On his Saturday show, CNN host Michael Smerconish displayed video from a CBS reporter in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, who went to a black barbershop and discovered there were black men there who questioned if Kamala Harris was authentically black.Oh no, they sound like Trump voters! It was never this controversial when Biden said in 2020 "You ain't black" if you wouldn't vote for him.
Smerconish underlined Trump's inaccurate trolling comments before the National Association of Black Journalists convention about how Harris decided late in her career to identify as black. Smerconish wondered if Trump did this because "Harris's rollout has gone so well that he wanted to take control of the news cycle, even if he had to do so with a negative story." You could have just as easily suggested he did this to get out of the seemingly endless "Vance said childless cat lady" cycle.
His second theory was Trump was "narrowcasting in the black community" about Harris's "code switching" of racial identities. She's black sometimes, and Indian sometimes, even if she's both.
Next, Smerconish explained: "A Harrisburg Pennsylvania CBS network anchor went to a central Pennsylvania barbershop seeking some candid conversation among the revelations that some of the black men that he interviewed did not regard Harris as black." It turned out disappointing for Team Harris.
CBS REPORTER: Is Kamala going to make you a little more likely or less likely to vote Democrat?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hold on. Wait. Is Kamala black, yes or no?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm going to let her speak on it. But to me, no.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Oh, is Kamala black, yes or no?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I share that same view.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Is Kamala blac, yes or no?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I heard she was. I heard she's half black and half Asian.
Smerconish: "When I played that audio on my SiriusXM radio program on Thursday, many callers who self-identified as African American were quick to tell me that those men were the exception, not the rule. Some describe them as low-information voters no different than you'd find among whites."
The CNN host pointed out Trump is outperforming other Republican presidential candidates for the black vote. Recent polling by the New York Times and Siena College shows him "capturing" 23 percent of the black vote, compared to just six percent for Mitt Romney in 2012, back when Joe Biden said Romney would "put y'all back in chains."
When he turned to pundits, Tara Setmayer sounded her usual note: "Donald Trump has been a bigot and has an issue with people of race his entire career. So that's why he didn't go into that audience. He felt that he was in a hostile environment once they got aggressive questioning....that's why he went there. So I just wanted to make that very clear."
