GOP House candidate in Baltimore get boost for long-shot bid with viral video, Trump backing

A Republican candidate with a long-shot bid to win a House seat in heavily Democratic Baltimore City is getting a boost from President Trump and a viral video in which she walks through impoverished Baltimore City streets while saying, “Do you care about Black lives? The people that run Baltimore don’t.”

The candidate, Kimberly Klacik, a Black female, is trying to win the former seat of long-time Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings, who died in 2019. 

“Kimberly will work with the Trump Administration and we will bring Baltimore back, and fast,” the president recently tweeted. “Don’t blow it Baltimore, the Democrats have destroyed your city!” 

The 38-year-old Klacik is running against Democratic Rep. Kweisi Mfume, who defeated Klacik in a special election this spring. They now face each other in a general election contest.

Klacik’s roughly two-minute video shows her walking through Baltimore streets with boarded-up homes with smashed-out windows, citing the city’s soaring crime and poverty rates.

Her video – titled “Black Lives Don’t Matter To Democrats” – has also garnered the attention of such prominent Republicans as Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Donald Jr. and Eric Trump, Trump campaign official Brad Parscale and Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, who wrote, “Wow. Just wow,” according to Fox News.

Trump has been critical of Democrats’ leadership in Baltimore in the past, particular about Cummings, whom Trump said represented  a district that was a “rodent infested mess.”

Mfume held the 7th District seat for a decade until 1996 when he left to become president of the NAACP, according to the Baltimore Sun.