(CNN) — Former President Donald Trump held a rally Thursday in the Bronx, as his campaign seeks to gain ground among Hispanic and Black voters ahead of the November election.
The event in one of the most Democratic counties in the country comes days before closing arguments in Trump’s criminal trial over hush payments in New York. Trump faces 34 felony charges and has pleaded not guilty.
The trial has kept the former president tied to New York for much of the past six weeks, but Thursday’s event at Crotona Park in the South Bronx was the Trump campaign’s first major rally in the state since his first bid. presidential in 2016. Trump has visited a warehouse, the scene of a fatal stabbing in 2022, a construction site and a fire station in Manhattan since his trial began in mid-April.
Addressing supporters in the park on Thursday, Trump spent most of his remarks criticizing President Joe Biden, arguing that his rival “isn’t doing the job for the Bronx,” New York state or the country.
“African Americans are being massacred. Hispanic Americans are being massacred,” Trump said, arguing that they have been negatively impacted by Biden’s border and economic policies.
“These millions and millions of people that are coming to our country, the biggest impact and the biggest negative impact is against our black population and our Hispanic population who are losing their jobs, losing their homes, losing everything they can lose,” he said .
A Trump campaign official told CNN that several factors, including the former president’s long history of living and working in New York and his efforts to win over minority voters, influenced the decision to hold the rally in the Bronx. The official said the area’s proximity to Trump’s criminal trial was also a consideration, as was the former president’s desire to “challenge the status quo” in a state he has long voted Democratic.
Supporters of former President Donald Trump gather near Manhattan Criminal Court in New York City on May 21, 2024. (Charly Triballeau/AFP/Getty Images)
Trump has insisted he has a chance this fall to win New York, which a Republican presidential candidate hasn’t carried since 1984. The Bronx is a Democratic stronghold, which Trump lost by about 68 points to Biden in 2020. But , that margin was smaller than four years ago, when Hillary Clinton carried the county by 79 points.
Trump’s improvement was even greater in the South Bronx, where Thursday’s rally took place. Biden won the congressional district (or precinct) surrounding Crotona Park by 69 points. Clinton carried the same precinct by more than 90 points in 2016.
Trump’s performance in the Bronx in 2020 mirrored his results in other areas where Hispanic voters make up a substantial portion of the electorate. Residents in the South Bronx are primarily Hispanic (64%) and black (31%), according to the US Census Bureau.
Polls this year show that Trump could do even better among Hispanic and black voters than he did four years ago. Polls conducted since early April show that Biden’s margin among these voters has decreased by double digits compared to polls from the same point in 2020.
That’s likely part of the reason Biden’s campaign released two new ads Thursday aimed at highlighting what it called “Trump’s long history of failures and broken promises” for Black people.
The ads note that Trump was sued for housing discrimination in the 1970s and accused of discriminating against blacks; he promoted the racist conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States; he advocated for the death penalty for five minority teenagers who were wrongly accused and convicted of beating and raping a woman in Central Park in the 1980s; and “supported violent white supremacists” in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
Trump’s campaign said the ads represented an attempt to “manipulate black voters.”
“We must not forget that it was Joe Biden who was a key figure in the passage of the 1994 Crime Bill, which disproportionately harmed Black communities through harsh sentencing laws and increased incarceration rates. Furthermore, we cannot pass “Biden’s policies are driving Black families deeper into poverty and making them less safe,” Janiyah Thomas, the campaign’s Black media director, said in a statement.
Several New York House Republicans said they were unable to attend Trump’s event because of changes to the chamber’s voting schedule on Thursday.
“New York is at stake and we had all planned to be there to greet him and attend this historic event. However, the House schedule changed and we will be voting to ban illegal immigrants from voting in elections and to protect the right of to financial privacy,” Elise Stefanik, chairwoman of the House Republican Party Conference and considered a potential Trump running mate, said in a joint statement with seven other lawmakers.
Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ritchie Torres, who represent parts of the Bronx, criticized the former president before the event.
Ocasio-Cortez, in an interview with NY1, called it an “attempt to, I think, mislead some of our residents here,” while Torres told the New York Times that Trump was “radioactive” in the Bronx.
Trump’s outreach to minority voters also comes as the former president has made stoking fears about undocumented migrants a cornerstone of his campaign. He has regularly made false or misleading claims about illegal immigration and used dehumanizing language when referring to migrants.
With reporting from CNN’s Kit Maher.
