The drift of black voters away from the Democratic Party has become a touchstone of the 2024 election. In Georgia, the anxieties of the Kamala Harris campaign are hard to miss. On one night in Atlanta it deployed music moguls to run a “Brothas and Brews” event. Then it released an “opportunity agenda for black men”, promising to give more business loans, protect cryptocurrency and legalise marijuana. To press her closing arguments Ms Harris is sitting down with Charlamagne tha God and other influencers.
Four years ago, Mr. Biden won the state by a razor-thin margin of 11,779 votes. If turnout remains constant this year, a gap like that among black voters would amount to a deficit of 139,000 votes for Ms Harris.
Donald Trump’s allies are pouring it on as early voting opens in Georgia: “For the last three and a half years the Democrats haven’t given a damn about black men unless they’re dead or gay,” Michaelah Montgomery, a black Republican activist, roared onstage at a rally featuring Mr Trump on October 15th. In the packed audience, black men in suits stood and clapped as white women looked on, beaming. Liberals can seem befuddled about why some black voters are turning to Mr Trump but the defectors are often moved by the same issues as other supporters: jobs and reinvesting at home. “You can’t fund other countries if your own backyard is on fire,” says Kiersen Harris, a 22-year-old security guard who plans to vote for Mr Trump.
Mr Biden’s narrow win in Georgia, the first by a Democrat since 1992, was one of the most remarkable results of the 2020 election. It announced that Democratic presidential candidates could again compete in old Dixie after years of mostly fruitless effort. An influential prophet of the turnaround was Stacey Abrams, a Democratic politician who had argued for years that the state was ripe for flipping. Anything less than full investment in Georgia “would amount to strategic malpractice”, she told national Democrats in 2019.
Stacey Abrams, photographed in her back yard in Decatur, Georgia.
Image: Rita Harper
Why was she right? In the two decades to 2020 Georgia’s voting population grew by 1.9m. Nearly half of that growth came from black voters—the largest percentage-point increase in any state’s black electorate. New voters came mostly from New York and Florida, but also the Caribbean and Africa. They bolstered the state’s well-established black elites. Black voters born outside Georgia are now more than twice as likely as black natives to have a college degree. This was a double advantage for Democrats, who increasingly rely on college-educated and minority voters.
Georgia, black people as % of population
By census tract, 2022
Share of total votes cast
by Black voters, 2020, %
Sources: Catalist; OpenStreetMap; Federal Election Commission;
Redistricting Data Hub; The Economist
Georgia, black people as % of population
By census tract, 2022
Share of total votes cast by Black voters, 2020, %
Sources: Catalist; OpenStreetMap; Federal Election Commission;
Redistricting Data Hub; The Economist
Georgia, black people as % of population
Share of total votes cast by black voters,
2020, %
Sources: Catalist; OpenStreetMap; Federal Election Commission;
Redistricting Data Hub; The Economist
Now Mr Biden’s achievement in 2020 lies on a knife’s edge. If Ms Harris does not match Mr Biden’s share of the black vote, she would need to make up votes among white voters, who skew Republican. But whereas Mr Biden won 30% of the white vote in Georgia, polls show Ms Harris up by just one point, at 31%. If that finding proves accurate she can afford to drop just two percentage points with black voters, not the ten shown in current polls.
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Democrats’ struggles with black voters are not new, or confined to Georgia. The party’s presidential candidates won an average of 87.5% of the black vote between 1984 and 2004. Barack Obama changed the equation and won 96% in 2008. “It was a lightning-in-the-bottle moment,” says Terrance Woodbury, a Democratic strategist. Since 2012, however, Democrats have fallen back towards their pre-Obama norm. Black support slipped to 90% by 2020, but a surge in turnout that year—200,000 more black voters in Georgia, in particular—masked the decline. More black votes even at a slightly lower margin delivered Democrats a significant net gain. The alarm for Ms Harris is that polls show her attracting the lowest share of any Democratic nominee in decades. The national Economist/YouGov polls have her at 83.5%, while other polls find her share as low as 78%.
Jobs on their mind
Lower turnout this year could exacerbate Ms Harris’s problem. In 2020 Georgia had two Senate races that attracted national attention and ultimately determined control of the chamber. This time there are no statewide contests to motivate voters disaffected by the presidential candidates. And the black migration that helped Democrats win in 2020 seems to have slowed. Data from L2, an analytics firm, show that of the 187,000 voters who moved to Georgia since 2020 only 24% are black, half the share of those who came before.
Source: YouGov/The Economist
Perhaps the most striking feature of black voters’ evolving outlook is that young black men see less salience in the civil-rights movement than did their parents’ generation. Just 65% of black men under 30 say civil rights are an issue that is very important to them, compared with 84% of those over 65. Auburn Avenue, a black business district that was once the epicentre of Atlanta’s civil-rights movement, is now hollowed out and quiet. “Thinking about racial politics is a luxury,” says a black millennial who works in Georgia politics. “These days young people are more concerned about jobs.”
Ms Abrams reckons this is a messaging problem—fears about the futures of black men and their access to jobs “are inherently civil-rights issues”, she says. She argues that the idea that black voters are moving away from Democrats is “an extrapolation that is not warranted yet”, especially as polling suggests that black women are heavily motivated by Ms Harris.
