Black voters “are definitely listening” to President Trump’s message “and it is resonating,” Kimberly Klacik, the Republican woman running for the Baltimore U.S. House seat held by the late Rep. Elijah Cummings, who was a Democrat, told “Sunday Morning Futures” in an exclusive interview.
Klacik, made the comment after host Maria Bartiromo pointed to the results of a new Hill-HarrisX poll, which found that President Trump’s support among Black voters increased nine percentage points in the Aug. 22-25 survey, which included the first two days of the Republican National Convention.
Bartiromo asked Klacik what she believes “the Trump administration has done for the minority communities?”
“This is an administration that actually has real results coming into the community,” Klacik, who suggested that Democrats don’t care about Black voters in a viral campaign ad and took aim at Joe Biden in her speech during the first night of the RNC, said.
In her speech at the Republican Convention, Klacik accused the Democratic nominee of believing that Black Americans “can’t think for ourselves.”
“A lot of people don’t talk about the fact that the criminal justice reform is something that many Black Americans thought President Obama would tackle. He failed to do that,” Klacik said on Sunday. “He didn’t even attempt to do it.”
In Dec. 2018, President Trump signed a sweeping criminal justice reform bill, marking a major legislative victory on an issue that garnered bipartisan support. The decisive passage marked a win for Trump as well as his senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, who advocated for the bill in the face of some conservative resistance.
The First Step Act gave federal judges more leeway when sentencing some drug offenders and boosted prisoner rehabilitation efforts. It also would reduce life sentences for some drug offenders with three convictions, or “three strikes,” to 25 years.
Klacik pointed to The First Step Act on Sunday saying, “We have a lot of people that have been incarcerated and they were incarcerated during the tech boom.”
TRUMP VOWS TO WORK WITH KIM KLACIK TO ‘BRING BALTIMORE BACK’
“What they need is skills and training when they come out because they can actually apply then for careers, not just jobs and that’s what we need in the area, we need careers,” she said.
She also noted that President Trump is “doing much more with ‘Opportunity Zones.’”
“He’s hit $75 billion thus far, he’s going to do even more in these communities and neighborhoods that Democrats left to decay and some of those neighborhoods are right there in Baltimore city so people see results when it comes to President Trump,” Klacik said.
She then compared the Republican Convention to the Democratic Convention as said Republicans “seem to be the party of optimism and hope.”
“We talked about things that we’re going to continue to do,” Klacik said. “President Trump talked about things that he’s been doing and he’s going to continue to do and that’s what’s important.”
“We’re done with the pandering,” she continued. “We saw many major cities paint Black Lives Matter on the streets. We don’t want just paint on the streets, we want careers, we want opportunity and we want equality and I think people are understanding that you’ll get that from President Trump rather than what we had in the past.”
She added that Baltimore was “under Democrat leadership for over 50 years and unfortunately, we have gotten nothing in return.”
She noted that “the homeless problem is terrible, we have a 20% poverty rate, we had the riots back in 2015 and we still have [the] same problems.”
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Klacik, 38, is running against Rep. Kweisi Mfume, 71 in a rematch of the April special election that followed Cummings’ death in October. Mfume held the 7th District seat for a decade before Cummings, leaving office in 1996 to become president of the NAACP.
Fox News’ Adam Shaw, Megan Henney and Judson Berger contributed to this report.
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