New Donald Trump ad taps Herschel Walker, Rep. Vernon Jones to recruit Black voters
President Donald Trump’s new ad targeting African Americans rehashes one of the main themes of the 2020 Republican National Convention: the president is not racist.
The ad, currently running on urban radio stations in Miami and Detroit as well as other major cities in North Carolina, Minnesota and Wisconsin, employs former Heisman Trophy winner Herschel Walker and Georgia State Rep. Vernon Jones, a Democrat, as ambassadors.
“He keeps right on fighting to improve the lives of Black Americans,” Walker said. “He works night and day. He never stops. He leaves nothing on the field.”
Jones asks listeners to vote Republican in November: “I’m part of a large and growing segment of the Black community who are independent thinkers and we believe Donald Trump is the President that America needs to lead us forward,” he adds, before criticizing Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s record as “all talk and no action.”
The two men’s remarks echo their speeches at the 2020 Republican National Convention in which Walker, who first met Trump when the latter bought the now defunct New Jersey Generals, touted his nearly four-decade long friendship as evidence of the president’s lack of racism. Similarly, Jones encouraged the Black community to leave the “mental plantation” of the Democratic Party.
“We’ve been forced to be [Democrats] for decades and generations but I have news for Joe Biden: we are free,” Jones said in late August.
Trump’s efforts to appeal to African Americans dates back to his 2016 campaign. He captured only eight percent of the Black vote both nationally and in Florida, according to NBC News exit polls.
Early 2020 projections suggest a similar result, with about 10 percent of Black voters nationally expected to go for Trump, according to polling and analysis site FiveThirtyEight.
The ad comes on the tail end of a summer that saw country-wide protests over racial injustice, a coronavirus pandemic that has disproportionately affected African Americans and the subsequent economic crisis that resulted in their highest unemployment rate in nearly a decade. Throughout, Trump has claimed that no president has done more for the Black community.
This story was originally published September 11, 2020 at 3:39 PM.
