Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg garnered 20 percent support from black voters in a new Morning Consult poll published Wednesday, increasing his support with the key demographic since earlier this month.
The poll was conducted days after a 2015 speech that the media mogul gave about ’stop and frisk’ went viral where he said minority neighborhoods are “where the real crime is.”
Despite the backlash from his past remarks, Mr. Bloomberg picked up four points in support from black Democratic primary voters since the last poll Feb. 11. Prior to the New Hampshire primary, Mr. Bloomberg was at 16 percent.
Frontrunner Sen. Bernie Sanders, Independent Vermont, also picked up support from black primary voters, going from 27 percent support before the New Hampshire primary to 30 percent in the new poll.
Former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg remained at four percent, while Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts Democrat, and former Vice President Joe Biden lost two percentage points with black voters.
Mr. Bloomberg’s increased support tracks with other surveys.
The bump comes after he was heard in the viral audio clip from five years ago, saying that the way to lower the violence-related death rate among young minority men is to “throw them up against the walls and frisk them” and confiscate their guns.
“Ninety-five percent of murders — murderers and murder victims — fit one M.O.,” Mr. Bloomberg is heard saying. “You can just take a description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all the cops. They are male, minorities, 16-25. That’s true in New York, that’s true in virtually every city … And that’s where the real crime is. You’ve got to get the guns out of the hands of people that are getting killed.”
The Morning Consult poll has a two-point margin of error and surveyed 3,361 black primary voters from Feb. 12-17.
-Dave Boyer contributed to this report.
• Alex Swoyer can be reached at aswoyer@washingtontimes.com.
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