10 Sep 2024 Horace Cooper: Black Americans Are Looking for Real Solutions, Not Necessarily Progressivism
What are black Americans looking for as they decide how to vote in the upcoming election?
On the Fox Business Network program “Evening Edit,” Project 21 Chairman Horace Cooper told host Liz MacDonald that the answer might surprise some people:
First, let me say that Project 21 is non-partisan, but let me tell you what I think because I wrote about this.
We had elections in the year 2018 in the state of Georgia and in the state of Florida in which black candidates ran as progressives. Guess what? In a year that was overwhelmingly good for the left in these two states, the left or the Democrats lost — and the margin of victory was the black vote.
And it’s precisely because of a phenomenon that is increasingly clear [regarding] black Americans: Just because they support Democrats and identify as Democrats doesn’t mean that they’re progressives. They’re looking for programs that will actually improve their lives and that of their families.
What we’re seeing in many of these instances are appeals that have nothing to do with the basic issues that black Americans face. And that’s why Georgians — especially blacks — are very, very likely to be more interested in a real program, a real policy, than a lot of these “affinity and joy” and things of that nature that have nothing to do with who people really are….
This economy has been awful. You go to the grocery store and you almost have to fill out a credit app when you get ready to check out. Black Americans are finding that that pain of inflation is harder because they’re disproportionately lower-income people. The plan has to be: What are you gonna do to change that?