Young Black men are not taking tangible steps to resist President Donald Trump at the same levels they did in 2020, according to new research released Thursday, raising concerns about their support for the Democratic Party in this year’s elections.
If Democrats want to re-energize young Black men, the director of the project that conducted the research said the party needs to embrace a message of both economic and racial justice, even over objections of some Democratic strategists who worry about explicitly addressing racial issues.
“Black people are pissed off,” said Terrance Woodbury, a veteran Democratic pollster who led the research. “But them being pissed off won’t result in mobilizing action now and potentially on Election Day, unless we connect the dots to what the federal government is doing and how it is hurting them personally.”
The data was the product of a year-long research effort from the Black Opposition Project, a consortium of liberal groups, including Way to Win and the SEIU.
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Woodbury said the share of Black people who took concrete action to resist Trump — including voting, protesting or signing a petition — had dropped from 2020, from 34% to 28%. That drop was concentrated among younger Black men, he said, an alarming trend for a group that showed a small but significant shift toward Trump in 2024.
According to the research, 41% of this group (defined as Black men under 50) thought Trump’s policies had hurt them. That’s a much lower share than other groups of Black voters, including men over 50, 68% of whom said the president had negatively affected them.
Nearly one-in-five young Black voters, or 17%, said Trump’s policies had helped them, more than double any other group surveyed.
“My warning to Democrats has been what it’s always been, and that is that these are swing voters,” Woodbury said. “They swung in ‘24, they swung back in ‘25, but in 2026 they have the risk of swinging again.”
Democrats started an intense internal debate after the last presidential election about how the party could win back younger voters of color. Most of those conversations focused on embracing a more masculine style of politics, embodied by popular podcasters like Joe Rogan, and a more populist economic agenda.
The project’s testing found that messages emphasizing the need to combat racism did the most to mobilize voters, Woodbury said, even if voters still expressed deep economic concerns. He said candidates that only talk about the economy won’t effectively reach as big an audience as they hoped among younger Black men.
“Black voters are rejecting that posture,” he said. “We gotta do both. We have to solve these economic concerns but also fight back against escalating racism.”
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