve been doing a long time ago.
This is not the first time that I’ve criticized last minute overtures to Black voters. Former President Donald Trump’s Platinum Plan was released in a similar way in 2020. In this publication, I criticized that rollout, saying “it became a footnote on the campaign trail. The Platinum Plan [was] released close to Election Day, causing the few who were aware of [it] to question [its] seriousness. Had Trump’s team rolled out those plans months earlier and led an aggressive campaign in the aforementioned communities to promote them, the outcome of the election may be different.”
The platinum plan was in some ways more robust than Harris’s plan, but it failed due to it appearing to be an afterthought. Many Democrats criticized it for that very reason in 2020. But now the Democratic nominee for president is making the exact same mistake the exact same way.
Some Republicans are, predictably, making the same mistakes on racial issues that they always do. Attacking Harris’s plan by calling it “racist” is stupid, especially when the Republican nominee did the same thing in the last election cycle. It is fair, however, to question the sincerity of a plan being rolled out at the last minute to what is supposed to be your core constituency. The smart response would be to point that out, or to embrace a more aggressive (and market oriented) agenda like the Opportunity Plan.
Republicans should have released their own plan before Harris did. Shelving the Platinum Plan and not replacing it with anything else was a mistake, and it gave Harris the opening to create this plan in the first place. Now she has a closing argument to Black voters, and she will argue that Trump’s overtures to Black men is just lip service. Given the liberal lean of many (but not all) Black media outlets, there will be an aggressive effort to ensure that Black voters are aware of this last minute olive branch. It also serves as an opportunity to trip up the handful of loud-mouthed Republicans who can’t resist the urge to say something dumb on race. The moment that a prominent Republican attacks her plan from that angle, it will be blasted across every urban city in every battleground state.
I don’t begrudge candidates for introducing plans and policies designed to address the unique concerns Black communities face. Politicians should do that, not because the constituents are Black but because that’s where the need is. The same thing should be done for all groups, including poor whites.
But let’s be honest about what this is: It’s a last minute attempt to address timid support that the Vice President has among Black men.
It’s hypocritical for the same Democrats who criticized Trump’s last minute Black agenda rollout in 2020 to be championing the same thing today. But such is life in American politics.
Darvio Morrow is CEO of the FCB Radio Network and co-host of The Outlaws Radio Show.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.