President Donald Trump visited an area affected by civil unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin
Credit: AFP
Shaquada Atkins sat waiting in her car behind a queue of voters that snaked down the road and round the corner, as the snow started to come down 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 ticket in 2012. The women were joined by a number of young black first-time voters, who said they saw much more at stake this time around.
“It’s not the time to sit back, to sit it out, to sit at home,” said Ms Atkins, a counsellor at one the city’s drug rehabilitation centres, on why she thought so many black Kenoshians were turning out. “Four more years of Trump and you’ll see, there’ll be a race war."
A BLM demonstrator and a supporter of President Donald Trump, right, engage in an argument near Civic Center Park in Kenosha, Wisconsin
Credit: Bloomberg
There are few places in the country where race is more manifestly on the ballot than here in Kenosha, a quiet Midwestern factory town that became a focus for civil rights protests over the summer after African-American Jacob Blake was shot seven times by police and left paralysed.
Entire blocks were torched to the ground in two nights of rioting that followed.
Tensions in Kenosha, whose 100,000 population is 80 per cent white and 12 per cent black, were always nascent, but they were brought to the fore by the Black Lives Matter demonstrations and a president who has sought to exploit them.
President Donald Trump won Wisconsin by just one per cent in 2016, buoyed in part by a depressed black voter turnout. Fast forward to 2020 and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden, who has a black female running mate in Kamala Harris, is a staggering 17 points ahead in the Rust Belt swing state.
Much of Kenosha’s high street remains boarded up two months after the August riots, while piles of burned-out cars still sitting where they were left.
Many here believed that the police had been heavy-handed with Mr Blake, who was shot in front of his three children in their car after he resisted arrest. But the violence that followed caused damage the community is struggling to heal from.
Firefighters put out a blaze following another night of rioting in the city that stem from the shooting of Jacob Blake
Credit: AP
Mr Trump, who has pitched himself as the law-and-order candidate, told the crowd at a Wisconsin rally over the weekend that he sent in the National Guard in their “beautiful, expensive uniforms” to stop the “terrible violence”. Many of his supporters wore ‘Blue Lives Matter’ masks in support of the police.
“You wouldn’t even have a Kenosha if not for Trump,” the president said to pantomimic boos and hisses.
Mr Trump has previously called the Black Lives Matter movement a "symbol of hate," and told the white nationalist group Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” at the first presidential debate in Utah.
Fabio de Bartolo, 44-year-old shop assistant, who watched the rally on TV, said “safety” was now his number one concern as he cast his vote at the county clerk’s office. “We can’t go through what happened again,” he told The Telegraph.
He counted himself among a “silent majority” of Trump supporters, who, he claimed, were too afraid to put their flags up in case “their houses were burned”.
Ms Atkins, who lives in a predominately African American neighbourhood of Kenosha, sees white Wisconsans’ conflation of the black struggle for equality with this type of thuggery as thinly veiled racism. All evidence suggests that the rioters, many of whom were white, came in from nearby Chicago or Milwaukee looking for trouble.
I’m in Kenosha, Wisconsin, this week for a look at how the city is recovering after riots this summer. It doesn’t look, or feel, like it has. So much of it is still boarded up. Shop owners fear reopening until a decision is made on whether to charge officer who shot #JacobBlake pic.twitter.com/qM2OtEPS3K
— Josie Ensor (@Josiensor) October 27, 2020
Tanya McLean, a community leader with the Wisconsin branch of the Working Families Party, blamed Mr Trump for stoking divisions in Kenosha. “All we can do is turn our anger and grief and frustration into votes,” she said.
There are early signs this is happening. Kenosha has recorded the second-largest boost in voter registration of the Badger State’s 72 counties. Mrs McLean said she had helped register hundreds of people herself, 80-90 per cent of whom were black.
She is determined not to see a repeat of 2016, when Hillary Clinton lost by a razor-thin margin of around 23,000 votes. A 20 per cent drop in black turnout helped propel Mr Trump to victory.
It will not be enough for him to turn out the same number he did last election, but it will be an uphill struggle to add more as the share of white non college-educated voters — his primary base — has shrunk, and the number of registered black voters is at an all-time high.
Mr Trump reacts to the crowd while walking to the podium during a campaign event at the Waukesha County Airport in Waukesha, Wisconsin
Credit: Reuters
Mr Biden has managed to attract older black voters, who associate him with a much-revered Mr Obama, but younger black voters have remained more elusive.
While there is palpable excitement for vice presidential nominee Ms Harris, the first black woman to ever feature at the top of the ticket, there is more muted enthusiasm for 77-year-old Mr Biden.
“He takes our votes for granted,” said 28-year-old hotel receptionist Shaun in downtown Kenosha, who did not want to give his surname. “That time when he said ‘you ain’t black’ if you don’t vote for him. Nah man, that wasn’t cool.”
Former US Vice President Joe Biden speaks at Grace Lutheran Church in Kenosha, Wisconsin
Credit: AFP
Mrs McLean described a vote for Mr Biden as a “doorway, not the destination,” and while it was important for Democrats to rally behind him now, she hoped for a more dynamic candidate in future.
She is determined not to see a repeat of 2016, when Mr Trump pulled in 46.85 per cent of the vote in Wisconsin while his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton lost by a razor-thin margin with 45.52 per cent — some 23,000 votes.
The 20 per cent drop in black turnout helped Mr Trump to victory.
It will not be enough for him to turn out the same number he did last time and it will be an uphill struggle to build on it as the share of white non college-educated voters — his primary base — has shrunk, and the number of registered black voters is at an all-time high.
Mr Biden has managed to gain older black voters, who associate him with a much-revered Mr Obama, but younger black voters have remained a little more elusive.
While there is palpable excitement for vice presidential nominee Ms Harris, the first black woman to ever feature at the top of the ticket, there is more muted enthusiasm for 77-year-old Mr Biden.
Men walk towards law enforcement with their hands up as Kenosha rioted over the summer
Credit: Getty
Notably, young black voters do not seem to feel as negatively about Mr Trump as older black Americans do. In early July — at the height of the protests — an African American Research Collaborative poll of battleground states found that 35 per cent of 18-to-30-year-old black adults agreed that although they did not always like Mr Trump’s policies, they liked his “strong demeanour and defiance of the establishment."
However, it is unlikely that black Trump supporters will make up a significant share of the black vote, which could account for as much as 13 per cent of the total this year.
Many pollsters have predicted that racial issues could come to define the election. Mrs McLean, who is black, agrees.
“There are people who vote for Trump because of his racism,” she said. “But I ask those who don’t to really ask themselves: what side of history will you stand on?"
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