Ms Abrams and her peers are confident that the Harris campaign can defy the polls. “We saw some similar softness two years ago and we ended up closing that gap,” says Lauren Groh-Wargo, a longtime Georgia operative. Political scientists have shown that tight-knit black communities have strictly enforced political norms, to include voting for Democratic candidates, even as conservatism has become more popular. Trump-curious black voters may yet be persuaded to back Ms Harris by pastors and women in their extended families. If they express support for Mr Trump “out loud in black spaces, research suggests it’s not going unchallenged,” says Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University. Most undecideds, she thinks, will break in the end for Ms Harris.
Top: Thomas Anderson, who is 36 years old, is not voting this year in part because “our votes don’t matter”. He considers job creation the most important issue. Bottom: William Owen, a 54-year-old salesman for Frito-Lay, is leaning towards voting for Kamala Harris. He grew up in council housing and sees affordable housing as the election’s most important issue.
Image: Rita Harper
At Fade Away Cutz in South Atlanta Richard Wright, once a candidate for Atlanta mayor and named for the black author, is getting a crisp shave. He and his barber, both middle-aged, are sceptical of the left but say they are voting for Ms Harris. They worry about the younger men who intend to back Mr Trump—and about the fallout from the campaigns’ obsessions with voters who look like them. “If Trump wins, me and you are going to have to move,” Mr Wright tells his barber between treatments, “because black men are going to get blamed.”■
This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline “Getting the drift”
The European Union is preparing further countermeasures against U.S. tariffs if negotiations fail, according to European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen.
U.S. President Donald Trump had imposed 20% tariffs on the bloc on Wednesday.
Von der Leyen’s comments come after retaliatory duties were announced by the bloc after the U.S. imposed tariffs on last month in a bid to protect European workers and consumers. The EU at the time said it would introduce counter-tariffs on 26 billion euros ($28 billion) worth of U.S. goods.
Industrial-grade steel and aluminum, other steel and aluminum semi-finished and finished products, along with their derivative commercial products, such as machinery parts and knitting needles were set to be included. A range of other products such as bourbon, agricultural products, leather goods, home appliances and more were also on the EU’s list.
Following a postponement, these tariffs are expected to come into effect around the middle of April.
This is a developing story, please check back for updates.
Attendees check in during a job fair at the YMCA Gerard Carter Center on March 27, 2025 in the Stapleton Heights neighborhood of the Staten Island borough in New York City.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images
Private payroll gains were stronger than expected in March, countering fears that the labor market and economy are slowing, according to a report Wednesday from ADP.
Companies added 155,000 jobs for the month, a sharp increase from the upwardly revised 84,000 in February and better than the Dow Jones consensus forecast for 120,000, the payrolls processing firm said.
Hiring was fairly broad based, with professional and business services adding 57,000 workers while financial activities grew by 38,000 as tax season heats up. Manufacturing contributed 21,000 and leisure and hospitality added 17,000.
Service providers were responsible for 132,000 of the positions. On the downside, trade, transportation and utilities saw a loss of 6,000 jobs and natural resources and mining declined by 3,000.
On the wage side, earnings rose by 4.6% year over year for those staying in their positions and 6.5% for job changers. The gap between the two matched a series low last hit in September, suggesting a lower level of mobility for workers wanting to switch jobs.
Still, the overall numbers indicate a solid labor market. Recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that the level of open positions is now almost even with available workers, reversing a trend in which openings outnumbered the unemployed by 2 to 1 a couple years ago.
The ADP report comes ahead of the more closely watched BLS measure of nonfarm payrolls. The BLS report, which unlike ADP includes government jobs, is expected to show payroll growth of 140,000 in March, down slightly from 151,000 in February. The two counts sometimes show substantial disparities due to different methodologies.
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The U.S. government is set to increase tariff rates on several categories of imported products. Some economists tracking these trade proposals say the higher tariff rates could lead to higher consumer prices.
One model constructed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston suggests that in an “extreme” scenario, heightened taxes on U.S. imports could result in a 1.4 percentage point to 2.2 percentage point increase to core inflation. This scenario assumes 60% tariff rates on Chinese imports and 10% tariff rates on imports from all other countries.
Price increases could come across many categories, including new housing and automobiles, alongside consumer services such as nursing, public transportation and finance.
“People might think, ‘Oh, tariffs can only affect the goods that I buy. It can’t affect the services,'” said Hillary Stein, an economist at the Boston Fed. “Those hospitals are buying inputs that might be, for example, … medical equipment that comes from abroad.”
White House economists say tariffs will not meaningfully contribute to inflation. In a statement to CNBC, Stephen Miran, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, said that “as the world’s largest source of consumer demand, the U.S. holds all the leverage, which means foreign suppliers will have to eat the economic burden or ‘incidence’ of the tariffs.”
Assessing the impact of the administration’s full economic agenda has been a challenge for central bank leaders. The Federal Open Market Committee decided to leave its target for the federal funds rate unchanged at the meeting in March.
“There is a reason why companies went outside of the U.S.,” said Gregor Hirt, chief investment officer at Allianz Global Investors. “Most of the time it was because it was cheaper and more productive.”
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