In a new video, Obama says Trump is trying to suppress voting by people of color.
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Version 0 of 1. In a stark new warning to voters of color, former President Barack Obama said that President Trump and his supporters were trying to suppress them from participating in the election and urged them to cast their ballots early. Mr. Obama spoke of voter disenfranchisement in a video released by the Biden campaign to PBS, which posted it on its website on Tuesday ahead of the first presidential debate. The minute-long video was targeted at followers of “The Shade Room,” a popular Black news site and social media platform. “Right now, from the White House on down, folks are working to keep people from voting, especially communities of color,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s because there’s a lot at stake in this election, not just our pandemic response or racial justice, but our democracy itself.” Mr. Obama’s comments came a day after Britain’s Channel 4 News reported that the Trump campaign had identified 3.5 million Black voters that it wanted to discourage from voting in 2016 and had used Facebook to target them as part of a “deterrence” scheme. The report cited a cache of information from Cambridge Analytica, the now-defunct political data firm that drew scrutiny for its work for the Trump campaign. A Trump campaign spokesman dismissed the report as “fake news” in a statement to several media outlets on Monday and said that Mr. Trump had forged “a relationship of trust with African-American voters.” Mr. Obama said that Black voters can’t afford to be complacent. “We can’t leave anything to chance,” he said. “Make your plan to vote early. Now is the time to fight for what we believe in.” |