Trump and Kushner Saw Super Bowl Ad as Way of Making Inroads With Black Voters

In a 30-second spot that cost Trump’s campaign millions of dollars, Johnson’s face fills up the screen as she tearfully thanks “President Donald John Trump” for her early release from prison. Trump commuted her sentence in June 2018, after reality television star Kim Kardashian West personally appealed to the president on her behalf. Johnson had been serving a life sentence for a nonviolent drug conviction.

Even before the ad, Johnson was already something of a touchstone for Trump, who invited her to attend his State of the Union address last year and highlighted her story in his speech. But elevating the administration’s work on criminal justice reform to Super Bowl status was another effort by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to reach black voters.

The Johnson ad was made late last year and was tested with focus groups months in advance, aides said. Trump himself made edits to the spot and ultimately settled on it as the “most impactful” of a flight of ads he was given to choose from in the days leading up to the Super Bowl, people familiar with the process said.

Trump was not wrong: Salesforce data indicated that online, the ad featuring Johnson was the most talked about one of the game, and that most of the chatter around it was positive.

But privately, several senior Trump aides expressed skepticism of Kushner’s belief that broad numbers of black voters, whose views of the president are overwhelmingly negative, are persuadable. Running an ad aimed at black voters — which could also have the effect of reassuring white suburban women, a worrisome demographic for the campaign, that the president is not racist — was a change of strategy from Trump’s previous efforts to simply energize and turn out his base.

Many public polls back up the skeptics in Trump’s orbit. According to a Washington Post/Ipsos poll released last month, for instance, more than 80% of black respondents said that they believed Trump was racist and that he had helped to make racism a bigger problem in the country. Nine out of 10 black Americans in the poll said they disapproved of Trump’s job performance.

Trump himself was a motivating factor for turning out African American Democrats in the 2018 midterm elections. Voter participation among black people in 2018 grew from the 2014 midterms, according to data from the Pew Research Center.

Despite those numbers and the skepticism from colleagues, Kushner has been advising Trump that black voters can be converted into supporters if they are simply educated on his policies. Trump’s biggest challenge, Kushner has told people, is a “knowledge gap” on many of the president’s accomplishments, particularly on the issue of criminal justice reform, which Kushner has spearheaded.

Kushner has hosted black leadership summits at the White House. And two of the lone African American West Wing staff members, Scott Turner and Ja’Ron Smith, have been traveling to black communities to make a pitch for Trump.

Even some of Trump’s most vociferous Republican critics said it was not an off-the-wall idea, although Trump had only a thin record to run on and a political career marked by racial invective and a proposed Muslim ban to run from.

“They don’t need to reinforce the base at this point,” said William Kristol, the conservative writer and prominent “Never Trump” Republican. “If they can chip away a little bit at the African American vote, or make it harder to mobilize them against Trump, it’s not a foolish expenditure of money.”

Kushner has pointed people to public polls, including Rasmussen, that are outliers but that have shown Trump winning up to 30% of the African American vote. In 2016, Trump won just 8% of the black vote, according to exit polls.

But Kushner has told people that in Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic nominee, they faced a candidate who had been popular in the black community for decades, while Trump was then an unknown quantity. In 2020, Kushner has argued, voters need to be reminded of the president’s accomplishments and that their “worst fears have not been realized.”

Trump’s goal is finding a way to shave off enough supporters from the Democratic nominee to compensate for an expected loss of suburban voters in swing states like Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, said that in three states that were key to Trump’s victory — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — even a small change could matter.

“Given how close many states were, but actually the three Rust Belt states that put him in the White House, any little bit helps at the margins of any demographic group,” Ayres said.

Trump has professed bafflement that his numbers with black voters are not higher, telling allies he assumed he would fare better because the economy is doing well and unemployment among African Americans has dropped.

Cornell Belcher, a progressive pollster whose firm worked on President Barack Obama’s campaign and who is black, described the efforts by Trump and Kushner as laughable. “It’s almost as if they think we’re all kin to each other,” he said, adding that passage of the First Step Act, the criminal justice bill that Trump signed in 2018, “does not erase this man’s record of just absolute, over-the-top racist rhetoric and policies that frankly hurt African American communities.”

(STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL MATERIAL FOLLOWS.)

The campaign’s decision to use the Super Bowl as an opportunity to expand its coalition of voters is a change from how Trump was positioning himself less than two years ago.

For years, Trump repeatedly criticized National Football League players who took a knee when the national anthem was played before games, a form of silent protest against social inequality and police brutality. He directed Vice President Mike Pence to walk dramatically out of an NFL game in Indianapolis in 2017 when a group of football players knelt during the anthem.

At the time, his political advisers noted that the fight with NFL players like Colin Kaepernick was not some distraction, but the essence of Trump’s reelection strategy: enmeshing himself in culture wars and heightening racial tensions as a method to fire up his political base.

Jessica Jackson Sloan, the national director of #Cut50, a prisoner advocacy group, said the ad was helpful to her work on the state level, regardless of any political advantage Trump was trying to achieve.

“We’ve heard many times what happened to this country when the Republican candidate for president was playing Willie Horton ads,” Sloan said, referring to an infamous ad in the 1988 presidential race that highlighted the story of a black man who had raped a white woman and assaulted her husband while free on a prison-furlough program supported by Michael Dukakis, the Democratic candidate.

“Regardless of what reasons he did it,” she added of Trump, “the fact we have a sitting Republican president campaigning on criminal justice reform is 180 degrees from where we’ve been in the past. It’s really going to help us with some of these Republican state legislatures.”

The Trump campaign did not announce the subject of the ad until after Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York City mayor running for president as a Democrat, unveiled his own ad, which featured an African American mother grieving the loss of her son to gun violence.

Trump had said he would air a 60-second ad during the Super Bowl, and previewed a generic ad showcasing his economic accomplishments. But what played during the game was a 30-second spot featuring Johnson, followed by a 30-second one afterward about the president’s economic record.

Trump’s campaign emphatically denied making any decision in reaction to Bloomberg. “He had nothing to do with it,” said Tim Murtaugh, a campaign spokesman. “How we would use our 60 seconds was always an internal decision based on no outside factors.”

Reached on the phone, Johnson declined to say when she learned the ad in which she appears would run.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .