For decades now, the black vote has been something thought to be solely held by the Democratic Party. In fact, since the 1930s, with the election of Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal, nearly 70% of America’s black voters have continuously voted Democratic. However, that is all beginning to change.
And according to Leo Terrell, it’s all the Democratic Party’s fault.
Terrell is a well-known civil rights attorney who has frequently offered his advice and opinion of the political environment in our nation. And usually, that opinion is heavily rooted within Democratic ideas. In fact, the man has come out strongly against both President Trump and the Republican Party on more than one occasion.
But last week, he made a somewhat surprising, if not wholly shocking announcement: He is going to vote Republican for the first time in his life in November.
The announcement was made during a recent appearance on Fox News’s “Hannity,” of which he is a frequent guest. He said, “This will be the first time in my life, Sean Hannity viewers, that I will be voting Republican.” Later during the segment, Terrell said, “If you didn’t hear it, I’m voting for Trump.”
Both Larry Elder, who is a conservative radio host that often appears on “Hannity” with Terrell, and Hannity himself tried to claim credit for the switch, saying that “if we can convert Leo, we can convert anybody. If we can get Leo, we can get anybody.”
However, Terrell says that the two hosts had very little to do with his recent change in opinion and party.
Instead, he puts that blame solely on the Democratic Party itself. As he later explained via his Twitter account, “Leo 2.0? #Hannitized? No way. I’m the same Leo but the #Democratic Party left me & I did not sign up for their socialist agenda.”
And Leo, 2.0 or otherwise, isn’t the first black American to say think this.
Black Georgia Democrat state Representative Vernon Jones also made waves earlier this year when he announced his support for the Republican president. And he, like Terrell, claims that the party they once agreed with is now far too radical for them to continue to embrace. Terrell has even described the party as being “hijacked by the extremists.”
And it would be hard to argue otherwise.
Even with a supposedly moderate Democrat like Joe Biden being the pick for president, it’s clear the party has moved extremely far towards the left in the last few years. The calls for police departments far and wide to be defunded and disbanded, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the extremism that seems to be taking over the nation is proof enough of that.
But it’s also proving to be the downfall of the ever leftward moving party.
As I mentioned before, black Americans slowly become Democrats in the 1930s when they had a Democratic president that proved to be for them and their communities. And with nearly every Democratic president that followed, Harry, Truman, JFK, and LBJ, blacks were given more civil rights and equal treatment. By the time Johnson was elected president in 1964, nearly 82% of black Americans considered themselves Democrats.
Since then, that percentage has changed very little. Evidence of this was seen in 2016 when only 8 percent of blacks voted Republican and as such for President Donald Trump. In fact, it has become such of the norm that it has nearly been taken for granted by the Democratic Party, as can be seen in Biden’s “you ain’t black” statement made about blacks who didn’t know if they would vote for him.
However, as Kanye West explained, times are changing, and “to say that the black vote is Democratic is a form of racism.”
Men and women like Terrell and Jones are proof of that, as are the over 34 percent of black voters who polled that they were in support of President Trump earlier in the year. Now, we do have to note that these polls were taken before the civil unrest and BLM movements that are taking place right now.
However, as Terrell has proved, BLM may not be helping the Democrats cause much. And as American Thinker Editor Thomas Lifson says, “If only half of that 34% of blacks vote for Trump, it will devastate the Democrats.”
