Trump speaks at Black journalists convention, Harris gains in polls

Donald Trump is set Wednesday to field reporters’ questions at the National Association of Black Journalists‘ annual convention in Chicago as he retools his presidential campaign to combat his likely election rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.

The Republican nominee’s Q&A before a live convention audience is expected to focus on the biggest issues facing the Black community, the NABJ said.

Trump will be speaking with Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner, ABC News senior congressional correspondent Rachel Scott and politics reporter Kadia Goba of Semafor. The hourlong event will be livestreamed at 1 p.m. ET on the group’s Facebook and YouTube pages.

Trump will not be asked questions from the audience, according to the NABJ.

The event gives Trump, who won just 12% of Black voters in his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden, an opportunity to directly appeal to voters of color.

But he may have more trouble courting these voters in a competition against Harris, who is the first Black person, first woman and first person of South Asian descent to serve as vice president.

Some polls show that Harris has more support among Black, Latino and young voters than Biden did before she replaced him as the de facto Democratic nominee.

On Tuesday, a new Bloomberg/Morning Consult survey of key swing states found that Harris has effectively eliminated Trump’s lead in the seven battlegrounds likely to determine which candidate wins the Electoral College.

The Trump campaign, in a press release Monday night announcing his NABJ appearance, claimed that he “accomplished more for Black Americans than any other president in recent history.”

The decision by the NABJ, the nation’s largest association of journalists of color, to host Trump quickly spurred a backlash both inside and outside the group.

Convention co-Chair Karen Attiah resigned her position on the eve of the event, writing in a social media post, “To the journalists interviewing Trump, I wish them the best of luck.”

“While my decision was influenced by a variety of factors, I was not involved or consulted with in any way with the decision to platform Trump in such a format,” wrote Attiah, who is a Washington Post columnist.

NABJ President Ken Lemon, in a statement Wednesday morning, said he consulted this week with a group of NABJ founders and past leaders about the decision to invite Trump to the event.

The group “affirmed that the invitation to former President Trump was in line with NABJ’s usual practices since 1976,” Lemon said. 

Harris is not attending the convention.

Although Biden had planned, when he was still a candidate, to attend the event, a person familiar with Harris’ plans told NBC News on Tuesday that the vice president could not fit a convention appearance into her schedule this week.

Harris’ overlapping plans include attending the funeral of the late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, and the ongoing process of selecting a running mate.

The person who spoke with NBC said that the NABJ declined a request by Harris’ team to let the vice president appear for a virtual fireside chat, or to schedule an in-person event with the group at a later date.

But Lemon in his statement Wednesday said that the Harris campaign told his group that she could not appear either in person or virtually during the convention.

“We are in talks about virtual options in the future and are still working to reach an agreement,” Lemon said.

After Lemon issued his statement, April Ryan, White House correspondent for theGrio, said that it was the NABJ who “shut down the conversation for a virtual town hall.”

“Only after reports of what happened were posted did the NABJ leadership feverishly begin to ask the @VP to now consider a virtual town hall,” Ryan wrote on X, citing sources familiar with the situation.

“The NABJ leadership even asked for a VP surrogate replacement like Megan the stallion, Oprah or Barack Obama,” wrote Ryan, who was the NABJ’s 2017 Journalist of the Year.

An NABJ spokeswoman did not immediately respond to CNBC when asked about the reporting by Ryan and NBC.

This is developing news. Please check back for updates.