Kamala Harris (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images), Donald Trump (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Black men in battleground Georgia, many of whom voted for President Joe Biden in 2020, are now turning to Republican nominee Donald Trump, expressing "buyer’s remorse" over the Biden-Harris administration, Politico reported.
"I’m not necessarily the biggest fan of Trump, but I’ll definitely take Trump over Harris," said Arthur Beauford, a black 28-year-old whose family is "Democrat, all the way."
Beauford said that Harris wasn’t qualified to be president as she "just seems to have been given everything" in her career.
Other black Georgians—a historically Democratic voting bloc in the crucial swing state—echoed Beauford's concerns, largely attributing their newfound support for Trump to the sky-high cost of living under the Biden-Harris administration.
"Trump’s a man of his word. What he says he’s gonna do, he does," said Joseph Parker, a 72-year-old black man who has never before cast a ballot for a Republican presidential candidate. "And everything is so high now—groceries high, clothes, everything, gas. And four years ago, it wasn’t that high. And so people see the difference in Kamala Harris and Trump, and they want some of what they had four years ago. And I do, too."
Samuel Kem, a 25-year-old who voted for Biden in 2020, said he had to move back home after college because of the high cost of living under the Biden-Harris administration.
"I wouldn’t say he’s perfect or anything," Kem said of Trump. "He will get the job done. He’s very talented in, like, diplomatic relations with other countries with mutual respect."
Jason Shepherd, a Republican leader in the Peach State, called black men’s shift to the right "good old fashioned buyer’s remorse."
"Let’s just boil it down to good old fashioned buyer’s remorse," said Shepherd, the former chair of the Cobb County Republican Party. "People have been hit in the wallet. All of a sudden, all those mean tweets and crazy comments from Trump just don’t seem as important as a positive balance on your bank account."
Harris has struggled more than any other Democratic presidential candidate in recent history to win over black men, especially in swing states like Georgia. Among black voters in the state, Harris is behind Biden—who narrowly won Georgia in 2020, drawing 88 percent of the black vote—by 10 points, which could prove detrimental in the tight election. Trump currently leads 52 percent to Harris’s 46 percent in the Peach State, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday.
"When you’re talking about a state where 30 percent of the electorate is African American and another 4 percent are minorities other than Hispanic, it’s a big deal if you move that even a little bit," said Ralph Reed, the founder of the Faith & Freedom Coalition.
Howard Franklin, a Georgia Democratic strategist, said Trump’s "wealth and his celebrity and his willingness to at least speak unlike a politician, unvarnished—I don’t think it would do Democrats any good to deny there’s some appeal there."
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