Zero Hedge

Will Black Voters Rescue The GOP In 2026?

Will Black Voters Rescue The GOP In 2026?

The Republican Party is bracing for a brutal midterm election this year. Polls show Democrats ahead in the generic congressional ballot, and prediction markets give them solid odds of taking the House and a modest chance of flipping the Senate. But despite polls and prediction markets, there are signs that the GOP could defy history.

And it comes down to black voters.

Could black voters actually be the secret weapon that keeps Republicans in power after the 2026 midterms? The numbers, at least according to CNN's Harry Enten, suggest the question is worth asking seriously.

Enten laid out a striking case, walking through data that shows Donald Trump and the GOP making inroads with African American voters that the Republican Party simply hasn't seen in decades. 

While there’s no doubt that Democrats still have a solid advantage among black voters, that advantage is shrinking, and in tight races, even modest shifts can flip outcomes.

Trump's approval rating among black voters sat at 12% during his first term. It's now at 16%. It’s a modest shift that could be consequential, Enten argues, in states like Georgia, where margins are razor-thin, and every percentage point is a battleground. "Republicans absolutely love the shift that's going on," Enten said, "because Democrats have had such a long-term advantage." He argued that Trump "actually gaining ground versus where he was in term number one... has major implications for elections down the line."

The party identification numbers are another good sign for the GOP in November. Democrats have a 51-point advantage with African-American voters, which may sound good, but it’s actually a devastating number when you consider that during Trump's first term, Democrats held a 63-point advantage. 

The Democratic advantage has shrunk by 12 points. 

"This to me was absolutely stunning," Enten said, noting that the Democratic lead among black voters is now "actually smaller than any lead from 2006 to 2021" - a stretch of time that includes Barack Obama's two presidential runs.

What makes this more than just a polling curiosity is that the gains appear to be sticking. Democrats got shellacked with black voters in 2024. Trump turned in what Enten called a "historically strong performance" with that group, and Democrats had their worst showing in a generation. The natural assumption would be that some of that was a one-cycle anomaly, and that current economic concerns and opposition to the war in Iran would erase the gains Trump made. 

But the data says otherwise. 

Pre-election polling ahead of 2024 showed Kamala Harris leading among Black voters by 63 points. That number now sits at 62 points. "Republicans are holding onto the gains that they made among African Americans in 2024," Enten observed.

Whether these gains will stick after Trump leaves office remains to be seen, but as far as the 2026 midterm elections go, it’s clear there’s no Democratic bounce-back. The voters who drifted toward Trump or away from the Democratic Party haven't come back. This is a huge problem for the Democratic Party coalition, which has relied heavily on the loyalty of black voters.

 "The Donald Trump-led Republican Party is making gains among African Americans that we simply put have not seen the Republican Party make in a generation." 

The implications of these numbers is huge for the 2026 midterms.

Southern states with competitive House and Senate races depend heavily on black voter turnout and margins. This means that if Democrats are hemorrhaging even a few percentage points of that support, the math gets ugly for them really

Tyler Durden Sun, 05/03/2026 - 11:05

The Left's Reaction To Arrest Of The Latest UK Stabbing Is As Predictable As It Is Disgraceful

The Left's Reaction To Arrest Of The Latest UK Stabbing Is As Predictable As It Is Disgraceful

Authored by Paul Birch via DailySceptic.org,

These people have never been in a life-or-death situation like the arresting officers

One would think that even when the police successfully detain a suspect who was alleged to have been conducting a marauding knife attack, the professional activists would have a day off.

But you would be wrong. Amid all the ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ cliché bingo, voices of criticism were heard. Among them, the blue-tick career race-baiter Shola Mos-Shogbamimu. She was quick to take to X following yesterday’s attack on the Jewish community in Golders Green, north London. The 45 year-old suspect, a British national of Somali origin, had reportedly stabbed two Jewish men at random. The suspect – depressingly, inevitably – had previously been referred to the Government’s counter radicalisation programme, Prevent.

Shola Mos-Shogbamimu criticised police officers who are shown kicking the suspect in the head while he is on the ground. She opined:

Contemptible abuse of police power. Why kick him in the head several times when he’s already Tasered and in your control? Should he not be alive to be brought to justice in a court of law for stabbing two Jews??!! Disgusting.

