Kamala Harris turns to basketball stars as she courts young black vote
Written by Black Hot Fire Network on October 1, 2024
In a pitch to young black men Kamala Harris joined a sports and pop culture podcast hosted by two former NBA players and addressed Donald Trump’s attacks on her racial identity.
The vice-president sat down with Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson on All the Smoke to reach a crucial slice of voters who are, according to polls, increasingly drifting towards her rival for the White House.
“I’m really clear about who I am,” she said. “And if anybody else is not, they have to go through their own level of therapy. My mother was very clear. She was
It was the latest demonstration of how both campaigns are courting non-traditional media to target groups of voters who get their news from streaming platforms, online celebrities and social media rather than television or newspapers.
For his part Trump has enthusiastically embraced the macho “Edgelord” culture thriving among young men on platforms like Twitch, YouTube and Kick. In recent weeks he has performed his signature dance outside his Mar-a-Lago home with the 23-year-old conservative influencer Adin Ross and discussed the merits of cocaine with the comedian Theo Von.
Harris’s appearance on All the Smoke was more understated but stretched from mental health and the economy to the fate of her home city’s sports teams.
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Black voters have long been the most loyal constituency of the Democratic Party and were crucial to sending Biden to the White House in 2020. But that support has eroded under Biden’s administration, particularly among younger black men, driven by concern about the economy, inflation and crime.
A poll by the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People earlier this month found that one in four younger black men said they would vote for Trump. Harris still commanded 63 per cent support among black voters overall, compared with 13 per cent for Trump. Among black men under 50, however, 26 per cent said they supported Trump against 49 per cent for Harris.
This was not the first time Harris has associated herself with basketball: she appeared with LeBron James and the Olympic team in July
KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS
It was partly these voters that Harris was thinking of when she reaffirmed her support for legalising marijuana, noting the disproportionate impact on young black men of past drug crackdowns (a 2020 study by the American Civil Liberties Union found that black people were four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white people).
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She also laid out economic plans that include raising tax breaks for small businesses, building three million new homes in her first term as president and expanding the child tax credit. “People just need to get their foot in the door,” she said.
Harris stressed that she and Biden had “reduced black unemployment to the lowest it has been in decades”, but acknowledged there was more to do to “build wealth” among black communities.
Launched in 2019 as a basketball podcast, All the Smoke now has more than one million YouTube subscribers. Barnes and Jackson have interviewed a string of black stars of sport and entertainment, including Snoop Dogg, Kobe Bryant and Will Smith.
Both men spent part of their NBA careers with the Golden State Warriors, the basketball team that Harris supports. They played for almost half a century in Oakland, where she was born, but are now in San Francisco. The Oakland A’s baseball team will follow the Oakland Raiders NFL team to Las Vegas next season, leaving the city without a major sports franchise. Harris said the departure of the Bay Area’s biggest teams “breaks my heart”.
Barnes and Jackson playing for the Warriors against the Los Angeles Lakers in March 2008
ANDREW D BERNSTEIN/GETTY IMAGES
Discussing racial justice, the vice-president drew a line between the civil rights movement of the 1960s, when her parents met, and the protests against police brutality that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd. “I do believe there is no significant progress that we’ve made in our country without the people often taking to the streets,” she said, warning of Republican plans to roll back hard-won civil rights if Trump wins.
“Now we’re seeing a full-on intent to restrict rights,” she said of Project 2025, a sweeping conservative blueprint for a second Trump term, drafted by former associates at the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank. The 900-page document, which Trump has disavowed, proposes expanding the powers of the presidency, abolishing the Department of Education, imposing new abortion restrictions, the mass deportation of undocumented migrants and a ban on pornography.
“Whatever gains we’ve made … will not be permanent unless we stay on it. You can’t take any of our rights for granted,” Harris added. She said that the crisis in mental health care, a particular blight on the black community, was “one of the biggest public policy failures in our country”.
“We have acted as though the body starts from the neck down, instead of understanding we need healthcare also from the neck up,” she said, discussing the stigmas around mental health treatment. She added that she preserved her own mental health with daily exercise, by cooking for her family and through avoiding the comments section on social media. “I’m serious,” she laughed. “Don’t read the comments.”
