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Shaquada Atkins sat waiting in her car behind a queue of voters snaking down the road and around the corner as the snow began to fall hard in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
The 29-year-old had gone to the polling station with two friends who had not cast a vote since Barack Obama was on the list in 2012. The women were joined by several young black voters for the first time, who said they saw a lot. more at stake in these elections.
“This is not the time to sit, to sit, to sit at home,” Atkins, a counselor at a drug rehab center, said when asked why she thought so many black Kenoshians were attending. “Four more years of Trump and you will see, there will be a race war.”
There are few places in the country where race is more prominently on the ballot than the sleepy Midwestern industrial city that became a hotbed of civil rights protests over the summer after Jacob Blake was shot seven times by police. , an African American man, and leave. paralyzed. Entire blocks were burned in the riots that followed.
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The long-standing tensions in Kenosha, where the population of 100,000 is 80 percent white and 12 percent black, was highlighted by the Black Lives Matter protests and a president who has tried to exploit them.
Donald Trump won Wisconsin by just one percent in 2016, fueled in part by depressed turnout among black voters. Fast-forward to 2020 and his challenger, Joe Biden, who has a black running mate in Kamala Harris, has a staggering 17-point lead in Rust Belt swing status.
Much of the remains of Kenosha’s main street bricked up two months after the August riots, with piles of cars burned where they were left.
Trump, who ran as the law and order candidate, told the crowd at a rally in Wisconsin over the weekend that he sent the National Guard in their “beautiful and expensive uniforms” to stop the “terrible violence.” . Many of his followers wore “blue life matters” masks in support of the police.
“You wouldn’t even have a Kenosha if it weren’t for Trump,” the president said.
Trump has called the Black Lives Matter movement a “symbol of hatred” and refused to condemn the white nationalist group Proud Boys, saying only “back off and stand by” in the first presidential debate in Utah.
Fabio de Bartolo, a 44-year-old clerk who watched the rally on television, said “safety” was now his first concern as he cast his vote in the county clerk’s office. “We can’t go through what happened again,” he said. He counted himself among the “silent majority” of Trump supporters, who he claimed were too afraid to put up flags in case “their houses were burned.”
Evan Vucci / AP
US President Donald Trump visited an area affected by civil unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in September.
Yet Atkins, who lives in a predominantly African-American neighborhood, sees the combination of white residents of the black fight for equality with this kind of carnage as thinly veiled racism. All the evidence suggests that the rioters, many of whom were white, came from nearby Chicago or Milwaukee looking for trouble.
Tanya McLean, a community leader for the Working Families Party, blamed the president for stoking divisions. “All we can do is turn our anger, pain and frustration into vows,” he said. There are early signs that this is happening. Kenosha has seen the second largest increase in voter registration of the 72 counties in the state. McLean said it had helped register hundreds of people, 80 to 90 percent of whom were black.
Biden has been successful in attracting older black voters, who associate him with Obama, but younger black voters have remained more elusive. While there is palpable enthusiasm for Harris, the first black woman to appear at the top of the ticket, there is a quieter enthusiasm for Biden.
“Take our vows for granted,” said Shaun, a 28-year-old hotel receptionist in downtown Kenosha who declined to give his last name. “That time when he said ‘you’re not black’ if you don’t vote for him. No, it wasn’t right.”
Andrew Harnik / AP
Democratic candidate Joe Biden is popular with older black voters, but the younger generation is more skeptical.
In particular, young black voters don’t seem to feel as negative about Trump as older black Americans. In early July, a survey of battlefield states by the African American Research Collaborative found that 35 percent of black adults ages 18-30 agreed that while they didn’t always like politics of Trump, they did like his “strong behavior and defiance of the system.” .
Trump supporters are unlikely to make up a significant portion of the black vote, which could represent as much as 13 percent of the electorate.
However, many pollsters have said that racial issues could define elections. McLean, who is black, agrees.
“There are people who vote for Trump because of his racism,” he said. “But I ask those who don’t to really ask themselves: which side of history are you on?”
