Clyburn says he doesn’t ‘believe for one moment’ Trump will win 15% of black vote

Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC) said he does not think Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump will win the support of 15% of black voters.

“The fact of the matter is I don’t believe for one moment that Donald Trump will get 15% of the African American vote,” Clyburn said Wednesday in an interview with CNN host Jake Tapper. “That’s not going to happen.”

The South Carolina Democrat was commenting on an MSNBC panel in which four black male voters each said they knew a black man committed to voting for Trump.

When asked if Vice President Kamala Harris’s recently launched presidential candidacy changed that, all of them said it had not.

Clyburn disagreed that the panelists’ experiences were representative of African American voters, saying he doesn’t “think for one moment that [Harris’s] entrance into the race did not change anything with black people.”

“I don’t know who those four people were, I could not see them, but I would hope that they do not reflect what’s going on in this country,” he said.

“I’m in AME, African Methodist Episcopal, I’m a 33rd-degree Prince Hall Mason, I’m a member of the Divine Nine, and I interact with all of these people, and I do not see 15% among them voting for Donald Trump,” Clyburn added. “Every one of them has been energized by the entrance of Kamala Harris in this race.”

Trump came under fire Wednesday for his remarks before the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago, where he suggested that Harris only recently began identifying as black.

The vice president is the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants and graduated from the historically black Howard University in Washington.

Harris is aiming to win back black voters, whose support for President Joe Biden’s candidacy had been faltering in the months before he dropped out of the 2024 presidential race.