Also, Green Party leader Zack Polanski, still playing at politics, was quick to condemn the actions of the arresting officers, using a retweet to maintain that:

Essentially his (Commissioner Mark Rowley’s) officers were reportedly and violently kicking a mentally ill man in the head when he was already incapacitated by taser.

What Shola, Zack and other commentators do not understand – because they have never been in a life-or-death situation – is that force is not judged by how it looks in a six-second clip. It is judged by necessity in the moment. These keyboard warriors have no idea what it’s like to face immediate and possibly lethal violence armed with often nothing more than some irritant spray and a stick. Your priority is to keep members of the public safe, followed by yourselves as much as possible.

These officers would have had no idea in such a fast moving situation whether the suspect was acting alone or as part of a cell. He needed to be neutralised as soon as possible in order to keep people safe. He wasn’t showing his hands; he was still holding a bloodied weapon that he had just used to attack Jewish members of the public; he had been moving rapidly towards them, and they would have had no idea if he was wearing an explosive vest (wearing a coat on a warm day is never a good sign).

Policing is not theatre. It is not performed for social media approval. It is messy, fast and often brutal. Because the people officers deal with are messy, fast and often brutal. A man armed with a knife who has already stabbed two people, who refuses repeated commands to disarm and who continues to pose a threat even after being tasered, is not “under control”. He is an active danger until the weapon is removed. That is the reality, no matter how uncomfortable it makes Left-leaning commentators feel.

The idea that officers should politely wait or somehow apply ‘gentler’ tactics while a suspect still has the capacity to kill is not just naïve in the extreme, it is dangerous. It puts officers’ lives at risk. It puts the public at risk. And it reveals a complete detachment from reality (I am reminded of the occasion when then Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, declared that Islamic State murderer Mohammed ‘Jihadi John’ Emwazi should have been arrested in war-torn Syria rather than killed.)

This is the gap at the heart of modern public debate on policing. One side deals in real-world consequences. The other deals in optics. The officers in Golders Green had seconds to act. Not minutes. Not the luxury of hindsight, slow-motion replays or viral commentary. Seconds. In those seconds they made unquestionably the right decision: remove the threat as quickly as possible, by whatever means necessary short of lethal force. And that point matters. Because the same voices now condemning ‘excessive force’ would be the first to demand answers if those officers had hesitated and others had been stabbed.

There is also an uncomfortable truth that many would rather avoid: this attack was not just violent, it was targeted. Two visibly Jewish men were attacked in broad daylight in a part of London with a large Jewish community. That context matters. It should matter. It’s part of an ever growing pattern of antisemitic attacks carried out by people holding extreme Islamist ideologies.

Yet instead of sustained outrage about antisemitic violence, the conversation was almost immediately derailed, redirected toward the conduct of the officers who stopped it. That inversion of priorities is telling.

It reflects a culture where the instinct is no longer to back those who confront violence but to scrutinise them first, and often most harshly. Where the benefit of the doubt is extended to offenders, those enforcing the law are expected to meet an impossible standard of perfection under extreme pressure – often from their own senior management.

And it is precisely this culture that erodes effective policing. If every split-second decision is second guessed by people with no operational understanding, officers will become more hesitant. More risk-averse. Less pro-active. That is not compassion. It is a recipe for more victims.

None of this means police should be beyond scrutiny. Of course they shouldn’t be. But scrutiny requires context. It requires full evidence. It requires intellectual honesty. A selectively edited clip on social media is not scrutiny. It is propaganda. That is the real issue here.

Not just one commentator getting it wrong, but an entire ecosystem that rewards outrage over accuracy, speed over truth and narrative over fact. The Metropolitan Police, to their credit, did something increasingly necessary: they put out the full body-worn footage. They showed the public what actually happened. And when people saw the complete picture, the narrative collapsed. Because reality is stubborn like that.

In the end, strip away the noise and the incentives of social media and the situation becomes very simple. A violent attacker stabbed two innocent men. Two unarmed officers confronted him. They stopped him. They went home alive, and so did everyone else.

That is not a scandal. That is policing working exactly as it should.

Tyler Durden Sun, 05/03/2026 - 09:20

Pages