Milwaukee’s Black voters expose cracks in Democratic foundation for Harris

Devonta Johnson is going door to door, clipboard in hand, wearing a bright yellow vest and a seemingly permanent smile.

“How do you feel about Kamala Harris?” Johnson asks when a woman answers the door and steps out onto the porch.

“I think she is great,” the woman says, and Johnson’s smile gets even bigger.

“How do you feel about Trump?” he asks.

“Not so great,” is the quick response.

The conversation lasts another minute or so, as Johnson runs through early voting opportunities and asks for a phone number so he can check back and make sure supporting Harris translates into voting for her. Then a pleasant goodbye, and Johnson turns back to the sidewalk and heads to the next knock.

Johnson and his colleagues from Black Leaders Organizing for Communities walk these streets year-round. But their steps are now a bit quicker and the falling leaves add a little color and crunching sound. The Halloween decorations on the lawn tell us the calendar is moving. So does the new script the canvassers are carrying.

“I just wanted to remind you that early voting starts on October 22,” one says to a man who steps out to talk.

It is turnout time, and any path to a Democratic victory in Wisconsin – which flipped from Trump to Joe Biden four years ago – begins in these overwhelmingly Black neighborhoods on Milwaukee’s north side.

“There’s a lot of momentum,” says Angela Lang, a veteran organizer who is the BLOC executive director. “Generally speaking, people feel pretty good about where we are at.”

The energy and activism among Black women is obvious. Plus, Lang says, her conversations with other organizers suggest perhaps a few surprises in the Wisconsin count.

“You can’t win a statewide election here without going through the heart of Milwaukee and in some cases that runs through this office and the work that our team does,” Lang said in an interview. “But we are also seeing folks in heavily red areas that are getting together with other women at coffee shops without their husbands knowing, for example, and starting to have those conversations.”

We first visited Lang and BLOC a year ago, in the early weeks of our CNN project – “All Over The Map” – to track the 2024 election through the eyes and experiences of voters who live in key battlegrounds or are members of crucial voting blocs.

It is obvious that Harris is in better shape now than Biden was during that first visit last October.

Back then, even Johnson, then 21, said he was not sure who he would vote for, describing Biden and Trump as too old and disconnected from his generation. Now, he is as excited to vote for Harris as he is to knock doors organizing for her and other Democrats.

“At the time, I was like kind of iffy, feeling like everybody else, kind of undecided,” Johnson said of his choices before Harris got in the race. “But now that Kamala got the ball and she rollin’ with it, I feel like oh yeah. … She’s making a good image for herself and for the Democrats.”

A year ago, Lang was blunt about Biden’s struggles in Milwaukee’s Black neighborhoods. Now she says there is energy around Harris and myriad efforts to find creative ways to generate high turnout.

“It’s extremely different,” Lang said.

Yet she candidly discussed cracks and concerns in the Democratic foundation, which were on clear display as we walked with the canvassers and sat in on the meeting in which they share notes about what they call being “on doors.”

Some who answer don’t plan to vote.

“Because they say it isn’t going to change anything,” one of the canvassers said at the meeting.

Young Black voters are harder to motivate.

“We still got a job to do,” one of the canvassers told her colleagues. “They have a lot of questions that’s not answered.”

But by far the biggest worry is Black men.

Two things come up the most.

“People are, like, ‘I think I had more money in my pocket when Trump was in office because of the stimulus checks during the pandemic,’” Lang said.

She tells canvassers to point out Congress passed that funding and that Trump initially opposed the idea, though he in the end had his signature printed on the checks.

The second concern is about how Harris got her start in politics: as a county prosecutor and later as California’s attorney general.

“It makes sense why people may have a little bit of a pause,” Lang said of the vice president’s background in law enforcement. “I myself did as well.”

Now she tells canvassers that a key Harris priority as a prosecutor were programs designed to reduce recidivism.

Brian McMutuary says he is open to listening in the final days. He was a lifelong Democrat until he voted for Trump in 2020.

He disagrees with Trump on abortion rights and immigration. But he likes the former president’s take on cryptocurrency and remembers being better off when Trump was president.

“When I go to the grocery store, I get what I need, not so much what I want or what the kids want,” McMutuary said in an interview in Menomonee Falls, a Milwaukee suburb. “We need to make it each week. We have a budget, you know. It is tight.”

McMutuary also says he worries Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping would not treat Harris as an equal.

“They look at a man as being a leader,” he said.

He said he had no problem with a woman president.

“Nope, not at all,” McMutuary said. “It’s about doing the right thing for the country.”

Eric Jones says he has heard that and more as he makes the rounds getting coffee, going to the barbershop or in his real estate business.

“If I were a gambling man, I would probably put my money on Harris,” Jones told us in an interview at Confectionately Yours, a new Black-owned coffee shop and bakery on Milwaukee’s Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.

“Things are getting better,” Jones said. “The numbers are better. The energy is different. It’s a lot different from when we were here last time, especially in terms of the election.”

Still, he sees the same cracks and doubts relayed by the BLOC community organizers, especially among Black men.

“They’ll say, ‘I had more money when he was the president,’’’ Jones said.

Harris’ work as San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general might help woo suburban voters but, at a minimum, raises questions here.

“Law enforcement has not been kind to Black people historically,” Jones said. “District attorneys have not been kind to Black people historically.”

Jones also says abortion and transgender rights have come up in some recent debates at stops in the community.

“The good old party feels they have a monopoly on the Christian vote,” Jones said. “The Democratic Party feels they have a monopoly over the Black vote. The problem is there are a lot of Blacks that are Christians and the Black church is one of the strongest institutions in the Black community, right?”

“So you have this tug of war in a city that I’m pretty sure the Black folk will decide who wins that city, and more than likely, the presidency.”