In Atlanta, a group of Black entertainers and elected officials took the stage at a brewery to urge a crowd of Black men to support Vice President Kamala Harris. In Milwaukee, dozens of volunteers fanned out across Black neighborhoods to encourage sometimes skeptical residents to vote. And in a blitz of national media interviews and campaign ads, Ms. Harris herself made her case to Black voters.
The flood of recent door-knocking, ads, rallies and celebrity-studded outreach events across battleground states reflects Democrats’ growing alarm about their weakening support among Black voters — a yearslong drift that the party’s leaders have not confronted so directly, and with the stakes so high, until now.
A New York Times/Siena College poll last week found that Ms. Harris was underperforming President Biden’s support with Black voters in 2020 by roughly 10 percentage points, and by 15 points among Black men — a drop-off that could doom her fortunes. The poll found that former President Donald J. Trump was making inroads, with 15 percent of Black voters saying they would back him.
Interviews with more than three dozen Black voters, strategists and elected officials offered a complicated picture of a politically powerful group of Americans whose waning devotion to the Democratic Party stems partly from a feeling that their decades of loyalty has delivered little in return. The party now finds itself in the unfamiliar position of needing to treat Black Americans as voters who must be persuaded to support them, rather than unflinching supporters who will back liberal candidates without a second thought.
Young Black men in particular say they feel disillusioned by the political system and do not see how Ms. Harris’s policies could help them. Their apathy and frustration with Democrats have provided an opening for Mr. Trump.
Ms. Harris has just a few weeks left to persuade hesitant Black voters that she is the candidate who can bring the change many say they are waiting for, and to give some of them a reason to vote at all.
