🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
Experts are ringing the alarm bells that Democrats could lose suburban voters, rural whites, and blue-collar workers in next month's midterms. But they're missing out on one of the Democrats' biggest problems: Black voters are not interested in the 2022 elections.
How do I know this? Well, I have unique insight into the interests of Black Americans, because I've owned and operated the Black celebrity news site Media Takeout for over a decade. MTO, as we're known online, reports mostly on African American news, but not exclusively, and we decide what articles to publish based on a fairly complex data analysis. Every day, I spend hours looking over data, monitoring the sentiments of our 35 million readers, many of whom are Black. It's one of the largest data sets out there if not the largest one for tracking African American sentiment.
Knowing how Black people feel about a person or an issue is an integral part of our business model and success. The more popular an artist, movie, TV show, or topic is with our readers, the more we write articles about them. We monitor our readers' interest in everything, from the Beyonce's recent album release to the newest piece of legislation.
And let me tell you, readers are much more interested in Ye's current controversies than the midterm elections.
While it's not surprising that the public is more interested in celebrity scandal than politics, what is surprising is how little interest the Black community appears to have in the upcoming elections—something that has not typically been the case.
Historically, 3 to 5 percent of our visitors click on an article about politics. But normally during an election year, we see an uptick in users' interest in political news. In the ramp-up to a presidential election, as many as 30 percent of readers choose political news stories. In the lead up to a midterm election, the numbers have historically been more like 5 to 10 percent. Yet in the last 30 days, we're seeing only 2 percent of visitors choosing political news.
Democrats should be on high alert. Our readers' interest in politics has in the past been a reliable predictor for Black voter turnout. In the lead up to the 2018 midterm elections, for example, which had a historically high Black voter turnout, 9.3 percent of our readers were clicking on political news articles. Similarly, in 2014, which had a historically low Black voter turnout, just 4.2 percent of our readers read political news articles.
This year's numbers are half those of 2014. This should be a giant red flag for Democrats.
Worse, when we break down our readers' interest by geographic region, the numbers are 1.5 percent in Georgia and 1.7 percent in Pennsylvania, which are even worse than the national average.
And Black interest in politics is moving in the wrong direction; every week, the interest in political topics on Media Take Out is dropping.
If these trends continue to election day, Democrats should expect to lose pivotal House and Senate races, which would be disastrous. Black voters were the driving force in electing President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in 2020. Black voters were also a deciding bloc in electing Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in Georgia, which flipped the Senate in 2020.
Next month, Democrats need Black voters to turn out in huge numbers if they want to keep the House and Senate or, at the bare minimum, minimize the number of seats they lose in Congress.
A Democratic loss would dramatically impact the country and Black people in particular, what with many Republicans pushing to weaken voting rights and attacking Affirmative Action.
So why am I writing this Op-Ed? Because most of the political class seems unaware that Black voters are uninterested in the midterms, and they're not pulling out all stops to reengage Black voters.
With days to go, Democrats need to wake up to the problem and act fast if they want to enact the rest of Biden's policies and win the midterm elections.
Fred Mwangaguhungais the founder of the first Black entertainment news site, Mediatakeout.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
