MEANWHILE, OUTSIDE THE BUBBLE:

But recent polls paint a bleak picture for Trump with black voters.

A Washington Post-Ipsos poll of 1,088 African Americans showed that more than 8 in 10 say they believe Trump is a racist and has made racism a bigger problem in the country. Nine in 10 blacks disapprove of his job performance, overall.

A Pew Research Center analysis of people who participated in its polls and were confirmed to have voted showed Trump won just 6% of black voters in 2016.

Trump's public denouncement of former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick and other professional athletes who knelt during the national anthem in protest of police violence against African Americans did little to endear him to black voters. Neither did Trump's professions that there was "blame on both sides" following a 2017 clash between white nationalist demonstrators and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The stakes are especially high in Detroit. The city is 80% African American and in a traditionally blue state, Michigan, that Trump won in 2016 by 10,704 votes. Trump won Wisconsin by fewer than 23,000 votes and Pennsylvania by about 44,000 votes, two other states that typically vote Democrat in national elections and where black turnout will be key.

Ninety-six percent of the city's registered voters cast ballots for Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016, but turnout was down in Detroit. It fell to 48% from 53% eight years earlier when Barack Obama won the presidency.

"People vote when they're passionate," said City Clerk Janice Winfrey. "People were passionate for Obama. And -- maybe not for the same reason -- they're passionate about Trump. And people are pretty mad." [...]

They are also frustrated by the racial climate under Trump, the toll of climate change on their neighborhoods and even Trump's past words and deeds before he became president.

Brown cites Trump's stance on the so-called Central Park Five in the 1980s, when five black and Latino teenagers were charged in the rape of a white jogger in New York's Central Park. That attack became a symbol of the city's soaring crime. Then-real estate developer Donald Trump took out full-page newspaper ads calling for the death penalty.

The teens said their confessions were coerced, and their convictions were overturned in 2002 after a convicted murderer and serial rapist confessed to the crime.

"He wanted 15-year-old boys murdered even though they were innocent," she said. "I don't think he's changed much."

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