After the 2016 election, progressives blamed white women for Hillary Clinton’s loss. This year, Black men have come under special scrutiny.

In early October, just before Kamala Harris spoke at the Dort Financial Center, in Flint, Michigan, the N.B.A. Hall of Famer Magic Johnson took the stage to offer a few insights about the candidate and her campaign. The choice of Johnson, who is a Michigander, to introduce Harris made sense for several reasons. He has been an advocate for people with H.I.V./AIDS—he has been H.I.V.-positive for more than thirty years—and Harris helped spearhead a Biden Administration effort to end the epidemic by 2030. He is a co-chair of the Athletes for Harris coalition. And, since he officially retired from basketball, in 1996, he has become known nearly as much for his shrewd investments in movie theatres and sports franchises as for his prowess as a point guard. In Flint, Johnson congratulated the Detroit Tigers on their playoff run, praised Harris for her economic proposals, and then spoke about a specific sliver of the electorate. “Our Black men, we gotta get ’em out to vote,” he said. “Kamala’s opponent promised a lot of things last time to the Black community that he did not deliver on, and we gotta make sure we help Black men understand that.”

Johnson was addressing a concern that has been alternately murmured and shouted in Democratic circles as Election Day nears: that Democrats are vulnerable with one of their most loyal constituencies, African American men. The statistical stalemate that the two major-party candidates have been locked in has led to a kind of obsessive demographic slicing in an effort to predict the election’s outcome. In the traumatic wake of the 2016 contest, progressives blamed white women, more than fifty per cent of whom, initial reports alleged, had voted for Donald Trump, compared with forty-three per cent for Hillary Clinton. (Subsequent analysis revealed the numbers to be closer to forty-seven per cent for Trump and forty-five for Clinton, but it was still a win.) This year, Black men have come under special scrutiny as the potential weak link.

A headline from a “PBS NewsHour” story in August noted that “Trump Is Gaining Ground with Some Black Men.” The same month, Mother Jones ran a story titled “I Spent a Week with Black MAGA. Here’s What I Learned.” A Times piece led with “Black Men Rally for Kamala Harris and Confront an Elephant in the Room.” Trump himself weighed in, noting, “I seem to be doing very well with Black males.” In fact, according to a recent A.P.-NORC poll, only one in ten Black voters thinks that Trump would “change the country for the better,” and eight out of ten have a somewhat or very negative view of him. Trump won fourteen per cent of Black male voters in 2016, according to Pew, and just twelve per cent in 2020. But there was enough concern among Democrats that the Harris campaign gave a spot on the final night of the Democratic National Convention to the comedian D. L. Hughley to make the least common form of an endorsement speech: an apology.

Hughley confessed that, because Harris had been a prosecutor, he made assumptions about her, and “often repeated them to a lot of people.” But, he added, “I was wrong. And I’m so very glad I was wrong, because, Kamala, you give me hope for the future.” He said that Harris had contacted him to discuss his doubts, and that he had then educated himself about her record as a public servant. He now describes himself as a “loud advocate” for Harris. The radio host Charlamagne tha God offered a similar conversion narrative. After previously lamenting Harris’s relatively low profile in the Biden Administration, he said during a CNN interview this summer that he’d held “an unrealistic expectation” of her as Vice-President. He cites Harris’s support for mental-health funding and her economic plans as reasons that he now endorses her. This week, he is scheduled to air a special show with Harris as his guest.

Whatever the perceptions, though, Harris is doing better with Black male voters than Joe Biden was earlier this year. According to a recent Pew survey, seventy-three per cent will vote or are leaning toward voting for her. Even in mid-July, before Biden dropped out of the race, Harris’s favorability rating among Black voters in battleground states exceeded his by five points. A more recent poll from Howard University found that, in swing states, eighty-eight per cent of Black men over fifty and seventy-two per cent of those younger say they will likely vote for her. Still, Terrance Woodbury, who leads HIT Strategies, a firm that has done extensive polling on this part of the electorate, has pointed out that the issue goes far beyond Harris as a candidate, or—as Barack Obama chided last Thursday, at a campaign field office, before he spoke at a Harris rally in Pittsburgh—the reluctance that some Black men may have to vote for a woman for President. (It’s worth remembering that Black men voted for Clinton in 2016 at a level that surpassed white women by thirty-six points.) Woodbury notes that “Democrats have experienced erosion—a two-to-three-point erosion amongst Black men—in every election since Barack Obama exited the political stage. This is not just a Kamala Harris problem. This is a Democratic Party problem.” A higher share of Black men than Black women identify as conservative. The declining number of Black male Democratic voters, like the Party’s diminishing appeal to Latino and working-class white voters, may portend an ongoing realignment. Or it may, as Woodbury contends, simply reflect the Party’s failure to craft messages that appeal to this part of its base.

Accordingly, the Harris campaign has been preparing a package of policy initiatives that relate to the issues—entrepreneurship, homeownership—that consistently emerge in focus groups with Black male voters. But there is another dynamic that warrants mention: Trump’s bombastic allure skews disproportionately male, and although young voters generally support Democrats, there is some evidence that young men may be a stealth asset for him in November. (Stephen Miller, Trump’s erstwhile immigration czar, recently advised young men that proudly displaying their MAGA sympathies is the best way to impress women.) And Trump is more popular with Black men under the age of fifty than with any other segment of African Americans.

The election will turn upon a multitude of dynamics, some too subtle to be apparent ahead of time. In Flint, Magic Johnson worried that Black men might not understand that Trump hadn’t kept his promises to the Black community. But comparatively few of them have found the siren song of Trump appealing. Should Kamala Harris not prevail in November, it will not be the fault of any single faction of the electorate. She will receive a large majority of Black men’s votes. Whether that—and the turnout among the other parts of her coalition—will be enough to win her the Presidency remains to be seen.