600,000 Black Ohioans Didn't Vote in 2022. It Wasn't Because Nobody Asked.

The number

In the 2022 midterms, 603,000 eligible Black Ohioans didn't vote, according to a June study by the Ohio Legislative Black Caucus Foundation. That is more than twice the margin by which JD Vance won his Senate seat that year.

With Sherrod Brown and Jon Husted locked in a Senate race polling within a few points, those 603,000 people are suddenly getting national attention. The question is what everyone thinks explains their absence.

The "nobody asked" theory

A recent MS NOW report from Cleveland lands on a tidy conclusion: these voters aren't tapped out; nobody has tried to tap them in. The reporter writes that every Black man they met said no one had tried to convince him to vote.

I don't buy it. Grown men aren't sitting at home waiting on a flyer. Not being asked isn't why people stay home, and being asked isn't what gets them out.

The government's own data backs that up. When the Census Bureau asked registered voters why they skipped the 2022 midterms, the top answer was "too busy, conflicting work or school schedule" at 26.5%. Next came not being interested or believing their vote wouldn't make a difference, at 17.6%. Among Black nonvoters, 25.8% said they were too busy. "Nobody asked me" isn't even one of the options.

What's actually weighing on Black men

"Too busy" is often a polite way of saying the math doesn't work. Look at what Black men are carrying.

Jobs. Black men's unemployment rate was 6.2% in August, against 4.1% nationally. Economists warn part of the recent improvement comes from people who stopped looking for work. Among Black men without a college degree, the share with a job fell from 55.6% to 53.3% between early 2025 and early 2026.

Wealth. The typical Black household had $44,900 in net worth in 2022, compared with $285,000 for the typical white household, roughly one-sixth. There is no cushion for a missed shift.

Cost of living. The MS NOW piece makes this case without meaning to. Dwight Bullard, 34, a Cleveland father of two, spends $100 a day on gas and $600 a week renting the truck he uses to haul tires. Some nights he runs food at a restaurant until midnight, then he's up at 5:30 a.m. That isn't apathy. That's survival.

Who's at the top? Only 11 Fortune 500 companies have a Black CEO, about 2%, and only 28 Black CEOs have led one in the list's history. Black workers make up 14% of the workforce but only 7% of managers, according to McKinsey. When the people setting wages and making hiring calls rarely look like you, it's hard to believe the system was built with you in mind.

Results. Bullard last voted in 2012 and says he never saw anything change. Shayla L. Davis, who leads the Black Caucus Foundation, says her own 28-year-old son stopped voting because he sees the rhetoric as performative and the parties as the same. Add Ohio's 2023 voter ID law and rules that drop infrequent voters from the rolls, and checking out starts to look like a rational call.

Checked out isn't the same as done

The most telling moment in the MS NOW story isn't a canvasser at a door. Bullard spent a year worried a tree in his mother's yard would fall on her house. When the city finally cut it down, she asked him who he thought the city was. He connected the people in office to the problems in his own life and said he'd vote in November.

No flyer did that. Seeing the line between his daily struggles and the people making decisions did. Campaigns don't need better door hangers. They need to show how a vote touches gas prices, jobs, the pothole on the block, and who gets a shot at the corner office.

Check your registration, find your polling place, and see your county's early voting hours at voteohio.gov. Early voting happens at your county board of elections, and hours expand on evenings and weekends in the final stretch.

Use the leverage

A Substack post doesn't close a wealth gap, and neither does a ballot on its own. But sitting out doesn't fix the economics or open the boardroom door either. It just hands the decisions to someone else.

The 603,000 Black Ohioans who stayed home in 2022 are enough to decide a statewide race. That's leverage. Use it, then talk to the people in your circle about what's at stake for their paychecks, not because somebody asked.

Sources

BY Manny Larcher, YourInfoDaily CEO