WASHINGTON - Mr Bahta Mekonnen, a 28-year-old in the key voting state of Georgia, is among the millions of black voters who helped deliver President Joe Biden the White House in 2020.

Three years later, he is one of the voters who Democrats fear could cost Biden a second term in 2024.

Disappointed by what he sees as Democrats’ lurch to the left, free spending and empty promises, but also turned off by far-right Republicans, Mr Mekonnen says he sees nothing but bad options at the ballot box in 2024.

“What I’m noticing across the Democratic Party right now is there’s a lot of pandering to the black community,” said Mr Mekonnen, who plans to attend business school after a career in the military.

“It seems like they do a lot to try to make it seem like they are the party for young black men or black men as a whole, but they don’t back it with anything. They don’t follow through,” he said.

Long the most loyal Democratic constituency, black voters played a large role in rescuing Mr Biden’s struggling 2020 presidential campaign in the South Carolina primary, and sending him to the White House with Democrats in control of the Senate, thanks to further success in Georgia.

In return, many black voters expected Mr Biden and Democrats to push new federal protections against restrictive local voting laws, police and criminal justice reform, student loan debt relief and economic empowerment.

Many of those efforts have been blocked by Republicans, leaving Mr Biden to ask voters to let him “finish this job”, with a second term, but with no clear path to get these things done.

On the other hand, the Democrats’ focus on LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) and abortion rights leaves voters like Mr Mekonnen feeling alienated.

“I’m probably getting turned away from the left, just because the Democrats are turning more left in my books,” he said, adding that he wished Democrats spent more time on the economy.

Polls and Reuters interviews show younger black voters and black men of all ages are losing their faith in Democrats, Mr Biden and perhaps even the political process, just three years after the US’s biggest protests for racial justice and civil rights in a generation.

The vast majority of black voters, including men, are still expected to choose Mr Biden over a Republican.

But the question for Democrats is whether disillusioned black voters will turn out to the polls in large enough numbers in crucial cities, from Philadelphia to Atlanta, Milwaukee and Detroit, to keep Mr Biden in the White House.

“Democrats need to understand that there is a growing population, especially with black men, who are reaching the point of being fed up with always being pushed over and looked over,” said Mr LeLann Evans, 33, a political campaign manager who is running as a write-in candidate for Nashville City Council.

Democrats’ failure to secure widespread student loan relief or legalise marijuana has been disappointing, Mr Evans said, adding that Republicans’ more aggressive approach when they have power means they are “actually getting things done”.

Turnout drops

Self-identified black Americans make up 14.2 per cent of the US population, or 42.7 million people, a 30 per cent jump from 2000, Pew Research shows.

These Americans are five years younger than the population as a whole, with an average age of 33, and Democrats’ earning their loyalty is crucial for the party to keep winning in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia, and to recapture districts in the South in the future.

Instead the opposite is happening.

Black voter turnout dropped by nearly 10 percentage points, from 51.7 per cent in the 2018 midterm elections to 42 per cent in 2022, according to a Washington Post analysis of the US Census Bureau’s survey released earlier in 2023.

White voter turnout slipped by only 1.5 points to 53.4 per cent.

“Black voter turnout was down across the country in 2022. We saw it in the polls, the surveys, the exit polls and every way you could measure it,” said politics professor Michael McDonald at the University of Florida.

Some Democrats have also been disturbed by recent polls showing that some black voters are defecting to Republicans.

One in five black people under the age of 50 voted Republican in the 2022 midterms, roughly double the number of their elders, according to a previously unreported analysis of exit polling data by HIT Strategies, a public opinion research firm aligned with Democrats that routinely surveys black Americans. Black men and women under the age of 50 voted Republican in similar numbers, the poll showed.

Republican Donald Trump’s 12 per cent share of the black vote in 2020 was four percentage points higher than it was in 2016, according to exit polls by Edison Research.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted from July 11 to 17 found 18 per cent of black Americans would pick Trump over Mr Biden in a hypothetical match-up, compared with 46 per cent who favoured Mr Biden, including about one in four black men, compared to about one in seven black women.

Compared with black women, black men were more likely to say they would back a presidential candidate that supported abortion restrictions and increased police funding to fight crime.

Economic gains?

Democrats are favoured by black voters who value abortion rights, voting rights and opposition to racism, says HIT Strategies chief executive Terrance Woodbury.

But that margin shrinks when it comes to managing the economy.

“When you get to economic issues – economic security, inflation, job security – those 50 and 60 point gaps began to shrink to near parity, where you have young black folks saying that Republicans are almost as good for them on the economy as Democrats are,” Mr Woodbury said.

Mr Julian Silas, 25, a black investment research analyst from the Chicago area, said many of his friends and family are re-examining their politics and questioning just how much the loyalty of black Americans to the Democratic Party bettered their lives, particularly their economic standing.

Every four years, Democratic candidates talk about increasing black wealth and closing the gap between black and white Americans, but “nothing actually really happens”, Mr Silas said.

“It seems like there are things that they talk about that seem good, that I can align with, like student loan debt relief or home ownership and all these different things, but maybe sometimes it doesn’t feel like it’s moving fast enough,” Mr Silas said.

The US black unemployment rate has fallen to historic lows under Mr Biden, but hit a 10-month high in June, driven in large part by black workers leaving the labour market.

Black families had 4.4 per cent of total household wealth in the first quarter of 2023, US Federal Reserve data shows, up slightly from 4.3 per cent at the beginning of 2020.

The Democratic Party has spent considerable time, money and resources to retain and expand the black vote, including mounting registration drives in battleground states and recruiting black campaign staff.

US Vice-President Kamala Harris, the first black person to hold that position and the highest US black elected official, and Mr Jaime Harrison, the African-American chairman of the Democratic National Committee, attended this summer’s Essence Festival of Culture in New Orleans and have lavished attention on historically black colleges and universities and media outlets, including black radio stations.

Ms Harris spoke at the annual National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, or NAACP, gathering on Saturday.

“As we head into the 2024 cycle, the DNC (Democratic National Committee) is doubling down on our commitment to engaging black voters with meaningful and sustained investments to make sure they know how President Biden and Vice-President Harris have delivered for them,” said Ms Tracy King, the DNC’s director of outreach communications, in an e-mailed statement.

For some, right now, that is not enough.

“I’m kind of stuck with Biden until someone else comes along,” said Mr Andre Russell, 47 and from Chicago, who works in education. “As a society, we definitely have to move past the trope of old white men running everything.” REUTERS