Business

Blacks have a big reason to vote for Romney

A recent poll conducted by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal came up with this startling result: Mitt Romney has absolutely no support among black voters.

I’m not saying that he had “little support” or “less support” than President Obama — who, I don’t think I need to remind you, is half-black.

Romney, the official Republican presidential candidate as of last week, polled absolutely no support.

Zero percent for Romney, 94 percent for Obama. (The rest, I presume, will be voting for me.)

I’ll assume the poll is accurate because of the quality of the news organizations involved. Accurate — and mind-boggling.

But not only for the reason you think.

My first thought is that at least a few black people called by pollsters must have said they liked Mitt. Sure, he’s whiter than white, but the guy’s not blazing red with horns.

And even if they don’t care for the candidate himself, a few black people must like his wife, Ann, or the fact that he has successfully supported his many kids and avoided getting arrested during his 63 years on Earth.

(I didn’t actually fact check for arrests but I assume the Republicans have.)

In the typical poll, people also say things they don’t really believe — “I like his name. Sure I’ll vote for him.” Surely a few people must have misspoke to the pollsters!

But there’s another, more important reason why this poll was so shocking: blacks have not done well financially during the Obama Administration.

I know, nobody has done well. But blacks have a legitimate gripe.

Yesterday was Labor Day (yes, that’s why you didn’t have to go to work) and the August employment report will be released this Friday. So I thought this would be a good time to revisit the job situation in this country.

And I’m going to start by chronicling the fact that black people love President Obama despite what the economy has done to them.

You can interpret the numbers I am going to give you in different ways.

One is that the president has an amazingly loyal following among blacks. The second interpretation is that blacks — because they have fared so poorly over the past four years — might be ripe for Mitt and his vice-presidential candidate, Paul Ryan, to pick off.

Here are some numbers.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 15 percent of all blacks were unemployed in July. That is down from 16.8 percent in July, 2011, but the figure is still much higher than the 8.3 percent total unemployment rate.

Overall, whites had an 8.2 percent jobless rate in July — a terrible number, of course, but not nearly as bad as the figure for blacks.

When President Obama took office in January, 2009, unemployment among all blacks over 16 years old was “just” 13.4 percent. The figure has been rising steadily and peaked at 17.3 percent in early 2012.

There’s nothing in those numbers to be happy about. Yet Romney doesn’t seem able to use those dire figures as leverage against Obama.

That’s the truly mind-blowing part.

It’s not that people of other races are doing so tremendously well.

Nobody knows what Friday’s numbers will look like. But everyone will be amazed (not to mention suspicious) if employment growth exceeds the already puzzling 163,000 new jobs recorded in July.

And the unemployment rate is unlikely to budge from the 8.3 percent level to which it rose last month.

The “fiscal cliff” everyone keeps talking about is likely to keep employers restrained in their hiring. And the fact that we are going over that cliff with an economic rope that’s already frayed is not going to make anyone feel any better.

In case you don’t know what the “fiscal cliff” is, it’s our elected officials in Washington once again behaving irresponsibly by delaying a decision on taxes until after the presidential election.

Going over the cliff. A train wreck. A disaster waiting to happen — use any analogy you’d like for this malfeasance.

So just how bad was the employment situation this Labor Day — the holiday that, since 1892, has celebrated the right to earn a living and the people who accomplish that miracle?

Well, according to the Labor Department, 13.4 million people were unemployed in a workforce of 156.5 million. If you add in all the people who are working fewer hours than normal because they couldn’t find full-time jobs (they are officially called involuntary part-time workers), then the figure jumps by an additional 8.3 million.

If you add in all the people who’ve said, “Screw this, there aren’t any jobs and I ain’t looking anymore,” then the figure rises to …

Actually, there is no statistic for that.

Labor treats people who’ve been too discouraged to look for work for more a year as if they don’t exist. But it wouldn’t be surprising if all the categories above, including those too discouraged to even thumb through the classifieds, add up to 25 million people.

Twenty-five million people!

President Obama has a lot to overcome on Nov. 6. If he can pull out a victory with the economy doing this badly it’ll either be because his core supporters held firm or because the Republicans nominated a guy who walks, talks and smells like the Wall Street bankers that both the employed and jobless have come to justifiably hate.

My guess: the economic issue wins out. Romney beats Obama.

john.crudele@nypost.com