Fox News regular Juan Williams accused President Trump of “having black faces lead a ‘gaslight’ crusade to create an alternate reality.”
In an Op-Ed for the Hill, Juan Williams argues that the purpose of this was not to win over black voters, but suburban women.
Williams writes:
So why, then, did the Trump campaign spend so much convention time having black faces lead a ‘gaslight’ crusade to create an alternate reality in which Trump is a man intent on healing racial wounds?
Well, it is a mistake to think those black faces on the convention stage were speaking to black people. They were on stage to speak to white women in the suburbs and white men in Trump’s base.
Their first job was to get white, suburban women to stop seeing Trump as a racist.
White female voters went for Trump by nine points in 2016. But in the 2018 midterms they split their vote and gave Democrats control of the House. Recent polls show women favor Biden by “23 percentage points, according to an average of national polls since late June,” according to the Washington Post.
And when Trump sent federal agents into cities “some 44 percent of suburban Americans said they thought the federal agents were being used for political purposes,” according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.
Currently, suburban voters favor Biden. But according to the Morning Consult poll, after Trump’s fear-filled convention pitch, Biden leads by 8 points with suburbanites, as opposed to 14 points before the convention.
Trump’s plan to win back those suburbanites, especially the white women, is out in the open.
According to Juan William’s Op-Ed, the black voices for Trump also served to help shore up support for white men as well.
Juan writes “It doesn’t stop there. Trump-loving black voices at the GOP convention had another job. Tell Trump’s heavily white, male base of voters that they are not racist for backing Trump and America is not a racist country.”
Juan later concludes “Every day of the convention, Trump turned to black voices to tell white voters to ignore reports of racial fires burning in America. I’m black, they said, and it is just a false alarm.”
