Charles Barkley, a former NBA star and now an NBA analyst on TNT, said after the Democratic presidential candidate debate on July 30 that political parties have been neglecting economic opportunities for black Americans. He also added that most black people he knows who have always voted Democratic are “still poor.”
In 2017, Barkley remarked that Democrats have “taken the black vote and the poor vote for granted for a long time,” and that “this is a wakeup call for Democrats to do better for black people and poor white people.”