A black Republican candidate looking to fill the Baltimore congressional seat left vacant by the loss of Rep. Elijah Cummings is taking on Democrats — both local and nationwide — in a viral video that blasts entrenched leaders for allowing Baltimore to descend into decades of poverty and c-rime.
In the walking-tour video, Kim Klacik also urges black residents to throw out Rep. Kweisi Mfume, who beat her in a special election to fill Cummings’ seat after his loss last year.
“Do you care about black lives? The people that run Baltimore don’t.
I can prove it. Walk with me. They don’t want you to see this,” Klacik says in the ad posted Monday to Twitter.
The video shows Klacik, in a red dress and heels, touring dilapidated areas of Maryland’s 7th Congressional District. The ad gained 4.4 million views on Twitter in less than a day.
“This is the reality for black people every single day: crumbling infrastructure, left homes, poverty and cr-ime. Baltimore has been run by the Democrat Party for 53 years. What is the result of their decades of leadership?” she says.
Klacik passes boarded-up and burned-out townhouses and trash heaps in left lots, denouncing Democrats for potentially making the situation worse by defunding po-lice.
“The Democrat Party have bet-rayed the black people of Baltimore. If the politicians walk the streets like I do, they would see exactly how their policies and corruption affects us,” Klacik says.
“Democrats think black people are stupid. They think they can control us forever, that we won’t demand better and that we’ll keep voting for them forever, despite what they’ve done to our families and our communities.”
Klacik lists statistics on Baltimore’s high cr-ime rates and interviews black residents who oppose defunding the cop. One man says three of his sons were finished.
“Look at this. How are children supposed to live here, and play here?” Klacik says.
“It’s not just Baltimore, the worst place for a black person to live in America is a Democrat-controlled city. It’s 2020, name a blue city where black people’s lives have gotten better,” she adds, concluding, “Black people don’t have to vote Democrat.”
The blunt message comes a year after Baltimore Democrats expressed outrage over President Trump calling the city a “disgusting rat- and rodent-infested mess.”
Klacik lost to Mfume, a former president of the NAACP, by almost 49 points in an April special election, but is seeking to pull off an upset in November.
The majority black district was formerly represented by Cummings, who lost in October. Maryland and most of its congressional districts lean Democratic, but Baltimore suburbs included in the 7th District sometimes swing statewide races to Republicans.
Democrats have substantially more black members in Congress, but black Republicans are running energetic insurgent campaigns this year in several districts, often with a Trumpian sales pitch.
In Atlanta, for example, Trump-pardoned former inmate-turned-author and reality TV star Angela Stanton-King is seeking to replace the late Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.). In a recent tweet shared by Trump, Stanton-King wrote, “I’m a proud Black woman who supports @realDonaldTrump. I’m done with the Democrat Party lying to my community. I’m running for Congress to end the lies once and for all.”
This Article Was Originally Published On nypost.com
