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DALLAS — While President Donald Trump will not be on the ballot for the 2026 midterm elections, the former chair of Black Voices for Trump believes Republicans can maintain the momentum gained from his major performance improvements among Black voters during the 2024 presidential race.
T.W. Shannon, a former Oklahoma state House Speaker who served last year in the second Trump administration and is now the Republican lieutenant governor nominee in his home state, says that policies “the GOP has expressed” as well as the Democratic Party’s leftward lurch will help Republicans as they continue to court Black voters.
Trump won 16% of the Black vote in the 2024 presidential election, according to a Fox News Voter Analysis, nearly double his total four years earlier.
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President Donald Trump arrives to speak during the first day of the Republican Midterm Convention at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, Texas, on Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2026. (Bloomberg)
“It’s because Donald Trump has transformed the Republican Party back into the working party. You see Democrats competing for the Black vote now. Something that you used to not see at all. They didn’t have to, they just took it for granted,” Shannon said in a Fox News Digital interview Thursday on the sidelines of the first ever GOP midterm convention.
Shannon pointed to job creation and lowering crime rates during the second Trump administration and said, “These are things that actually benefit…Black voters and Black communities.”
He then took aim at Democratic candidates backed by or aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
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“Look at what….the DSA is offering, you know, we’re talking about raising taxes, we’re talking about doing away with the Senate… disbanding the police,” he said. “These are not things that are well received in the in the Black community.”
Democrats disagree with Shannon’s assessment.
“Black Americans are going to reject Trump’s billionaires-first, cost-raising agenda at the ballot box this November and elect Democrats who are fighting to lower costs and deliver for working families,” a Democratic National Committee (DNC) spokesperson told Fox News Digital.
The spokesperson added that the “DNC is investing critical resources to reach, register, and mobilize Black voters across the country. While the Trump administration continues to attack civil and voting rights, we are fighting to protect the core of our democracy.”
Shannon, a Lawton native who became his state’s youngest and first African American House speaker in 2013, and the first member of the Chickasaw Nation to hold the office, is favored to win in November in solidly Republican Oklahoma.
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He said speaking in primetime at the convention gave him a chance to stand on the “national stage.”
“Any time I get a chance to tell the story about how great Oklahoma is and how great America is, I won’t miss a chance to do it,” he said.