According to recent polls, former President Donald Trump is poised to capture the largest percentage of black voters of any Republican candidate since Richard Nixon got 32 percent in 1960. If President Trump openly advocates for policies that incentivize two-parent families and a reversal of the trend of fatherless homes, he can capture an even larger percentage of the black vote and ensure a significant number of black Americans remain in the Republican Party long after he leaves office.
Since LBJ’s social welfare programs of the 1960s, the Democrats have presided over the catastrophic decline of black families, from around 80 percent two-parent families to nearly 80 percent fatherless homes — and they failed to launch a single nationwide initiative to reverse the decline. A President Trump pro-family agenda would put the Democrats on the defensive on an issue that is nationally the biggest elephant in the room — the fatherless home crisis among black Americans.
If President Trump and the Republican Party made two-parent family policy part of Make America Strong Again and followed it with real and substantive policy changes (not tweaking welfare policies around the edges), it would create a stark contrast between the two political parties.
A pro-family agenda would force Democrats to defend and explain not only the policies that destroyed the black family but also the generations of damaging social ills that resulted from them. For example, a 2011 study by Cassandra Dorius at the University of Michigan revealed that 59 percent of African American mothers have children from different fathers, the highest percentage of any ethnic group. Dorius noted that “raising children who have different fathers is a major factor in the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage.” This is the reason for racial disparities — not systemic racism.
Democrats make excuses and blame others for the rise of violent crime, the prison population full of black fatherless teenage boys and girls, and other social transformations that are a result of their lust for power and wealth.
The Democrats would have to explain why for over 50 years they didn’t address this issue, as long-standing members of the Congressional Black Caucus became wealthy while representing the poorest districts in the nation. They would have a hard time explaining their slave-like allegiances to the teachers unions that restrict school-choice options for black families or feminist groups that advocate for reducing the influence of the traditional nuclear family or the “patriarchy.”
Furthermore, many members of the Congressional Black Caucus who identify as Democratic Socialists prefer government jobs and grants to a vibrant private-sector economy in their districts, a private-sector economy that would generate real equality.
The shift President Trump could create is evidenced by polling by a national firm on important issues among black Americans. The nonprofit TakeCharge, which promotes restoring the two-parent black family, commissioned polling for three consecutive years.
The polling revealed that over 60 percent of black Americans believe the federal government should incentivize two-parent families with a father in the home instead of single-parent households. The polling also indicates that black Americans want school-choice options instead of being forced to send their children to unsafe, underperforming public schools where they graduate illiterate, angry, and unprepared to enter the workforce or college. These two issues that are important to black Americans are not a priority for the Democrat Party, the NAACP, the National Urban League, or Black Lives Matter (BLM).
Before the 1970s, the cultural roots of black Americans were the traditional Christian faith, strong families, and the desire for a better education for their children. U.S. Census data reveals that black women were more likely to be married than white women from 1890 to the late 1960s, before social welfare programs were marketed in black communities by the LBJ administration. Beginning in 1968, the unwed birth rates among black Americans skyrocketed, and the percentage of unmarried black women is now higher than any other ethnic group in the United States.
President Trump has an opportunity to recalibrate power from the political class back to its citizens and remind all Americans that the freedoms black Americans enjoy today were delivered by the Republican Party of 1860, the deaths of more than 600,000 soldiers in the Civil War that ended slavery, and the sacrifice of the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated in office.
In addition, the voting rights of those newly freed slaves were protected and enforced by the second Republican president, Ulysses S. Grant, who placed armed soldiers throughout the South. It was Republican President Theodore Roosevelt who invited the first black American (Booker T. Washington) to the White House as an adviser, and decades later, it was Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower who ensured black students were safe while they gained access to newly desegregated schools throughout Democrat-controlled southern states. These are the reasons why over 30 percent of black Americans — including Jackie Robinson — voted Republican in nearly every presidential election until the early 1970s.
With a pro-family agenda — that not only benefits black Americans but all Americans — President Trump has an opportunity to highlight our nation’s history, educate all Americans, and usher in a historic voting shift that is long overdue.
Kendall Qualls is a former Republican candidate for governor of Minnesota and president of TakeCharge. He was raised by a single mother in Harlem, New York. Mr. Qualls is a U.S. Army veteran and former executive in the health care industry. He graduated from the University of Oklahoma and earned his MBA from the University of Michigan. He has been married for 38 years and has five adult children.
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