Democratic powerbroker Clyburn urges Black voters not to be ‘fooled’ by Donald Trump

Civil rights veteran says Republicans will ‘reap the reaction’ for redistricting moves ahead of midterm elections

Jim Clyburn, the Democratic veteran of the civil rights movement, has warned Black voters not to be seduced again by Donald Trump, saying his policies had opened up “racial faultlines” in the US akin to “Jim Crow 2.0”.

“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me,” he said in an interview with the FT. “A lot of Black folks got fooled. They can be forgiven, but [if] they make the same mistake a second time, that’ll be on them.”

But Clyburn also said Republicans should brace themselves for a backlash from voters angry at the party’s efforts to gerrymander parts of the US South, which has reduced the predominantly Democratic Black vote in some districts.

“These people who attempt to exploit racial differences are reaping a reaction that they did not expect to come,” he said.

The intervention from Clyburn, a Democratic Party grandee, came just weeks before midterm elections that will decide control of the US Congress and shape the final two years of the president’s second term. Black voters could be critical in the outcome, after many failed to turn out in 2024.

Clyburn said only 59 per cent of Black voters participated in the 2024 election, compared with 71 per cent of white voters — and party leaders deserved some blame too. “The failure was probably on our part . . . the motivators,” he said.

The South Carolinian, one of his party’s longest-serving members of Congress, also urged Democrats to focus on affordability issues to win back Black voters who stayed away from the polls in 2024.

The problem with Democrats, he said, was not the “message” but the “methods” — too many television ads and not enough direct engagement with voters to explain how their proposals will improve their lives.

A former House majority whip, Clyburn, 86, is one of the most influential Black politicians of his generation and an important bridge between the civil rights movement of the 1960s and today’s Democratic Party. He was speaking in his hometown of Sumter.

Polls suggest Democrats are on course to wrest control of the House of Representatives and maybe the Senate from the Republicans, with Trump’s approval rating cratering at about 30 per cent, according to an FT poll.

Guy Chazan, US national correspondent, discusses with Congress member Jim Clyburn the Black vote ahead of the midterms elections

Project 2025 is Jim Crow 2.0. I've been speaking to Jim Clyburn, an African American politician who is one of the most senior figures in the Democratic Party and has been a congressman for more than 30 years. We were mainly talking about the midterm elections, which are coming up in November, and I asked him what kind of impact Black voters could have on the outcome of those elections. Do you think that Black voters could hold the key to success for the Democrats in some of those races? Absolutely. Certainly not all of them, but some of them, and they must be motivated to go to the polls. And we must utilize the methods uh, that worked for them, and it ain't television. The methods that we use. to convey our message, it's just wrongheaded. All the money we've been spending on television, that is not going to motivate voters. You may inform them, effectively by TV, and you may even excite them, but that's a total different thing. And motivating people to go to the polls. One of the things I raised with Jim Clyburn was redistricting, the efforts by some Southern states to change the electoral map ahead of the midterms in ways that critics say dilutes the voting power of Black people. I think that Black voters will react in their own self-interest when they see that the Republicans spreading this kind of disrespect, no respect for their ability to choose their own candidates and then doing the things that are necessary to suppress their votes. A controversial ruling by the Supreme Court in April which critics say eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the crowning achievements of the civil rights era in America. I asked him if he thought this was a setback to Black political rights in the American system. You learn history in order to understand the present. I don't fly in the face of history. You're basically saying that what we're seeing now is almost like an echo of the kind of period after the civil war where Blacks were deprived of their rights and Jim Crow essentially. Absolutely, this is Jim Crow 2.0. At the Democratic National Convention and I spoke there in Chicago, that's exactly the term I use. Project 2025 is Jim Crow 2.0. Lastly, I asked Jim Clyburn about President Donald Trump and what he thought his lasting impact will be on America. I think this country has been as successful as it's been because people have always wanted to be a part of us, and that is what I worry about, to wake up and see that this is a country that nobody wants to come to or be a part of.

Guy Chazan, US national correspondent, discusses with Congress member Jim Clyburn the Black vote ahead of the midterms elections © Filmed and edited by Gregory Bobillot

Black American voters tend to vote Democrat but shifted markedly to Trump in 2024, fuelling Republican hopes of a fundamental realignment in favour of their party.

According to Pew Research, the president nearly doubled his support among Black voters between 2020 and 2024, from 8 to 15 per cent.

A 17-term Congress member, Clyburn has significant sway with Democratic voters. In his interview with the FT, he took aim at newly redrawn electoral maps adopted by Republican-controlled legislatures in southern states, claiming they were designed to dilute the power of Black voters.

He said Black voters would react “in their own self-interest” when they saw Republicans trying to undermine their “ability to choose their own candidates”.

Joe Biden shakes hands with Jim Clyburn as they stand at a podium with “Biden South Carolina” signs during an endorsement event.

Joe Biden shakes hands with Jim Clyburn at a campaign event in 2020 © Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Mike Marinella, spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee, said he had seen no evidence that Black voters were rejecting the Republican Party.

The party had been working “relentlessly to continue to earn the trust of Black voters in every community through historic tax cuts, safer streets and a secure border”, Marinella said.

“House Democrats have taken too many voters for granted, and families across the country want nothing to do with their radical socialist policies that will make life harder,” he added.

But Andra Gillespie, political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, said Black voters who backed the Republicans in 2024 out of frustration with then-president Joe Biden’s handling of the US economy had been disappointed by Trump’s performance.

Polls show anger at high living costs and inflation — in particular the surge in diesel and petrol prices caused by Trump’s Iran war — has heavily eroded Republicans’ popularity.

“Black voters, because of their persistent socio-economic inequality, are more likely to be sensitive to these types of issues,” Gillespie said. “People who were willing to try something different now have had two years of being dissatisfied with what they’ve seen.”

However, this does not mean Black voters will turn out for Democrats in November. In Michigan, polls show the progressive Abdul El-Sayed has work to do to win over Black voters in the state. Though he won the August Democratic primary statewide, he lost in Detroit, where three-quarters of the population are Black.

Clyburn has been an outspoken critic of Trump’s policies, especially those that he says have had a disproportionate impact on Black households. These include the rollback of diversity, equity and inclusion programmes, drastic reductions in the federal workforce and cuts to food stamps and Medicaid, the US government health insurance scheme for people on low incomes.

But he believes the furore over redistricting could have the most impact on the mood of Black voters.

Clyburn was among the most outspoken critics of a controversial Supreme Court ruling from April that struck down a Louisiana congressional map creating a second majority-Black district, calling it an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander”.

That judgment allowed a number of southern states to try to get rid of their own majority-Black districts. Tennessee’s Republican-controlled legislature voted in May to split the city of Memphis and its surrounding county among three congressional districts, all of them majority-white.

“You may not be suppressing, but you’re diluting” Black votes, Clyburn said — and voters would notice, he added.

Clyburn likened Trump’s rightwing agenda, embodied in the Project 2025 blueprint for his government published by the Heritage Foundation, to a new era of Jim Crow, a reference to the system of laws and practices that enforced racial segregation and disenfranchised Black voters in the American South until the civil rights era.

“Project 2025 is Jim Crow 2.0,” he said.

This article has been amended to reflect that Clyburn is serving his 17th term in Congress